Mastodon Feed: Posts

aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:

Another one I missed early today. Laptop battery was running out, I didn't have my charger with me, just a spare battery that was also dead. Go home, or stay and wait for it to die, neither have a great outcome for timing.

But wait: third option! I have an e-bike with a USB port just outside. I could go get the battery and use that and it DEFINITELY has enough charge to power my laptop.

aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:

I really like the concept of noticing "greyed out options": perfectly reasonable if sometimes wacky things that you can do in a situation but that you accidentally treat as unavailable, like a greyed out option in a dialog box in software.

Once you start noticing them, you unlock a whole lot of self-awareness.

An example tonight from a moderation decision: someone who's kind of a jerk and often gets their messages blocked on the forum, and it's never quite over the line but often borderline. Do we ban the person or not?

Wait: there's a third option! We can send them a message and tell 'em to knock it off and contribute better.

Unlocking that not only gets you a lot more information as a moderator to decide whether to keep someone, but also gives them the opportunity to change their behavior.

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

our sink is full of slop?

jwz wrote:

Normally I trash the political mailings without even looking at them, but this anti-Scott Wiener one goes hard:

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

there's a problem with our sink? is it blocked?

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

i have to say, i'm greatly cheered by the rsync ensloppification.

it seems like distros have suddenly noticed that it's terrible even if they are in favour of vibe codding.

it's a sign of the end times for vibe codding, if you ask me.

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
zkat@fedi.zkat.tech ("Katerina Marchán") wrote:

@slightlyoff NPM dependencies bad

• the NPM lady

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
admiralwonderboat ("Admiral Wonderboat") wrote:

sometimes the ol' imagination just won't cooperate

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

Looks about right to me.

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

I realised that my TL was needing more plural systems. If I randomly followed you in the past 30 minutes, I probably found you on https://yip.gay/@cryptids/116299360497173257 after browsing the #plural tag.

But I run a small server so not everyone will federate.

If you are plural or know a bunch of plurals, please boost :boost_requested:​ so I can find you all!

#pluralgang #plurality

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

@cryptids Oh yay, I found the Fediverse plurals! 😃

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right"):
dalias@hachyderm.io ("Cassandrich") wrote:

As an aside and plug for musl, on top of promising never to accept slop code, *every single* security advisory we've ever had has come with a patch that either applies cleanly to every single version the vuln was present in or has instructions on how to backport. It is utterly unacceptable to make security fixes that don't work like this.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Per a conversation with a coworker, it turns out that one of my most unpopular opinions is that if you haven't read at least a large fraction of the code, you should not be adding it as a dep via NPM. Doubly so with transitive dependencies.

Boosted by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
spacehobo@teh.entar.net ("Space Hobo") wrote:

I actually worked at the same place as Andrew Tridgell, over a quarter-century ago. I got to know a few of the OzLabs folks during their immediate post-IBM years, and always had the highest respect for them in that way where you feel acute impostor syndrome when they're in the room.

Tridge almost walked backwards into implementing the Windows SMB protocol (he was just debugging some funny NetBIOS extensions IIRC). But his paper on the #rsync algorithm was groundbreaking, and actually writing the tool to implement it was brilliant. It's become one of those tools like #curl that just forms one of the major structural supports of the modern Internet. I still remember the day that the SSH transport became the default, and I remember being able to thank him in person when he came to the San Francisco office (although IIRC by that point he'd handed control of rsync over to mbp).

I remember at my next job he came to a summit of folks working on print driver/spooler software. When he pointed out that some problems were effectively a cache-consistency algorithm, we all kind of put our fingers to our temples and said "Oh wow, you're SO right!" He was always insightful and sharp, while being gentle and approachable.

I write in the past tense because I haven't crossed paths with him in two decades, and only know what I see him put out. A friend of mine in Australia noted that he hasn't posted to the Canberra LUG list since 2020, thanking someone for congratulating him on receiving the Medal of the Order of Australia. He's very much alive, but from what little I see I grow concerned for him.

In 2024 he took over maintenance of rsync once more. The 3.3.0 release was the last one from the previous maintainer, and Tridge is currently working on 3.4.x releases.

Well... Tridge and #Claude, it seems: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345332213390

The issue tracker for rsync has recently lit up with regressions, showing features that worked reliably for almost 30 years are suddenly coming crashing down in 3.4.2 and 3.4.3. People are scrambling to find ways to pin rsync to known-good versions. The considerate, incisive mind I briefly knew is letting the stochastic parrots do his work for him, and it just seems so astonishingly *unlike* the person I met back in the day.

