@neilk@xoxo.zone
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

neilk

@neilk@xoxo.zone

Hacker, bicyclist, househusband. Living in beautiful downtown East Van. Once upon a time, in an uneasy zone between idealists, pranksters, and tech monopolists in the SFBA.

These days I do backend programming for that VR company that people sometimes actually like.

On social media I follow some of the people I have shared space with.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

neilk, to random
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

I'm a huge fan of @Mer__edith . I often like to understand where people come from, but there's surprisingly little I can find from internet searches.

As far as I can tell, she got a BA in rhetoric and psychoanalytic theory (I guess Lacan or something?), and in 2006 entered the Googleplex as a CSR. 12 years later she's leading an AI-focused lab, organizes workers, and then she's testifying before Congress and running Signal.

What happened in the middle there? What happened before?

neilk, to random
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

Spanish Banks, Vancouver. It’s pretty dark here, but this close to the city, the looked like milky, streaky clouds, with very faint glow and color.

You might not even notice them, if not for their dramatic structure, shooting out of a single point high in the sky, slowly billowing, fading in and out.

The phone camera seems to know to enhance the colors.

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neilk, to random
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Tradition is a wonderful thing. Looking forward to this generation of protesters learning that their campus administrators, the cops, and almost all of the media are going to shamelessly lie about them

kissane, to random
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Some of the responses to yesterday’s post made a rusty gear start clunking in my brain and oof, understanding aspects of FOSS culture as fandom makes a lot of things make sense.

https://mas.to/@kissane/112288128849621639

neilk,
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

@kissane Fascinating analogy. For my own part I have encountered purity dynamics in contexts that are “scenes” focused around culture and creators like punk music, and others which aren’t quite, like Wikipedia or political movements.

I’m not sure if that means those things are also fandoms or if there’s a third thing that unites all of them? I don’t know much about fandom cultural studies.

neilk, to random
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Jonathan Haidt is generally perceived as right of centre, but he’s debating in the arena of evidence, not mere appeal to tradition.

Anecdotally, is there anyone of any age who personally wishes they spent more time watching videos or scrolling?

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epidemic

neilk, to random
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https://openasteroidimpact.org/

neilk, to random
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A bedtime story for web developers. With lots of twists and a happy ending

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

b0rk, to random
@b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

how HEAD works in git https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/03/08/how-head-works-in-git/

neilk,
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

@b0rk
> Similarly, the meaning of “ours” and “theirs” are flipped in a merge and rebase.

🤯.

I’ve been advocating rebase over merge for years, but had also concluded I have no idea what “ours” and “theirs” actually mean and now I know why!!

neilk, to random
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

I know a Japanese person who wants to experience very “American” things when he visits San Francisco. Like traditional diners.

I recommended In & Out and Grubstake but I can’t think of much else that’s stereotypically American in SF. Suggestions?

mattblaze, to random
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

Pleased to report that our* new paper, "Bugs In Our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning", has been published by the Oxford Journal of Cybersecurity. In it, we examine the folly of using client-side software to detect and report CSAM images.

https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/10/1/tyad020/7590463

  • Harold Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven M Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matt Blaze, Jon Callas, Whitfield Diffie, Susan Landau, Peter G Neumann, Ronald L Rivest, Jeffrey I Schiller, Bruce Schneier, Vanessa Teague, Carmela Troncoso
neilk,
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

@mattblaze A very tricky question but does this disrecommendation only apply to major phone manufacturers?

What if, for instance, you operate an app that is primarily a social network for young people, and predators have been known to target it? Would some client-side scanning in the app be justifiable then?

In other words, if the scope is limited to activity in one app, versus surveillance over your whole life, isn’t the case for CSS greater?

neilk, to random
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Sigh, how do you extremely-senior-developer without being a constant killjoy

One of my colleagues has responded to their burnout by writing their own parser for a minilanguage they want to embed into our product

I think I know why they're doing this. They have big ideas, love perfection, and got burned out on a project where neither was possible. This is a kind of programmer self-medication. I want to indulge them

...but on the other hand, I don't want to maintain that

neilk, to random
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From surveying the tech news, I conclude that I am safe from a layoff. My company is neither publicly traded nor profitable

neilk, to random
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Moxie Marlinspike spent 2023 doing his New Years' resolutions. The twist: he was part of a pact among friends where they selected resolutions for each other, and demanded their completion.

