Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by jwz:
cstross@wandering.shop ("Charlie Stross") wrote:

@mjg59

I'm a full-time professional novelist. Have been for 25 years. Before that I was a software dev. From the inside, the cognitive experiences of writing prose fiction and writing software *feel identical*. The creativity exists outside the words, and most of the phrases and grammar I use are unoriginal.

Ball's back in your court.

Boosted by jwz:
jwz wrote:

@mikej @mjg59 @glyph Running with the leaded gasoline analogy:

LLMs have managed to turn Github into a Superfund site.

Future decades are going to have to spend trillions to even partially remediate the damage done by allowing slop to leech into the soil and aquifer.

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁!"):
FediTips@social.growyourown.services ("Fedi.Tips") wrote:

If you know someone who wants to move their account from one Mastodon server to another, here's an easy-to-understand step-by-step guide:

➡️ https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-account-to-another-server

It tries to answer all the questions people have about transferring Mastodon accounts. If I've missed something let me know 🙂

If you know someone looking for a server to move to, here's a human curated site listing good reliable servers:

➡️ https://fedi.garden

#FediTips #Mastodon

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:

@theverge have Ed Zitron on your podcast, you cowards.

zkat@toot.cat ("Katerina Marchán") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@eniko/116433054140983153

This is a good game and you should buy it. “Mario 3 with lesbians” doesn’t even do it justice. It would be amazing even if it wasn’t Mario 3

Boosted by zkat@toot.cat ("Katerina Marchán"):
Lana@beige.party ("𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight"") wrote:

Elliot Page has the chance to do the funniest thing

Boosted by jwz:
jwz wrote:

@mikej @mjg59 @glyph
The tech industry loved Langford's Basilisk so much they made it real.

I also wonder if bulk brain damage and disinhibition from 7+ COVID infections is an inciting factor.

The "find out" phase is going to make this decade look worse than leaded gasoline.

NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

@whitequark If you're not tied to PowerShell, #nushell has the nice structured data approach of PowerShell but is cross-platform and a bit more unix-y/FP-y. I use it across Win/*nix/Mac. <3

But definitely agree re: "unserious platform"

NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

@dysfun Genuinely curious what the odd choices were. && What's the use case you're wanting a JIT for?

There's of course V8 but that's C++ and AFAIK pretty heavy compared to Lua.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
sethmlarson ("Seth Larson") wrote:

I reworked my #Retroachievements play activity and progress tracker to only account for "Progression" and "Win Condition" achievements. Now I'm feeling a lot more confident about finishing “Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons”. My estimated remaining play time dropped from 25 hours to 5 hours... 😅

https://github.com/sethmlarson/retroachievements-play-activity/commit/0e9a2670131b76cf2e83a37fbc735ad4ee1f592c

#retrogaming #gaming #zelda

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
dreid@wandering.shop wrote:

Part of the point of open source is reuse. And wholesale copying can be valid. But that reuse has always had boundaries and constraints applied to it.

Attribution, open sourcing of modifications, etc.

Thats what the licenses are there for.

If we're saying licenses shouldn't matter then ok that's an argument we can have.

But the "clean room implementation of a thing in the training data" people still seem to think licenses matter or they wouldn't have had to relicense anything.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
whitequark@treehouse.systems ("✧✦Catherine✦✧") wrote:

windows: the new shell is powershell
also windows: the only way to develop is to use "vcvarsall.bat" which has no .ps1 equivalent

deeply unserious platform 🤡

Boosted by jwz:
fazalmajid@vivaldi.net ("Fazal Majid") wrote:

@codinghorror it's funny how economists say incentives are everything, but get all huffy when you suggest who funds their paycheck influences their opinions.

