@UP8@mastodon.social
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

UP8

@UP8@mastodon.social

Software developer at a major research university. I live on a farm near Ithaca, NY.

Experienced in e-commerce, e-publishing, search, A.I. and other data-rich systems. Current side projects involve modelling financial messages in OWL, a smart RSS reader with a transformer-based classifier and workflow engine, and a system of three-sided cards.

searchable

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ben, to random
@ben@werd.social avatar

The perfect programming language. https://github.com/TodePond/DreamBerd

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@ben I like how DreamBerd addresses confusions common in popular programming languages such as the fact that a “const” reference in Javascript (or “final” in Java) cannot be swapped out for another object but might not be “constant” in that you can still modify the object (say add or remove members to a list); DreamBerd lets you be explicit about these different forms of mutability/immutability.

codinghorror, to random

“The un-oranged images were caused by one of the most basic features of digital cameras, their ability to infer what color is in an image based on the lighting conditions in which it is taken. Like the people looking up at it, the software never expected the sky to be bathed in orange.” https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/09/camera-phone-wildfire-sky/616279/

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@codinghorror i took a picture of some badly faded prints the other day that didn't look faded in the photo so I faded them in post otherwise I'd have to tell people that "they looked faded in person but unfortunately they don't to you"

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

As I said with Meta/Oculus/Holo: I will stan any VR product that can be used by the majority of women for 2 hrs without causing nausea.

So far, most VR/AR headsets can't do that. It's expensive research to get that solved. And it doesn't make sense for a company to bet the farm if they can't do it.

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@grumpygamer @mekkaokereke look at the problem of 3-d movies; about 20% of people don’t normally perceive stereo, maybe 8% or so of those are made uncomfortable. You can’t project movies only in 3-d because of that so you are stuck with the problematic model of showing two versions of the same movie in two theaters

davew, to random
@davew@mastodon.social avatar

Smoky skies in upstate NY.

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@davew it looks like that around Ithaca and I can smell the forest fires

rbreich, to random
@rbreich@masto.ai avatar

This is how our government has been corrupted:

  1. Donors give huge sums to elect politicians to office
  2. Elected officials rewrite rules in the donors' favor
  3. Donors make huge profit
  4. Repeat

We must get big money out of politics. It’s the root of all evil in Washington.

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@rbreich if humans end up like the dinosaurs I think Mancur Olson’s theories about why small groups can organize more effectively than large groups might be the best explanation.

grumpygamer, to random
@grumpygamer@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Big companies don't care about you. They don't care about your privacy or social issues or authoritarianism or the planet. They care about making money. Sometimes making money intersects with the others and they can say "We care".

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@grumpygamer there is a sense of “inclusivity” which is exclusive of taking a stand on charged issues; take a stand and you piss off half of your customers; with the way people are inflamed and mobilized today the “reasonable” company keeps it’s head down and lets someone else take the bullet

leaverou, to random
@leaverou@front-end.social avatar

One of the things that puzzle me the most about our industry is why devs keep choosing React over Vue.

It’s bloated, produces poor UX, makes bigger demands on tooling, respects web standards less, and has significantly poorer DX…

Is it just ecosystem? But then how did it get there?
Is it because it came out of Facebook?
Is it because some of the frameworks around it actually have good DX?
Something else?

I …don’t get it. 🤷🏽‍♀️

See also, @slightlyoff’s controversial post: https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@leaverou @slightlyoff i wanted to like Vue as its rendering model handles many common cases but I like React’s accommodation of quirkier rendering scenarios, outputting to three.js, etc. I think svelte dominates Vue also. Anyway most of those SPAs could be made better (from the user standpoint) with 1/3 the cost if we made them as pure SSR apps the way we did in 1999 but that seems to be a lost art

codinghorror, to random

It is 2023 and I can absolutely confirm that printers still suck balls. Tray 2 is overfilled.. seriously? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@codinghorror i’ve had many a good laser but prefer inkjet printers for photographs, art reproductions and such

christianselig, to random
@christianselig@mastodon.social avatar

“Dang I wish I could get my app on the cover of The Verge, Daring Fireball, MacRumors, 9to5Mac”

-monkey paw curls-

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@christianselig something I did got talked about in Wired magazine but they didn't know who did it and said whoever did it was a royal dumbass; I got something in Nintendo Power too

khalidabuhakmeh, to random
@khalidabuhakmeh@mastodon.social avatar

Are there any Flash websites still on the web?

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@khalidabuhakmeh Adobe renamed the flash editor to “Adobe Animate” and created several HTML-based players that support most of the features Flash did. The industry as a whole switched to video for animation and Adobe Animate also exports video.

Hardly anybody publishes it because Flash has been forcibly removed from most desktop machines and never worked on iOS anyway.

christianselig, to random
@christianselig@mastodon.social avatar

Got off my call with Reddit just now about the API. Bad news unless I come up with 20 million dollars (not joking). Appreciate boosts. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@christianselig they can’t have usable third-party Reddit clients out there because that would get in the way of dark patterns such as blending ads into the content as well as “badly” organizing threads and injecting lots of irrelevant content to confuse you into clicking on an ad

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

“Haha lol banks use 60 year old programming languages!”

Yes, young whippersnapper, that’s because they need things to be reliable and not change all the time, the code probably has to run for another 60 years.

“Modern” devs could learn a lot from not trying chase every trendy new framework and every shiny new programming language.

