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70 posts total
mcc

I'm generally enjoying Rust but I really feel like I would be *completely* unable to write software in this if I didn''t have 24/7 access to discord channels that can patiently explain to me why that baffling type error is occurring when I make code changes that seem like they ought to be no-ops. Every day writing Rust is like my worst day writing ocaml. I think haskell, had I ever really learned it, would have been easier to fit to an intuition.

mcc

The rust-analyzer language server is pretty nice but a thing that drives me nuts is I type "let x = 5;" and IMMEDIATELY it underlines in irritated green and announces that the variable x is not used. Yes I just this second typed it how could it possibly be used. Mom I'm WORKING on it

mcc

WebGPU, the new graphics API for JavaScript, shipped in a stable web browser (Chrome 113) about… an hour ago!

I have written a blog post about it, covering a brief (okay, not brief) history of graphics APIs to ~situate WebGPU in a context~, a brief general guide to writing WebGPU, and some specific resources for making WebGPU projects in TypeScript, Rust, and C++ (you can use it on desktop! it doesn't have to be in a browser).

I think WebGPU is really good.

cohost.org/mcc/post/1406157-i-

WebGPU, the new graphics API for JavaScript, shipped in a stable web browser (Chrome 113) about… an hour ago!

I have written a blog post about it, covering a brief (okay, not brief) history of graphics APIs to ~situate WebGPU in a context~, a brief general guide to writing WebGPU, and some specific resources for making WebGPU projects in TypeScript, Rust, and C++ (you can use it on desktop! it doesn't have to be in a browser).

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mak

@mcc Thank you for this article. It was fun to read and contains so many helpful details!

ChukG

@mcc great blog post -- I remember most of those graphics APIs from when they came out but it was helpful to see them all explained at once together (also I didn't know about WebGPU yet)

Thomas Dickerson

@mcc as someone who is still running Mojave on a 2013 MBP with discrete Nvidia card, this whole blogpost hits home.

mcc

I appear to have found either a bug, or a way to improve the game tremendously, in Oquonie/uxn v5

mcc

Also, reminder, Bandcamp United which is currently trying to get Epic to recognize their employee union is asking people to participate in a letter-writing campaign. See thread ending here: mastodon.social/@bandcampunite

They are *not* asking for a boycott (not every labor action is a boycott). They are actively encouraging people to buy music and support Bandcamp artists:

mastodon.social/@bandcampunite

Also remember if you buy music on Bandcamp today (Bandcamp Friday) Epic does not get paid anyway so, lol

Also, reminder, Bandcamp United which is currently trying to get Epic to recognize their employee union is asking people to participate in a letter-writing campaign. See thread ending here: mastodon.social/@bandcampunite

They are *not* asking for a boycott (not every labor action is a boycott). They are actively encouraging people to buy music and support Bandcamp artists:

mcc

Looking up the original GIF89a spec, final version issued in 1990.

This is in the appendices.

"Lawl"

liffy 💜

@mcc oh yeah, that gave me a chuckle when i was mucking with the gif format last year. also i'm sad that there's a bunch of stuff that nobody implements any more, like text frames

Lorry

@mcc It's not wrong though!

(Snideness aside, it wasn't wrong in 1990 when average network speeds would have taken an hour to load a typical modern throwaway response-gif).

mcc

Have you ever noticed how many canonical "paradoxes" just sort of evaporate if you decline to recognize Bayesian inference as a thing that works

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IoT is the grey goo

@mcc A favorite saying of mine is "Not everything that's logical is reasonable". Bare logic can work on top of any prior assumption.

As for "rationality" I think that term has some baggage. Arguments or world views (or people) are sometimes derided as irrational because they are not aggressive or greedy (...and that may itself indicate ideas like game theory have questionable priors).

Michael Busch

@mcc I make a sharp distinction between actual Bayesian inference, which works just fine, and the caricature of it used by the "rationalist" / "effective altrusim" / LessWrong contingent.

