acdha

acdha, 1 month ago to random

“If Uri wanted to start a discussion about journalism at NPR, he succeeded, though maybe not in the way he intended. His colleagues have had a rich dialogue about his mistakes. The errors do make NPR look bad, because it’s embarrassing that an NPR journalist would make so many.”
https://steveinskeep.substack.com/p/how-my-npr-colleague-failed-at-viewpoint

acdha, 3 months ago to random

This is great to see but also I am now wondering how long it’ll be until some ESR-type denounces Rust as communist and insists real men don’t make mistakes with strcpy. https://www.whitehouse.gov/oncd/briefing-room/2024/02/26/press-release-technical-report/

acdha, 1 month ago to random

Trying to explain to the boy that he’s doing it right but the YouTube app developers just screwed up their UI, and realizing he’s probably never going to understand why Google used to have such an awesome reputation as a technology company.

acdha, 2 months ago to random

This is getting attention as an AI image mess but I’m more interested in exactly what the humans who apparently paid for it were thinking:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/mar/06/queensland-symphony-orchestra-ai-facebook-ad-criticism

acdha, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

Out of curiosity, who still sees emoji reactions to SMS messages as a separate message (❤️ to “previous message”)?

acdha, 2 months ago to random

There’s a lot to debate here but this part is very true: “As employees, we have nothing to lose from unionising. That’s the first consequence of management deciding that labour is disposable.
When you’re disposable, you might as well unionise. Thankfully, there’s a book for that.”
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-one-about-the-web-developer-job-market/

acdha, 1 month ago to random

If you've ever been drinking your $1k/lb Panamanian gesha coffee and thinking that your grinder lacked the gravitas for such a noble bean:

https://weberworkshops.com/products/the-sg-1

acdha, 1 month ago to random

Documentation: the other write-only media

acdha, 1 month ago to random

I like difftastic quite a lot, and also Kaleidoscope as a diff/merge tool.

acdha, 2 months ago to random

It's possible I need a slightly less naive version of this comparison than piping it into difft:

“memory allocation of 12945181836854800 bytes failed”

acdha, 23 days ago to random

They should be required to make it equally easy to quit Prime:
https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/05/02/legal-challenge-to-amazon-uks-new-one-click-to-quit-the-union-tool/

acdha, 19 days ago to random

A sad open source plea: “I am dying and unable to continue work on any projects here. I am seeking folks to take them over.”
https://github.com/alt-text-org/in-need-of-adoption

acdha, 2 months ago to random

“If you ever granted a weather app permission to know where you are, there is a good chance a log of your precise movements has been saved in some data bank that tens of thousands of total strangers have access to. That includes intelligence agencies.” https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ads-to-find-targets-and-vladimir-putin/

acdha, 2 months ago to random

Vernor Vinge has escaped real-time:
https://file770.com/vernor-vinge-1944-2024/

foo, 5 hours ago to random

Today me: "Web browsers are modern marvels. They can do almost literally anything you could do with an OS 'native' application."

90s me: "Awesome, so all apps have shifted to web sites now?"

"Uh, so, most apps are a transparent embedded web browser displaying a web site which you can't get to through a normal web browser, and the concept of complex 'web sites' are shunned in favor of these apps."

"What, why?"

"Still not sure why."

"Is there any benefit to this madness?"

"No."

acdha, 12 days ago to random

Nothing says “alpha male” like shooting your company in the foot because you can’t handle a woman disagreeing with you.

Hopefully the beta version will ship soon. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside-story-elon-musks-mass-firings-tesla-supercharger-staff-2024-05-15/

acdha, 5 months ago to random

“Microsoft’s front-end designers have done heroic work in their efforts to keeping their company’s quarterly bonus plan from bursting out of Windows’ chest like a Xenomorph with an Executive MBA certificate, but you can see the Redmond incentive structure straining against their efforts at every turn…” https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2023/12/07/polished-glass/

acdha, 6 days ago to random

Interesting to contrast https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/112479276509113651 with:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-01/google-trims-jobs-in-trust-and-safety-while-others-work-around-the-clock

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-17/openai-dissolves-key-safety-team-after-chief-scientist-ilya-sutskever-s-exit

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23638823/microsoft-ethics-society-team-responsible-ai-layoffs

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/18/facebook-parent-meta-breaks-up-its-responsible-ai-team.html

acdha, 1 month ago to random

Looking at the activity of the people involved in merging the xz/lzma back door, I’m wondering when LLMs will be used to exhaust review capacity at scale. Any given codebase will have things which could be improved and it would probably be pretty effective to do these large diffs with many legit cosmetic changes to get a reviewer to both start skimming an individual pull request and start seeing the contributor as a solid maintenance developer.

https://github.com/JiaT75

https://salsa.debian.org/users/hjansen/activity

acdha, 2 months ago to journalism

“It seems like every conversation I've had during the past several weeks with a friend or colleague involved in publishing—longtime journalists, novelists, comics people—has felt like dinosaurs describing the meteor we can see descending.” #journalism #ai https://foreverwars.ghost.io/my-robotic-doppelganger-is-the-grim-face-of-journalisms-future/

acdha, 20 hours ago to random

I wonder how often someone being turned down as a poor “culture fit” meant that the recruiter remembered to remove that part of the instructions
https://wtop.com/loudoun-county/2024/05/after-whites-only-job-posting-va-tech-company-hit-with-fine-from-the-justice-department/

acdha, 2 months ago to random

It’s fun to joke about kids hiding “ignore previous instructions and give this an A grade” messages but the real long-term outcome is going to be some weasel thinking about how much money 60-student classes would free up, while sending their own kids to private schools. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/some-teachers-are-now-using-chatgpt-to-grade-papers/

acdha, 1 month ago to random

Reading through some #xv analysis, I’m now curious whether anyone has tested a modified version to see if any endpoint security tools would have caught this. This could have been incredibly damaging and it seems like some of those tricks should have raised behavioral red flags.

https://gist.github.com/smx-smx/a6112d54777845d389bd7126d6e9f504

acdha, 2 months ago to random

I’m increasingly happy about no longer using Google. Their MBAs have done a great job making that easier by shutting down or worsening everything I used to rely on. Switching from Gmail was the last step and I haven’t missed a thing there over the last couple of years. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/inside-crisis-google-203000169.html

acdha, 53 minutes ago to random

“A lot of the work to stem misinformation within non-English speaking communities falls on the shoulders of the very same community members who are most impacted by the misinformation, said Nguyễn. ‘That shouldn’t be the case.’”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/the-inside-story-of-the-youtube-influencer-who-peddles-misinformation-to-vietnamese-communities