Mastodon Feed
fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:
Man on Fire walked so John Wick could run. This is Denzel Washington’s best work. And oh, how quotable.
"A man can be an artist… in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasy’s art is death. He’s about to paint his masterpiece."
Banger.
Mastodon Feedvmstan@vmst.io ("Michael Stanclift") wrote:
Mastodon Feedisagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:") wrote:
The old one, for comparison :-)
Mastodon Feedisagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:") wrote:
We grew our own home illustrator!
Mastodon FeedReblogged by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
damieng ("Damien Guard") wrote:
8x8 Font Advent Calendar 2024 Day 21
Shadow of the Beast ZXCPC
Shadow of the Beast was a gorgeous atmospheric Amiga game that struggled to fit into less powerful machines.
The Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum versions while graphically constrained did however include this gorgeous 8x8 bitmap font.
https://download.damieng.com/fonts/conversions/Shadow+of+the+Beast+ZXCPC.zip
Mastodon FeedReblogged by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
I would now like to sum up my experience of nearly 50 non-expert years of using computers and the internet:
Plaintext, wherever possible, FTW.
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:
What is shadowbanning? Why social media may be hiding your posts. - The Washington Post:
"We asked Washington Post readers to share their stories about “shadowbans," the real or perceived suppression of a person’s posts, and many suspected that their posts were being shown to friends but hidden on feeds. Few had proof this was happening."
Good read. Not to get too conspiratorial, but I have often wondered about the ... https://micro.fromjason.xyz/2024/12/21/what-is-shadowbanning.html
Mastodon FeedReblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
katzenberger@mastodon.de wrote:
With "a new social", another #Meta / #Threads lobbyist group has appeared. They're partially imitating the look and even the wording of the so-called "Social Web Foundation".
One of the team members is #RyanBarret, the guy who wanted to force opt-out from his #Mastodon - #Bluesky bridge "Bridgy Fed" upon the Fediverse, until a shit storm stopped him.
Quote from their website:
»Industry Partnerships
We will also work closely with existing organizations building on top of the open social web, focusing on maintaining compatibility and collaborating on features and education. We've already begun discussions with #industry #partners like Flipboard, Bluesky, Meta, and Mastodon, and we look forward to continuing to work with them.«
Never forget who's trying to open the gates for #Meta.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
dangillmor ("Dan Gillmor") wrote:
Spotify is a creepy, and grossly unethical, platform at this point. it rips off musicians and rewards huge companies -- and itself. Apparently what it's doing is legal, however.
This is great reporting, from a new book by Liz Pelly. A compelling read.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
Mastodon FeedReblogged by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
darktable@photog.social wrote:
well well well if it isn't version 5.0.
get it here: https://www.darktable.org/2024/12/darktable-5.0.0-released/
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:
I, for one, welcome our cyborg insect robot army.
I found this story on Boing-Boing. A university in Singapore created a sort of logistic model for mass-producing cyborgs cockroaches capable of doing their master’s bidding.
A Starship Troopers timeline is as good as any, I guess. https://boingboing.net/2024/12/21/cyborg-cockroach-production-nears-one-per-minute.html
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:
On my second reading of the essay “A Linkless Web,” I remember the first book I ever read, and wonder if an AI-generated summary would’ve robbed me of that experience.
When AI summaries replace hyperlinks, thought itself is flattened | Aeon Essays:
"In The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), he argued that a reader could not sum up a poem by paraphrasing what it ‘says’. Poetry does not work like ordinary language. It is not reducible to its ... https://micro.fromjason.xyz/2024/12/21/on-my-second.html
Mastodon Feedcstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:
Before I forget, and just for the purposes of this thread where I seem to be dumping all my art related things, the post linked below contains a christmas card I made in 2013.
https://social.coop/@cstanhope/113691963939292523
(apologies to any followers who already saw the post)
Mastodon Feednikitonsky@mastodon.online ("Niki Tonsky") wrote:
I propose we replace semantic versioning with pride versioning
Mastodon Feeddavid_chisnall@infosec.exchange ("David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)") wrote:
I finally turned off GitHub Copilot yesterday. I’ve been using it for about a year on the ‘free for open-source maintainers’ tier. I was skeptical but didn’t want to dismiss it without a fair trial.