Boosted by jwz:
codinghorror@infosec.exchange ("Jeff Atwood") wrote:

Raising the minimum wage, unless you ask sketchy bought-and-paid-for economists, turns out to be a good thing, actually: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/economists-warned-california-not-raise-110500084.html

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
dracos ("Matthew") wrote:

@slightlyoff As no-one else seemed to have done, I opened https://github.com/FujitsuResearch/FieldWorkArena/issues/1 :)

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
tef wrote:

huge week, got to break out one of my favourite puns

a friend was elated "i saw a whale in the harbour!" she'd taken the cross bay ferry and caught a glimpse

i couldn't stop myself from replying

"bit of a fluke"

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
susankayequinn@wandering.shop ("Sue is Writing Solarpunk 🌞🌱") wrote:

If you think things are rough, let me tell you a little story re:my HOA:

My neighborhood HOA was very chill... so chill I never heard from them. Until suddenly the board sold us out to a management corp who jacked up our fees & vowed to crank up "enforcement" (sound familiar? it gets better)
1/n

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
freebooters.uk@rss-parrot.net ("🦜 The Freebooters Podcast") wrote:

Freebooters, food and drink edition, with Wing

freebooters.uk/media/20260419-freebooters.mp3

Chris and Drew are joined by friend of the show Wing for a chat about food, drink, and computers.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
hynek ("Hynek Schlawack") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@AlSweigart/116431940330126637

I have arrived in the highest creator echelon 🥲❤️

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

there's space left over too, but anything i add can't take up too many bits because it's got to pack into 64 bits with a type tag (currently up to 6 bits for the extended tags). but i could add null or various sorts of sentinel error values easily enough

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

my immediates can now encode:

• booleans
• 8/16 bit integers
• 61/32 bit integers (64-bit only)
• 61-bit floats (64-bit only)
• 30 bit integers (32-bit only)
• up to 7 char strings (64-bit only)

so i can overlap any of those with a pointer and avoid heap data for all the values that fit in immediates!

pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:

Waking up to snow.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/04/19/my-poor-spiders/

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Combined with the inherent hazard of using chatbots for a UI then, in theory, any tech designed like this makes for a perfect storm that converts, convinces, and spreads without adding much to the overall economy itself.

/end

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Those who are lucky in their first go (+X%) will become tool gamblers, those unlucky (-X%) will be perplexed by the hype. If the hype continues, they'll get over their disappointment and try again. Depending on the roll of the dice they risk getting converted to tool gamblers like their peers

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

For each person who vibe-codes a useful app there'll be another causing a disaster. Given the nature of the tool the OVERALL effect on the economy from the tool ITSELF is likely to be more volatility but minimal benefit. Then you factor in the bubble, abuses, etc and it becomes a clear negative

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Variability in sequences tend to cancel out

If an intervention adds a +/-10% variability to each step in a sequence then as the number of sequences grows the closer the overall effect will trend to zero. Scale this up to an economy and you get added volatility with little benefit

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

I'm sceptical that LLMs provide a meaningful economic benefit because of their variability

"Variability destroys variability" so when you apply the same tech, with the same variability dynamic, throughout an economy, whatever benefit it might intrinsically provide will wash out at scale

/thread

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Just to make it extra clear. This is not a dunk. I’m agreeing with the post I quoted. Just saying that I don’t think it’s a line of argument that works on people unless they’re hesitant to begin with.

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

RE: https://mementomori.social/@juergen%5Fhubert/116429168342399754

I’ve been making this argument for over three years now to little success

I’m also extremely sceptical of the notion that there is anything truly useful to LLMs, whatever benefit they might have is likely to wash out at scale because of their variability and UI (prompts and chatbots are an incredibly poor UI for productive work), but I I’ve generally avoided making that argument until recently because devs are notoriously bad at assessing what genuinely improves the process of making software

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
juergen_hubert@mementomori.social ("Jürgen Hubert") wrote:

My stance on #LLM :

1. There _might_ be some useful use cases with this technology that could be worth exploring.

2. However, it is glaringly obvious that, as of now, their main purpose is to power the mother of all investments bubbles.

3. Which leads us to the present trillion dollar business case for "we must build energy- and water-wasting data centers everywhere so that we can scrape every single website a thousand times a month for new training data!"

4. Thus, there is currently pretty much no ethical way of using LLMs.

5. Any ethical exploration of LLM use cases will thus have to wait until the bubble has burst, the investors have moved on to the next scam, and we can sort through the rubble to check what is left.