I had a conversation with one such person where he did not seem to understand what a probability distribution function was; but claimed to be doing Bayesian analysis to justify his personal misconceptions about physics & cosmology.

He did not react well to my explaining that that is not how any of this works.

mcc

I just this second drew the line in my head from "Microsoft is one of the companies who is convinced ChatGPT is a good thing and is telling its shareholders it's going to try to shove this brand of 'AI' into everything it can" and "Microsoft owns my phone keyboard, since they bought SwiftKey" and, uh… shit, maybe I should audition AnySoftKeyboard sooner rather than later

mcc

FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU

mcc

"The Crudites" sounds like the name of the evil aliens from a children's cartoon

Devine Lu Linvega

@mcc evil vegetable aliens, from planet Trempette

mcc

Have you heard of Crossfire? It was this old CNN show that presented news through a spectrum of a left-right debate, except of course "left" meant "centrist" and "right" meant "Pat fucking Buchanan". Timothy Leary called it "the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA". Anyway when you periodically see Jack Dorsey publicly disagreeing with Elon Musk about Twitter I feel like it's like that except instead of the CIA it's people who think there's an Ivermectin coverup

mcc

I wonder what the TikTok teenagers think about the Twitter blowup and this whole Mastodiaspora thing.

mcc

I think Mastodon's low-discovery mindset (no public search, no QRTs) is overall good, but one thing I think I should be able to do is search posts that I personally have seen. Like if something appears in my Home feed, I've already "discovered" it. There's not particularly interactions one would want to avoid that are exposed by letting me search for posts I saw yesterday and lost the link to, except interactions those people were already exposed to.

mcc

Also I suuuuuuper wish I could search ordered by date, because I search my own posts to find previous posts/threads all the time and this is going from convenient to unusable as I my post count increases and posts I made ten minutes ago get buried below ones from months ago. But I assume that's coming.

mcc

TIL: There is a cursed color in the Kodak ProPhoto RGB color space which, when converted to sRGB using pre-August-2020-Security-Update Android's image conversion routines, causes an integer overflow and a crash due to a rounding error. Some dude accidentally created an image (flickr.com/photos/gaurav_agraw) which contains the cursed color on a single pixel. In 2020 if you set this image as your desktop on a Google or Samsung device, the device would brick & lose all onboard data youtube.com/watch?v=iXKvwPjCGn

TIL: There is a cursed color in the Kodak ProPhoto RGB color space which, when converted to sRGB using pre-August-2020-Security-Update Android's image conversion routines, causes an integer overflow and a crash due to a rounding error. Some dude accidentally created an image (flickr.com/photos/gaurav_agraw) which contains the cursed color on a single pixel. In 2020 if you set this image as your desktop on a Google or Samsung device, the device would brick & lose all onboard data

mcc

There was an actual IRL SCP / machine basilisk in the world and it remained effective for almost a year

mcc

The paradox of Mastodon is no one (not even mastodon.social) likes mastodon.social dominating the network, or Eugen G being the sole arbiter of extensions to the common protocol,

but on the other hand, ultimately, the reason we all use Mastodon (IE, the part of the Fediverse people think of as "Mastodon", modeled on the Mastodon extensions to ActivityPub) instead of Secure Scuttlebutt or identi.ca or whatever is because Mastodon was the AP implementation that had one person's singular vision.

mcc

We *need* standard protocols like ActivityPub, but ultimately, users do not want a protocol. People do not want a formless ball of infinite potential. They want "Products". They want a clearly presented thing that they can put into their web browser or phone and it slots them into a legible user flow satisfying a specific user story. This is not because they are brainwashed by capitalism. It is because most people *have other shit to do* and don't want to bother with software that's unfinished.

mcc

A building consisting entirely of the 13th floors that were omitted from other buildings

mcc

A book written in human blood on pages of human flesh, except it's from the universe where humans have ink for blood and paper for skin

mcc

#FediTips (or perhaps #FediWarnings?):