It has cost me more time than it has saved. It lets me type faster, which has been useful when writing tests where I’m testing a variety of permutations of an API to check error handling for all of the conditions.
I can recall three places where it has introduced bugs that took me more time to to debug than the total time saving:
The first was something that initially impressed me. I pasted the prose description of how to communicate with an Ethernet MAC into a comment and then wrote some method prototypes. It autocompleted the bodies. All very plausible looking. Only it managed to flip a bit in the MDIO read and write register commands. MDIO is basically a multiplexing system. You have two device registers exposed, one sets the command (read or write a specific internal register) and the other is the value. It got the read and write the wrong way around, so when I thought I was writing a value, I was actually reading. When I thought I was reading, I was actually seeing the value in the last register I thought I had written. It took two of us over a day to debug this. The fix was simple, but the bug was in the middle of correct-looking code. If I’d manually transcribed the command from the data sheet, I would not have got this wrong because I’d have triple checked it.
Another case it had inverted the condition in an if statement inside an error-handling path. The error handling was a rare case and was asymmetric. Hitting the if case when you wanted the else case was okay but the converse was not. Lots of debugging. I learned from this to read the generated code more carefully, but that increased cognitive load and eliminated most of the benefit. Typing code is not the bottleneck and if I have to think about what I want and then read carefully to check it really is what I want, I am slower.
Most recently, I was writing a simple binary search and insertion-deletion operations for a sorted array. I assumed that this was something that had hundreds of examples in the training data and so would be fine. It had all sorts of corner-case bugs. I eventually gave up fixing them and rewrote the code from scratch.
Last week I did some work on a remote machine where I hadn’t set up Copilot and I felt much more productive. Autocomplete was either correct or not present, so I was spending more time thinking about what to write. I don’t entirely trust this kind of subjective judgement, but it was a data point. Around the same time I wrote some code without clangd set up and that really hurt. It turns out I really rely on AST-aware completion to explore APIs. I had to look up more things in the documentation. Copilot was never good for this because it would just bullshit APIs, so something showing up in autocomplete didn’t mean it was real. This would be improved by using a feedback system to require autocomplete outputs to type check, but then they would take much longer to create (probably at least a 10x increase in LLM compute time) and wouldn’t complete fragments, so I don’t see a good path to being able to do this without tight coupling to the LSP server and possibly not even then.
Yesterday I was writing bits of the CHERIoT Programmers’ Guide and it kept autocompleting text in a different writing style, some of which was obviously plagiarised (when I’m describing precisely how to implement a specific, and not very common, lock type with a futex and the autocomplete is a paragraph of text with a lot of detail, I’m confident you don’t have more than one or two examples of that in the training set). It was distracting and annoying. I wrote much faster after turning it off.
So, after giving it a fair try, I have concluded that it is both a net decrease in productivity and probably an increase in legal liability.
Discussions I am not interested in having:
- You are holding it wrong. Using Copilot with this magic config setting / prompt tweak makes it better. At its absolute best, it was a small productivity increase, if it needs more effort to use, that will be offset.* This other LLM is much better. I don’t care. The costs of the bullshitting far outweighed the benefits when it worked, to be better it would have to not bullshit, and that’s not something LLMs can do.
- It’s great for boilerplate! No. APIs that require every user to write the same code are broken. Fix them, don’t fill the world with more code using them that will need fixing when the APIs change.* Don’t use LLMs for autocomplete, use them for dialogues about the code. Tried that. It’s worse than a rubber duck, which at least knows to stay silent when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
The one place Copilot was vaguely useful was hinting at missing abstractions (if it can autocomplete big chunks then my APIs required too much boilerplate and needed better abstractions). The place I thought it might be useful was spotting inconsistent API names and parameter orders but it was actually very bad at this (presumably because of the way it tokenises identifiers?). With a load of examples with consistent names, it would suggest things that didn't match the convention. After using three APIs that all passed the same parameters in the same order, it would suggest flipping the order for the fourth.
