cstanhope@social.coop ("Charles Stanhope") wrote:

John McCarthy: I've invented garbage collection, and now we won't have to worry about memory allocation anymore!

Others: Oh neat!

Also others: [endless conversations and arguments about garbage collection techniques, their drawbacks, performance impact, and how to work around them]

Reblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Charles Stanhope"):
alex@pipou.academy ("timothée chalabof") wrote:

Anathema wrote:

Hooray, I'm the code witch that can be trusted to bring a complex piece of work over the line with minimal oversight or rewrites / big changes needed, according to my boss.

OK he didn't say 'code witch' but I'm sure he'd agree with that label 🧙‍♀️

isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:") wrote:

This month I learned a lot of programmers do live on GitHub, like on a social network. Never occurred to me for all these years...

Anathema wrote:

Ducks.

Attachments:

• A photo showing the bank and body of a large pond. There are many ducks on the bank.

technomancy@icosahedron.website ("tech? no! man, see...") wrote:

a clock that's just two RGB LEDs; one for hours one for seconds. the color is interpreted as the angle that the clock hand would be, but in terms of how far around the color wheel that color exists.

Reblogged by technomancy@icosahedron.website ("tech? no! man, see..."):
srol@mellified.men ("Goat observer") wrote:

cstanhope@social.coop ("Charles Stanhope") wrote:

I just wanted to learn some facts about the moon, and I have to filter through ML pollution. smh

cstanhope@social.coop ("Charles Stanhope") wrote:

While searching for confirmation of the factoid above, I came across some super sketchy garbage. My first search gave me a 2nd result that was a page that had FAQ like structure about the moon. You know, a bunch of questions with answers.

The questions were all sensible, but the answers seemed to me the kind of word salad that GPT-3 or some other generative ML algorithm would generate when fed the questions as prompts.

cstanhope@social.coop ("Charles Stanhope") wrote:

#TIL that the moon helps stabilize the tilt of Earth's axis:

"The moon has long been recognized as a significant stabilizer of Earth's orbital axis. Without it, astronomers have predicted that Earth's tilt could vary as much as 85 degrees. In such a scenario, the sun would swing from being directly over the equator to directly over the poles over the course of a few million years, a change which could result in dramatic climatic shifts."

https://www.space.com/12464-earth-moon-unique-solar-system-universe.html

Good thing the moon is there!