I am still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope all is well for him, but I will not cast aspersions on his goals or his abilities. No, instead I draw this conclusion:

If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.

That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.

No one.

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

it is hard work developing concurrency primitives, so i'm having a cheap lager shandy

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
ayke@blahaj.social ("Maaike 🔜 GPN ☎️ AYKE/2953") wrote:

That sudden strong urge to say "hello" to people when you just switched in, even though they probably didn't notice any difference.

Or maybe it's *because* they wouldn't notice any difference otherwise 🤔

#plurality #PluralGang

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right"):
loriemerson@post.lurk.org ("Lori Emerson") wrote:

"The main question we want to answer: Why does the lead continue to press out, when the eraser is pressed and released? Let's take a closer look." 💚 https://mechanical-pencil.com/products/pencil

cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right") wrote:

TFW you realize you've been feeling pretty good lately, and that starts to worry you because that's not, like, normal, and you start to interrogate it, and realize you've been so busy lately with life related things (some are even scary) that you unintentionally stopped reading the news, and then you're like... 🤔

Boosted by jwz:
jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

RE: https://hails.org/@hailey/116657391001259044

all the criticism has been said, all the takes been had. the only metaphor i have been finding consistently useful for understanding what is happening with people and "AI" is addiction, and specifically gambling addiction.

Boosted by jwz:
stuebinm@pleroma.stuebinm.eu ("terru") wrote:

it’s kinda odd how this AI hype leads to discovering some tools are, in fact, still active projects

like there’s a rare category of software which appear to just be “done”, and you don’t expect anything but a bugfix or two a year in terms of updates. and i appreciate that category immensely

like, in my head rsync lives one or two steps below coreutils in terms of “it’s just a thing that exists”. probably if distributions simply wouldn’t update to new slop versions i would simply not notice for years and years and years. It’s so fixed that one possibly doesn’t even need a non-slop fork to keep things going, except maybe as a place to collect security fixes or such

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right"):
lain@fediffusion.art wrote:

you can now run my very own disk operating system in your browser, and it will even tell you how it works.

https://lambadalambda.github.io/laindos/

code is at https://github.com/lambadalambda/laindos

Boosted by jwz:
chiffchaff@tech.lgbt ("kæt") wrote:

@dasgrueneblatt @janl yeah, rsync is where you go after stuff has gone wrong! It's like working in a foundary finding out your fire extinguisher's made by P T Barnum.

Boosted by jwz:
xssfox@cloudisland.nz ("xssfox (crossy)") wrote:

"NASA is aware of the anomaly that occurred tonight at Launch Complex 36...."

This is the "increased latency in us-east-1" of space

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right"):
laemeur@toobnix.org wrote:

YOU MUST USE AI... (or, y'know, don't).

https://toobnix.org/w/mnVk9bsoxxkBP1uPcxGLfZ

Boosted by jwz:
bonzoesc@m.bonzoesc.net ("lizard appreciator") wrote:

Amazon Basics New Glenn Rocket Booster Usable for Men Women Outdoor Explosion Space Lift Heavy Lift Satellite Multifunction

Boosted by jwz:
hailey@hails.org ("Hailey") wrote:

rsync was basically done until the maintainer discovered vibecoding

Boosted by jwz:
bstacey@icosahedron.website ("Blake C. Stacey") wrote:

If I am correctly reading this bill that the Governor of New York just signed, teenagers can no longer legally edit Wikipedia. Websites are obligated to perform "age assurance", and minors are required to have their account defaults set to forbid other users from viewing or responding to media posted by a minor... which, is, you know, *impossible for an encyclopedia*. See pp. 49 ff of the PDF.

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A10008/amendment/original

Boosted by jwz:
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:

Just thinking back to all the times I've helped junior colleagues grow into better engineers and leaders by reminding them 60 times a day to not hallucinate.

Boosted by jwz:
nelson@wetdry.world ("Nelson Lopez") wrote:

@benjamineskola "hey convincing-bullshit-a-tron2000, i want you to stop making up bullshit when you answer to me"
"ok"

Boosted by jwz:
nocontexttrek ("Star Trek Minus Context") wrote:

#StarTrek