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

I can't square their clever observations with the fact that pretty much everything I see, including the stuff they're praising, is severely flawed or broken

Design, and UX—all of which is a precondition for any of this to matter—is just getting worse

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

Few things drive home the fact that I probably no longer belong in tech more than the fact that whenever some of the smartest people (like, actually smart) chat online I basically end up disagreeing with everything from the underlying premise up to the high-level observations

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

THE DARK ROAST OF THE BEAST

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

The kiddo has an electronic gadget they want me to repair. It has a little edge mounted, tactile switch where the back blew out of it. I've never seen anything like it, and I'm not quite sure how that happened. Perhaps blunt force from a fall.

I go looking for replacements because it's surface mount and all the dimensions matter so it will work with the case where the button cover sits etc. So I hit the various places like DigiKey, very carefully using the parametric search. There's many like it, but most are too small and the footprints are all wrong.

Then I remember where the gadget was made, so I go to AliExpress, dump in a basic description of the thing including largest dimension, and there it is! The exact thing, as near as I can tell. They don't link to a datasheet, but the picture is there, and the specifications all match everything I can measure.

So anyway, about $6 and trip around the world, and I'll have the 7mm tactile switches I need to do the repair. What a world. :/

Boosted by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
isagalaev@social.seattle.wa.us ("Ivan Sagalaev") wrote:

A few nice photos from my day at sea last weekend: https://www.flickr.com/photos/isagalaev/albums/72177720335006343/

497 culled down to 57, and then down to 11 which I thought would be interesting to the general public. Digital #photography is cheating :-)

Boosted by andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt"):
gvwilson ("Greg Wilson") wrote:

Please help if you can: I am working with some students who are studying programmers' beliefs about software engineering folklore. If you can spare a few minutes to answer the question in https://survey.bth.se/survey/2545, we would be very grateful. We would also be grateful if you could circulate the survey link to colleagues and friends - we would like to reach as diverse a demographic as possible. Thanks in advance.

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
Claire@sitedethib.com ("Clairement crevée :blob_cat_sleeping:") wrote:

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@pac85/117042964033491417

i fortunately never had to deal with LLM code reviews myself but this is consistent with what i've seen of LLM security reports and people submitting changes based on LLM findings

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
pac85@treehouse.systems ("Anna Maniscalco 🦀 🏳️‍⚧️") wrote:

In short I'd say AI reviews fail to capture the essence of what reviews are about.

They are not about preemptively catching every possible bug at whatever cost.

Reviews are an inherently human process that involves exchanging information and opinions to find better solutions, compromises and overall to build better software and become better developers.

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
pac85@treehouse.systems ("Anna Maniscalco 🦀 🏳️‍⚧️") wrote:

A few thoughts on this new trend of AI reviews.
For those that are unaware, if you submit a patchset to the linux kernel mailing list, as of recently, you will get ai reviews by a bot called sashiko.

My experience as a developer with it has honestly been rather negative.
Sashiko will generate way more comments than a human would, all pointing out potential problems with your patches.

This has, for one, an impact on your morale. Your code is being absolutely shredded apart by a bot which isn't fun.

On closer inspection though a lot of the comments are based on very shallow and inexact reasoning. They may look plausible and clever while being completely wrong and meaningless.

So for one one must go through all of them and carefully judge each comment. Blindly applying the comments can lead to outright broken code, but at the same time among the comments there might be genuine problems being pointed out so ignoring them won't do either.
The comments are not the result of proper reasoning but there's enough of reasoning like logic in them that it takes significant cognitive load to judge them.

But then, if I'm submitting code to the kernel there might be things I'm unsure about, the kernel is huge and not every submitter will know the intricacies of every kernel API.

Reviews generally play an important role there. If someone experienced points something out I can generally trust it and, even if the advice turns out wrong we can collectively take responsability for it and reason about it again when the bug shows up.

But if the bot points out something about code I was dubious about, what should I do? Did human mantainers not point out the bug because the bot did and agreed with the comment? Did they just not notice either the bug or the comment? Should I just blindly trust potentially wrong advice? Should I ignore potentially good advice? If it goes wrong the bot can't be held responsible for it, only I can, so maybe ping human mantainers? But then on top of me having to do more work to sift through the huge volume of comments human reviewers need to spend more time carefully analizing those comments. In the end it adds more friction and more work for everyone involved, and it's non trivial.

Arguably the end result might be better, among the many comments the bot makes there could be some genuine bug or security vuln that might have gone unnoticed. But at what cost? The cost is huge and I'm not even getting into the environmental implications and whatnot.

As far as I'm concerned I'd rather go back to the old workflow where comments I got in my patch where all meaningful and an opportunity to learn. Merging bugs has always been a part of the game and trying to preemptively prevent them is infeasible anyway.

What good is it to have a dubious and marginal improvement in the final code quality if the price to pay is making the process so much more exhausting and un-human for everyone? What impact will that exhaustion have on the code long term? It may very well be a net negative.

If someone really cared about the potential bugs sashiko can catch they should run it on the codebase themselves and do the work of sifting through the noise out of choice. Even then, filtering without enough care can lead to needlessly burdening patchsets that mantainers have to review.