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:
Startup set to brick $800 kids robot is trying to open source it first - Ars Technica:
"The $800 robots, aimed at providing emotional support for kids ages 5 to 10, would soon be bricked, the company said, because they can’t perform their core features without the cloud."
This is Web 3.0, the new Internet, the newer Internet of Things. We’re no longer able to buy products and services, only compute. Fleeting, short-term, ... https://micro.fromjason.xyz/2024/12/21/startup-set-to.html
Mastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
yahhhh
‘Walk Away (Album Version)’ by Tom Waits
Mastodon Feedcstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:
I already haven't been hanging out here as much the past week, and I think I'll take a more definitive break starting today.
I hope you have good holidays, if that's your thing. Otherwise, I hope you have good days.
I've got the urge to make a Christmas card again, but if I manage it, it'll be next year's. I actually have two ideas, but I'm trying not to abandon the first.
I don't have a card this year, but this is the one I made in 2013. See you next year!
Mastodon FeedReblogged by rmrenner ("The Old Gay Gristle Fest"):
zeta0134@mstdn.plus ("Zeta") wrote:
Good grief! The entire sprite system has been overhauled, and now I can have way more metasprites without breaking the art budget.
Please enjoy this updated flail, which is now (hopefully) much easier to understand in motion thanks to 20 unique on-hit animations!
Mastodon FeedReblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
ThompsonArt@mastodon.art ("Aled Thompson") wrote:
A Flying Fire Fox
Mastodon Feedcstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:
Code like other people matter.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
mathias@rhizospherelabs.com wrote:
There’s an idea I run into frequently but don’t know if we have a proper term for — using a lower end computer (often an older laptop like one of the classic Thinkpads) when developing software. Not just for using what you have and keeping it out of the landfill; but that those machines are both plenty fast and that it forces you to consider performance. Is there a better term than “low-end computing”?
Mastodon FeedGargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:
She’s full of crimes.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by mbrubeck@mefi.social:
solar_seattle@mas.to ("Solar Seattle") wrote:
The sun will rise in #Seattle #Washington tomorrow at 7:55, 30 seconds later than the day before.
It will set at 16:20, 27 seconds later than the day before.
Mastodon Feedpzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑") wrote:
Curious. All these billionaires are college dropouts who know nothing about physics, but they like to claim they could have been physicists. So why don't they go back to school?
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/12/21/a-common-thread-among-billionaires/
Mastodon Feedcstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:
I'm probably the wrong guy to be posting about this on the internet, but Proko has done an "advent calendar" or "12 days" of sketchbook tours from some fabulous artists. Yeah, it's a (very mild) promo for proko's lessons, but if you have an interest other artists' sketching habits or just want to see artists talking about their great art, then maybe check it out:
Mastodon Feedpzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑") wrote:
Uh-oh. All we need is religion added to the volatile mixture in the powder keg.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/12/21/the-imagery-that-should-scare-the-wealthy/
Mastodon FeedSo what I'm getting from the Superman trailer is that a Hawk-Tuahgarian is coming for your Krypto.
Mastodon FeedI finally got Rockbox installed on my iPod (don't ask) and it is able to read my Apple database and play music, yay. But none of the ID3v2 album artwork is showing up, and my searches just turn up ancient Reddit posts saying crazy shit about parallel directory trees full of BMP files. That can't be for real, right? Right?
Also what's the most Apple iPod 5-like theme?
Mastodon FeedReblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
jdp23@gotosocial.thenexus.today ("Jon P") wrote:
If he says you don't need OPSEC, he's a Fed
If he says you don't need OPSEC, he's a Fed
If he wants you to repeat it
Where the chatroom won't delete it
If he says you don't need OPSEC, he's a Fed
