@xgranade@wandering.shop
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

xgranade

@xgranade@wandering.shop

Sometimes I write intimate eschatologies or words about technology and math. Sometimes I make things by burning them with light or squeezing them through a small, hot tube. Sometimes I push water with a stick while sitting in a tiny boat.

If you're looking for my business account, go check out https://social.dual-space.solutions/@cgranade!

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

xgranade, to random
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

Ligatures, or as @crazy4pi314 says, BDSM for typography.

gavi, to random

that apple ad truly scares the shit out of me

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

@gavi It is so incredibly dismal.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I wish the TTC would buy a second bus so I wouldn't have to stand around so long waiting for the one

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

@mcc I still remember when I got stuck at Pearson because the police confiscated the one bus...

xgranade, to random
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

TODO: add line to Xcompose to quickly type out "Apologies if this isn't useful."

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

New version of Fritter today: https://pypi.org/project/fritter/0.0.9/

Containing this fun new API: https://fritter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/fritter.drivers.datetimes.html#guessLocalZone

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

@glyph Projecting WinRT into Python, goodness.

It looks like the official PyPI winrt is more or less abandonware, with no updates in three years, otherwise I'd suggest it as a tool to generate a package with a projection for just that one function.

As a clarification, though, are you trying to avoid a huge build dependency, a huge runtime dependency, or both?

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

@glyph (If build-time dependencies aren't a problem, using the WinRT crate together with PyO3 would allow for exposing just that one function through to Python with a very tiny extension module. That's a hell of a lot of build cruft, though.)

xgranade, (edited )
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

@glyph WinRT is, like so many things at Microsoft, good on paper, well-designed, then undermined by management at release and ultimately abandoned in favor of the next promotion.

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

@glyph Holy shit. You're not wrong, but daaaaammmnnn.

tef, to random
@tef@mastodon.social avatar

[youth pastor voice] remember, it's not about a nex-you, or a nex-me

it's about a torture nex-us

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

@tef [youth pastor voice] You know who else was tortured for us?

xgranade, to random
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

Gah. This is the bane of my life today.

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

I signed up for Gmail back in 2004, back when both it and the Internet were very very different. Now I use a different e-mail provider, use my Google account in very different ways, and have precisely zero ability to reconcile that with decisions I made more than half my life ago.

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

Gmail's great, but it no longer fits my needs and how I use e-mail in 2024. But I can't ever fully retire that address because it's permanently associated with my Google account, including my phone, video streaming, sites that only support "Continue with Google" SSO, and so much more.

Sigh. 'Tis the state of the web twenty years on, I suppose.

xgranade, to random
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

In retrospect, it was the "universal" part of "Turing machine" that was where it all went dreadfully wrong.

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

(This is a sardonic and not serious take. Please don't Church–Turing Thesis-splain me.)

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

The more serious version of this is that the downside of having a device that can do whatever it's told — not just the thing it was designed for — is that you then have all the power dynamics involved in deciding who gets to tell that device what to do.

xgranade, to random
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

Separately from everything else, it's really sad to see the publisher that I was so happy to work with for my textbook to go all-in on "prompt engineering" and other rank nonsense. It really feels awful to have my work appear alongside that.

xgranade, to random
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

It is weirdly funny to see the backlash against "AI" bleed over into ML applications. Like this AI stuff is just so vile that anything even slightly adjacent is quite reasonably suspect, even when considering machine learning algorithms that have strong theoretical foundations and that can be trained and applied ethically.

Kind of one of those trust thermocline examples. If companies think "AI" is OK, then of course there's a desire for closed form algs that can be understood and verified.

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

I don't know much about motorcycle maintenance, but I do know that I can pretty reasonably inspect mine and that it's pretty unlikely to send my location data to an ad broker. I don't know how to say the same about a drive-by-wire car.

I can see the clockwork in a typewriter, and be pretty assured that none of the arms will send my writing to OpenAI for ingestion.

When I play a CD or a vinyl or a cassette tape from a device made before the Internet*, I know DRM won't retro-yeet my music.

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

*Yes, I know many CD players aren't technically pre-Internet. Still.

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

It's not even that simplicity is good — have you seen how an internal combustion engine or a typewriter works? They're complex as fuck! But there is a real attraction to complexity that you can see, understand the boundaries of, and can form an at least rough mental model of.

It's related to but distinct from Luddism as a labor theory, in that it's a kind of agency found in machinery that you can see.

Of course we see the same kind of yearning in algorithms as well.

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

It seems like editing one's answers on Stack Overflow is not an effective protest vote, but perhaps upvoting https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430135/where-is-the-opt-out-option-so-my-answers-dont-get-used-by-openai could be one signal that would be legible to the site's owners

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

@glyph @aeva

> terminology continues to be annoying…

If that's not a universal and timeless truth, I don't know what is.

(Especially given how much any useful terminology almost immediately ceases to be useful due to con artists finding it profitable to co-opt such utility.)

xgranade, to mtg
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

OTJ is actually a fun set. Plot and crime work really well together to make some quite interesting turns.

xgranade, to random
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

If you need me, I'll be mad about the iPad ad for the rest of the day (and probably much longer).

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

Side thought: the most inept thing about the iPad is not understanding at all the artistic mindset that many of their most ardent and dedicated customers bring to they way they use Apple products.

Their whole gimmick is being a good platform for artists to create! They used to use skeuomorphism to indicate that, but now the simulacra has supplanted the real with nary a whiff of irony.

xgranade,
@xgranade@wandering.shop avatar

You could teach a whole undergrad class on unpacking the antecedents of that fucking ad.

(@ireneista's feed today could easily be the first few lectures in such.)

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • anitta
  • thenastyranch
  • magazineikmin
  • tacticalgear
  • InstantRegret
  • ngwrru68w68
  • Durango
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • mdbf
  • rosin
  • PowerRangers
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • normalnudes
  • vwfavf
  • hgfsjryuu7
  • cisconetworking
  • osvaldo12
  • everett
  • ethstaker
  • GTA5RPClips
  • khanakhh
  • tester
  • modclub
  • cubers
  • Leos
  • provamag3
  • All magazines
    •