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@thomasfuchs i was reading about programming techniques used in old CICS mainframe programming and saw they used metaprogramming techniques to write 360 assembly language for serializing and deserializing data to send to the 3270 terminal or a database, facing problems not too different from web programmer today

khalidabuhakmeh, to random
@khalidabuhakmeh@mastodon.social avatar

Hot take: We don't need live-action remakes of animation classics. If anything, we need more animation.

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@khalidabuhakmeh i liked the live action Gin Tama

timbray, to random
@timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

Mark Pilgrim famously remarked that the difference between a corporate & personal blog is that you can say “motherfucker” on your personal blog.

I wonder if the human-vs-LLM language battleground will be similar. I wonder if there’ll be an incentive to write in an idiosyncratic highly-individual hard-edged never-ever-bland style just so as to sound like a human.

You don’t think there’ll be a battleground? Silly you.

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@timbray it’s a temporary condition that LLMs speak in that hypnotically agreeable register; once fine-tuning is widely available you will see models trained to speak like George Carlin

UP8, to random
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

The fastest maze-solving competition on Earth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMQbHMgK2rw

u0421793, to random
@u0421793@functional.cafe avatar

Now that I’ve been redundant for a week or two, can’t remember, I know I won’t ever go back to work in “tech” as they stupidly call it

There’s literally no way that a web site needs a programming language – there is no programming required, it’s not a program, it is content, the web site has the content, you get the content, that’s it – no bespoke programming should ever be getting in the way

No wonder the people that work in “tech” are so emotionally fucked up – look at what a horrendously distorted world view they’re forced to live in

UP8,
@UP8@mastodon.social avatar

@u0421793 javascript-HTML is the worst way to build applications except for all the others; I looked at a large number of “cross-platform” GUI toolkits, the only one I liked at all was JavaFX, no wonder why we have so many tiny Electron apps that are 30MB

osma, to random

deleted_by_author

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    UP8,
    @UP8@mastodon.social avatar

    @osma i used to wonder what the left wing version of the Rush Limbaugh show is, now I now

    UP8, to random
    @UP8@mastodon.social avatar

    Lately I've been building applications based on HTMX, which lets you write web applications the way you did in 1999, avoiding the complexity of React, Vue and all that, but add substantial helpings of Javascript 'magic' by putting special attributes on your HTML tags

    https://htmx.org/

    UP8,
    @UP8@mastodon.social avatar

    @khalidabuhakmeh aiohttp in Python that looks a lot like Sinatra or JAX-RS, Jinja2 templates, a macro can either be rendered on its own or in the page so i can redraw just a <select> or draw the same form in a modal dialog or it’s own page

    codinghorror, to random

    Ultimate Life Hack

    UP8,
    @UP8@mastodon.social avatar

    @codinghorror every cat I own (except for the barn cat) is trained to do some special behavior to get fed. This is always something the animal will do spontaneously but occasionally that is reinforced. The barn cat (large, black, like a witch’s familiar) thinks a really great interaction always ends in a bite, however, which is not good to reinforce.

    AbandonedAmerica, to random
    @AbandonedAmerica@mastodon.social avatar

    A lot of people have been really critical of HBO's rebranding as "Max", but I have to hand it to them about one thing: nothing makes you more excited about the renaming of a service than being automatically logged out of all your devices and having to spend over half an hour of your one and only life bouncing around broken phone apps, websites, and TV apps trying to reset your password to get in again

    UP8,
    @UP8@mastodon.social avatar

    @AbandonedAmerica nothing says “bull in a china shop” like spending 30+ years building a brand known for quality and then trading it all for something generic which any rando could file a trademark claim against

    GossiTheDog, to random
    @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

    deleted_by_author

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    UP8,
    @UP8@mastodon.social avatar

    @GossiTheDog … I got accused of being a crackpot because I said I was interested in A.I. in 2008

    mathowie, to random
    @mathowie@xoxo.zone avatar

    I’ve been buying these salad kits at supermarkets lately and they’re delicious but I can tell since the majority of the salad is bits of cabbage and carrots that a brilliant person figured out how to turn large scale agriculture food waste into a product

    UP8,
    @UP8@mastodon.social avatar

    @mathowie reprocessing “waste” into saleable products is the #1 strategy for profits in agriculture

    mattblaze, to random
    @mattblaze@federate.social avatar

    If nothing else, Mastodon seems to be pretty convincing evidence that an edit button can work. I'm not seeing many cases of it being abused the way many worried it would be.

    Bad actors are the problem, not the tools. Get rid of the bad faith people, and we can have nice things.

    UP8,
    @UP8@mastodon.social avatar

    @mattblaze me too, or sometimes somebody points out a mistake and i think it’s better to fix it you can rather than accept the correction in a reply that may or may not get read

    tcely, to random
    @tcely@fosstodon.org avatar

    Simulating elections shows the really odd behaviors RCV/IRV has for more than two candidates very clearly.

    Adding more candidates results in much more strange behavior.

    This contest between five candidates only has three possible winners with plurality, and only STAR Voting shows the expected outcomes.


    @theequalvote

    Plurality, RCV/IRV, Score, and SRV/STAR simulating five candidate elections. Heat maps were added to show when and by how much each system deviated from the ideal outcome. Plurality deviates very intensely in the center and prevents two of the candidates from ever winning. RCV/IRV deviates in much of the same area but less intensely. The green candidate that was without a way to win in plurality now has a tiny triangle area in the red and yellow territories. Score prevents the red candidate from winning by center expansion of both the blue and green territories. SRV/STAR deviates only slightly by preferring the red candidate too much when it's between red and green territories.

    UP8,
    @UP8@mastodon.social avatar

    @tcely doesn’t Arrow’s theorem fundamentally problematize any voting with > 2 choices?

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