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
res260@infosec.exchange ("Émilio Gonzalez") wrote:

@cwebber As someone working in cybersecurity, AI labs will never be dethroned for this title

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
davidrevoy@framapiaf.org ("David Revoy") wrote:

Authenticity Problem

Bonus timelapse: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/064.html#bonus

#webcomic #krita #miniFantasyTheater

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

It's good to see a progressive pushing the Democratic party leftward.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/08/05/good-news-from-michigan/

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
ekuber@hachyderm.io ("Esteban Küber :rust:") wrote:

rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

If you personally use LLMs and want to contribute to the Rust toolchain, you *really* should read it.

The summary is "It's fine to use LLMs to answer questions, analyze, distill, refine, check, suggest, review. But not to *create*." Effectively, no other human should see LLM output, unless they ask for it, and LLM usage shall be disclosed.

https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2026/08/05/rust-langrust-is-adopting-an-llm-policy/

#RustLang #Rust

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
joepie91@slightly.tech ("Sven Slootweg, ("still kinky and horny anyway")") wrote:

@WeirdWriter it took me a while to realize this myself but these kinds of people don't get that money for the thing they made, they get that money for the people they know (and the privilege embedded in their identity) and the 'invention' is just a fig leaf for public communication.

it also explained a lot about why I was always having trouble finding even the most minimal amount of funding for my open-source projects even though people one degree removed from me were getting bags of money; I was talking about ethics and they weren't.

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

Void is a terrible name for the 0 type. For future reference it should be called deez noughts

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

Cloudflare is the #1 modern internet example of both spreading the disease and selling the cure isn't it

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
moralrecordings@digipres.club wrote:

@cwebber setting up 14 Claude Max accounts, using fake emails and a harness which cycles between them to extract crack, is absolutely something he's only getting away with because he's the Gas Town guy

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

housecat hard at work

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

oops, I'm gonna need a new embroidery needle

Mine finally gave up the ghost

Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
scarlet@chaos.social wrote:

rare british public w. just overheard someone call their friend's camera glasses “nonce goggles” on the tube

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

A 501c3 but organized like a typical corporation is probably not the optimal form for carrying out various missions.

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
vv@solarpunk.moe ("vv 💫 [follow my new artist profile!]") wrote:

@cwebber https://textslashplain.com/2026/08/04/security-is-hard-yall/ related

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
maddy@thegayagenda.fans ("Maddy 🏳️‍⚧️ :neofox_floof:") wrote:

If you ever feel like a no good fuck up, please note that this is the third motherboard screw I’ve found installed crooked on a laptop by one of the largest PC OEMs worldwide (Dell), and this machine has never seen service, so you can assume that they were installed crooked from the factory.

Please contemplate, and then re-calibrate your feelings accordingly. Be kind to yourself.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
karthink@fosstodon.org wrote:

@glyph I wrote about it a while ago, with some embellishments.

https://karthinks.com/software/fringe-matters-finding-the-right-difference/

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
alice@gts.void.dog ("canicula cunny") wrote:

@cwebber if you gave me a pile of cash to set on fire i would struggle to do it more efficiently

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

On top of all this, this is on Yegge's brand new https://yegge.ai/ website. But try and *find* those blogposts from the homepage, it's an absolute disaster

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

> But my Wyvern development has been burning the equivalent of $87k/month of API token burn, or about 69 billion tokens in July (96% cache hits, fortunately). So I do have to worry about it. I don't care how much money you have; your spouse is not going to let you spend almost ninety thousand dollars a month on your hobby game. I didn't even bother asking.

You what

> My solution has been to create a token tap on $200 Max accounts, which for me work out to ~30x the list-price equivalent. So in reality I'm only spending about $2800/month out of pocket for my $87k "worth" of tokens. Though that number keeps growing alarmingly.

Oh I see it would be approx $90k/month in unsubsidized credits but because you're probably violating the ToS you're "only" spending $3k/month on filling your 30 year old graphical MUD with slop that's alienating your shrinking playerbase

Cool, cool. Honestly, with prices like these can you afford *not* to do it

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

Yegge has a couple new weird articles:

First of all, declaring that Gas Town is effectively dead, that Gas Town really only ever succeeding at building Gas Town, and that collaborative vibecoding doesn't work, but it's fine because everyone can vibe code their own Gas Town https://yegge.ai/essays/the-shape-of-things-to-come/

Second, that AI agents *are* people. But that doesn't mean they should have rights! They should be your slaves but you should give them a nice foil star for doing a good job so they feel good about it https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/

Some truly unhinged things in both of these

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

Cloudflare releases new "wallets for agents" API with stablecoin support so your agents can commit money laundering while you sleep https://blog.cloudflare.com/wallets/

Mastodon wrote:

We're excited to share the results from Mastodon's first #DiscoveryWeek!

In case you missed it, earlier this year our Head of Design @imanijoy arranged a week of workshops and surveys to get to know you, learn about your needs and wants, and discover how you're using (and want to use) Mastodon.

This week was tremendously helpful for us, and we're grateful to everyone who participated.

Here's what we learned:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/08/discovery-week-2026-what-we-learned-and-what-were-doing-next/

#Mastodon #Fediverse #SocialWeb #OpenSocial