tomw

tomw, 9 months ago to random

I tried eating fruit but the onboarding was confusing. I have to choose from apple, banana, orange? How is a normal user supposed to navigate this complexity

tomw, 10 months ago to random

This whole submarine thing is a preview of exactly how "space tourism" is going to go

tomw, 7 months ago to random

The state of identity verification in the UK:

1. "You need a utility bill with your full name and address".
2. Of course these are all online now, and even if you try to get paper ones for this very purpose the companies keep pushing you to online instead.
3. Go download a PDF of the bill.
4. "We cannot accept online bills, it must have been posted to your address"
5. Print out the PDF
6. Take a photo of it
7. Email it to them
8. Accepted

tomw, 9 months ago to random

"I'm only on Mastodon now" is the "I have gone vegan" of social media

tomw, 1 year ago to random

Here's a blue sky invite:

Go outside

tomw, 1 year ago to random

Mastodon is an incredibly rare opportunity for open-source, non-profit, advertising-free, decentralised software to be a real contender in a category – and, if it continues to grow, even to pull many other social networks into being part of (or interoperable with) the fediverse.

It's strange to me that this isn't mentioned more in the endless opinions about features, onboarding, UX, "vibes" etc.

tomw, 1 year ago to random

Mastodon will never achieve mainstream adoption unless it adds a "poke" button

tomw, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to random

We really haven't reckoned with how broken Google is.

The only alternatives anyone ever suggests are all reskins of Bing – also useless.

Edit: Do not reply suggesting Duckduckgo, yes it has a few bells and whistles but its web search results are still sourced from Bing.

tomw, 1 year ago to random

People worry a lot about losing knowledge — about "burned-down libraries".

Comparatively few people seem to worry about what happens if you take a billion books full of auto-generated, often-untrue junk text and add them all to the library.

In theory, nothing is lost. In reality, everything is lost, because nothing useful can now be found.

tomw, 1 month ago to random

Mastodon has two types of people: people who really want replies to their posts and people who extremely do not.

(I am in the first category, reply away)

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Do not trust AI to tell you which mushrooms to pick.

By extension, you can no longer trust Amazon results for that, or Google results either.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Every so often I see a post about how LLMs fail logic puzzles.

And... yes? Of course they do. The only way it could solve it is if it has seen the puzzle before or a substantially similar one. (But that might cause it to give the answer to the similar one, not the correct answer.)

Why is this even tested so often or considered surprising? It is, in essence, an autocomplete. It does not understand logic. It has no concept of a correct answer. It gives the most likely completion.

tomw, 1 year ago to random

Seeing all these predictions of the AI future, I'm reminded of when every object in the world was going to be tracked on a blockchain. How's that working out?

tomw, 9 months ago to php

Is Composer just completely stuffed in PHP8 or am I doing something wrong?

(Composer's website seems to list 7.2 as the most recent supported version.)

#php

tomw, 20 days ago to random

Pop quiz: can you spot the problem in this PHP snippet? I just got tripped up by it and it was very Not Fun. (This is rewritten to be a minimal example.)

if ( $coolness > 10 ) {
define('COOL_MODE', true);
}

if ( COOL_MODE == true) {
echo 'You are cool.';
}

tomw, 10 months ago to random

My web development tip:

Try to use your fancy JS web form while you're on a train. See if it still works. Most don't.

tomw, 7 months ago to wordpress

It's funny how people who talk about web dev believe that a very particular set of "modern", JS-heavy, build-heavy practices are the only thing worth discussing, while #wordpress continues to quietly take over everything.

https://wptavern.com/why-nasa-chose-wordpress-for-revamping-its-flagship-website

tomw, 6 months ago to random

"Focusing on doomsday scenarios in artificial intelligence is a distraction that plays down immediate risks such as the large-scale generation of misinformation, according to a senior industry figure attending this week’s AI safety summit."

Yeah - it is frustrating that there's so much focus on silly sci-fi threats when right now, LLMs are being used to fill the web with spam.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/29/ai-doomsday-warnings-a-distraction-from-the-danger-it-already-poses-warns-expert

tomw, 1 month ago to random

The trouble with "enshittification", apart from the misuse of the word everywhere, is that platforms don't start off "good/useful" and then "enshittify". They start off as skinner boxes that give out rewards and end up as skinner boxes that have stopped giving out rewards. It is very silly to believe that the skinner box in its initial state is benevolent.

tomw, 6 months ago to random

When I was a child – when many of us were children – there were veterans of the First World War still alive, and you could even go talk to them, if you wanted. I never really considered that this would soon stop being the case.

tomw, 4 months ago to random

My #Swedish is still not great but it improved a lot once I realised you can just throw in English words into sentences occasionally and keep going, and (in this specific cultural context) it doesn't make you sound stupid, just kind of... urbane maybe? The average Swedish young person talks like this anyway.

(Although they can still tell that I am English from the very first syllable.)

tomw, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago) to random

Do you write "T-shirt" or "t-shirt"?

It isn't a proper noun, I know, but to me it makes more sense to have the capital T because... the T looks like the shape of the shirt, and that's clearly why it is named that way. Lowercase t is the wrong shape.

tomw, 7 months ago to random

Email attachments are a silly hack but it's now just considered routine and even reliable. Base64? We're seriously still transforming multi-megabyte binaries to alphanumeric encoding for transmission? multipart/alternative; boundary=[random garbage]? Just an absolute joke of a hack.

tomw, 6 months ago to random

Imagine you accidentally come into possession of a pineapple.

You don't currently have any way to slice, cook or otherwise prepare the pineapple. Also, you don't like eating pineapple anyway.

What do you do with the pineapple?

tomw, 1 year ago to random

You know you're having A Day when you start reading the whole manual for wget