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Reblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):

tixie@guerilla.studio ("Tixie Salander") wrote:

Make full content rss feeds when the author only provides a summary https://paul.kinlan.me/projects/full-rss-feed/

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Reblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):

mttaggart@infosec.exchange ("Taggart :donor:") wrote:

Boost if you want less generative AI in your tech in 2025.

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Reblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):

Cdespinosa ("Chris Espinosa") wrote:

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fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni and a Smear Campaign After ‘It Ends With Us’ - The New York Times:

"When Ms. Abel wrote to her Aug. 4 that “I’m having reckless thoughts of wanting to plant pieces this week of how horrible Blake is to work with. Just to get ahead of it,” Ms. Nathan replied that she had spoken off the record to an editor at The Daily Mail."

I don’t spend too much time reading up on Hollywood. But, I vaguely recall ... https://micro.fromjason.xyz/2024/12/22/blake-lively-justin.html

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Reblogged by pzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑"):

randahl ("Randahl Fink") wrote:

"If only American billionaires could buy the EU, like we bought the US presidency, stealing people's data while destroying planet Earth would be so much more profitable."

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Reblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):

hipsterelectron@circumstances.run ("d@nny "disc@" mc²") wrote:

"don't use technical solutions for social problems" might be better reframed as "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house"

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fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

Feature Chum
You know how when a tech company pushes a feature onto its users and it’s evident that the feature is just a way for the company to collect more user data or for some other nefarious business goal? You can tell that the feature results from some c-suite demand for world domination, and the marketing department sort of backed into whatever user benefit they’re touting.

There isn’t a great word for that.

In tech, ... https://micro.fromjason.xyz/2024/12/22/feature-chum-you.html

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Reblogged by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):

5t3ph@front-end.social ("Stephanie Eckles") wrote:

Ho ho ho! All 12 Days of Web articles and emails are scheduled and ready to take flight up until Christmas night!

Do some catch up reading this weekend, and considering re-gifting an article to a friend or two.

#css #html #javascript #webdev #frontend

https://12daysofweb.dev

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jwz wrote:

I'm trying to get my music into Rockbox by using rsync instead of iTunes, and the iPod can only transfer about 20 files before it crashes. And when it does that, it somehow makes my USB hub reset as well, which I have never seen before. So that's going great.

Also it takes 3 1/2 minutes between plugging it in to USB and the mount point showing up on the desktop.

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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.

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Reblogged by jwz:

vmstan@vmst.io ("Michael Stanclift") wrote:

#startrek #superman

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

The old one, for comparison :-)

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

We grew our own home illustrator!

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Reblogged 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

#adventoffonts #bitmapfont #amstradcpc #zxspectrum

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Reblogged by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):

WhistlerInTheDarkAges wrote:

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.

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fromjason ("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

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Reblogged 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.

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Reblogged 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/

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Reblogged 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/

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fromjason ("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

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fromjason ("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

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cstanhope@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

#drawing #yaombaaa

(apologies to any followers who already saw the post)

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Reblogged by jwz:

nikitonsky@mastodon.online ("Niki Tonsky") wrote:

I propose we replace semantic versioning with pride versioning

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Reblogged by jwz:

david_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.

#GitHubCopilot #CHERIoT

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fromjason ("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

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jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

yahhhh

‘Walk Away (Album Version)’ by Tom Waits

https://pandora.app.link/xgORVx7UvPb

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cstanhope@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!

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Reblogged 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!

#pixelart #nes

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Reblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):

ThompsonArt@mastodon.art ("Aled Thompson") wrote:

A Flying Fire Fox

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cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:

Code like other people matter.