Something I discovered the other day on accident is in Mastodon and derivative software, if you are sending someone a DM, and you spontaneously tag someone in the middle of the message, *that person now has read access to the DM in which they're mentioned*. This is a neat feature if you're using it on purpose but could be awkward if you're just trying to link an account and suddenly that account can see you talking about them…!

mcc

Apparently this is a Mastodon-unique behavior and was not part of how messages worked in the original ActivityPub. (I don't know if it works this way on independent Mastodon reimplementations such as Pleroma.)

mcc

Tusky, the third-party Android client for Mastodon/ActivityPub that I use/contribute to, is currently being blocked from updating by Google. Link to middle of a thread by the lead dev about the problem:

chaos.social/@ConnyDuck/109004

They claim there's no "terms of use", ignoring/not understanding Tusky operates no sites and so cannot have terms of use. It is like banning a web browser for not enforcing terms of use.

No one on the project has any idea how to get Google's attention about this :(

Tusky, the third-party Android client for Mastodon/ActivityPub that I use/contribute to, is currently being blocked from updating by Google. Link to middle of a thread by the lead dev about the problem:

chaos.social/@ConnyDuck/109004

They claim there's no "terms of use", ignoring/not understanding Tusky operates no sites and so cannot have terms of use. It is like banning a web browser for not enforcing terms of use.

mcc

(Note: I say "currently being blocked from updating". Specifically, Tusky has two apps on the store, one is the normal release and the other is Nightly. Google has, inconsistently, locked only the Nightly app. We're afraid they'll hit the main app tho next time it updates, and anyhow under its current process Tusky cannot post updates to the main channel or even third party stores without using the established Nightly channel first to gather bug reports.)

mcc

So here's what YouTube, very gradually, did to me:

- Announced that because of Google+, they were forcing me to change my YouTube handle to my full name
- Later they allowed me to create a "brand" account so I could have my preferred name, "andi mcc"
- I did this. This deleted every YouTube comment I'd ever made. It also means (1) I was blocked from using Google Music (2) renting movies doesn't quite work right
- Now they're introducing "handles", which is a way to sign up for a… third name

mcc

Google+ no longer exists. I only needed the "brand account" to work around a no-longer-extant name restriction caused by Google+, but now Google+ is gone, I'm stuck with it. This "handles" thing, which I don't get why it exists if you can pick your own name now, appears to exclusively exist to promote "Shorts". Like Google+ was an attempt to clone Facebook, "Shorts" are an attempt to clone TikTok.

What happens when Google cancels Shorts? What weird wrinkles will THAT leave behind?

mcc

Wondering if there's like, a set of five to six words that if spoken are the minimal way to discover if there is an alexa/google home/siri microphone present in the room and listening to you. It would be like a magic spell. Speak these words aloud and any invisible demons present shall be revealed

mcc

mastodon.social/web/@zens@merv "siri’s tricky since that’s aupposedly tuned to the user’s tone of voice" Great so anything you say it MIGHT be listening, unpredictably, depending on whether the neural network has briefly confused two human voices in that second.

Increasingly convinced that the only solution is like federal laws that any building, home or workplace with one of these devices must have clearly posted signage that the words you say are potentially being recorded (also outlaw ShotSpotter)

mastodon.social/web/@zens@merv "siri’s tricky since that’s aupposedly tuned to the user’s tone of voice" Great so anything you say it MIGHT be listening, unpredictably, depending on whether the neural network has briefly confused two human voices in that second.

mcc

I have been running into a situation where I keep using "RTX" to refer to hardware raytracing acceleration, but this is misleading because RTX is actually NVidia's trademark for their specific implementation and sometimes you want to contrast NVidia with AMD. To solve this, I would like to propose we now refer to the underlying technology as "HRT", for "Hardware Raytracing". "Within ten years all gamers will have access to HRT", et cetera

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