https://moxie.org/stories/year-of-the-challenge/

neilk, to random
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Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI? – Locus Online https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

molly0xfff, to Wikipedia
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar

Since Bill Ackman and his followers have so many questions about how Wikipedia works now that his wife has been accused of plagiarizing from it, I figured I'd help him out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_jM6aoTDK0

neilk,
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

@molly0xfff Immediately after the video ended, YouTube gave me an ad sympathetically asking the viewer, “Has a woman ever made you feel inadequate?” 😂

neilk, to random
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

nerd friendship: after a friendly chat we send footnotes for the books we mentioned

neilk, to random
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We are visiting my parents in Montreal and I warned my spouse about one of their friends. Whenever you mention Vancouver, this friend expresses dismay at how visibly Chinese it is.

Sure enough, at a party this friend started with "and all the signs were in Chinese..."

My wife: "...and I love it!"

Friend: (shocked) "But it looks so Chinese!"

Wife: "Whenever I return to Vancouver, and hear people speaking Cantonese and Mandarin, it feels like home!"

Friend: (utterly stymied, changes topic)

neilk,
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

My wife feels, as a white woman, she has a responsibility to change the conversation, especially when it comes to talking with other white women, and I think her strategy is brilliant.

It would be justified to call out the friend as racist (or at least nativist). But my wife's strategy flips the whole conversation; the friend was looking for sympathy in her discomfort and instead heard a story of comfort.

neilk, to random
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

There's a viral post going around about AI results clogging search results - claiming that now it's impossible to find the right temperature to roast hazelnuts.

I couldn't replicate this, but the trends are worrying.

On DDG and on Google (not logged in):

  • the advice was universally the same: 350F for 12 minutes

  • the top sites were human-ish-created, and usually much older than 2022. But only human-ish. As everyone knows, recipe blog sites game results in ways short of AI.

clive, to random
@clive@saturation.social avatar

Man, the "dead internet" is arriving

@bhawthorne describes his recent experience searching for basic info online -- he looked for the temperature to roast hazelnuts, and got nothing but stochastic-parrot garbage: https://infosec.exchange/@bhawthorne/111601578642616056

He concludes:

"I think it may be time to download an archive copy of the 2022 Wikipedia before we lose all of our reference material. It was nice having all the world’s knowledge at my fingertips for a couple of decades, but that time seems to be past."

neilk,
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

@lispi314 @bhawthorne @rysiek @clive It's a very clever idea and DDG should implement this as an option. I can imagine countermeasures evolving but it's a start.

neilk, to random
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Anyone remember Substack? Not the publishing website, the highly prolific open source coder who was most active about a decade ago.

They became far less visible on the internet, to mostly focus on living off-grid with their partner. Social media and coding profiles reclaimed or deleted.

I am curious how it's going even as I imagine they've ascended to a plane of perfection. They've gone through having an solid-green Github profile to sparkling pure white and finally non-being.

neilk, to random
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

I know someone whose speech is remarkably like a malfunctioning AI.

He is a little bit clever, has a narcissistic streak, and has always spoken with detailed authority about things he didn’t understand. But now he has illness-related dementia so it’s a little more obvious.

He lectured us about how the FODMAP diet, prescribed by his doctor, was called that because you “mapped” whatever foods you wanted to your lifestyle. I don’t think he was intentionally lying.

neilk,
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

I don’t know if we all need another depressing bit of science to deflate human pride. But with the rise of LLMs one has to wonder exactly how much mental activity that we call cognition is just linguistic expression.

I know for sure that I can think without words (sorry, postmodern linguists) and maybe that’s the “real” thinking? Or even if it’s not privileged, maybe it’s essential to sense-making.

neilk,
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

Orwell noticed something similar - that bad writing, especially political writing, was full of mixed metaphors, and other indications that the author was not really visualizing what they were saying. So perhaps nonverbal thinking is essential to verbal expression. How could it be otherwise?

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

neilk, to random
@neilk@xoxo.zone avatar

Some people blame incompetent developers for cursed code.

But the most cursed code is caused by highly competent developers.

You just have to give them a task in a team that has the right kind of organizational dysfunctions - poor communication, power imbalances, diva designers or managers, unclear decisions.

Where the incompetent developer would just fail, the highly competent developer will deliver an eldritch monstrosity - that works. Just don't ask how it works.

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