@bzdev@fosstodon.org
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

bzdev

@bzdev@fosstodon.org

While my background is in physics, I joined fosstodon.org because of developing a Java class library and some applications and wanted to share those.

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

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

While babies in Gaza are starving to death or are getting incinerated or buried under piles of rubble, American university presidents are complaining that “tents are violence”

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@thomasfuchs About those students protesting in tents: when I was in college & graduate school (1960s to early 1970s) in anti-war student protests that "got out of hand", the students would occupy university buildings. If they had merely camped out on the lawn, an administration would have breathed a sigh of relieve. Why is the reaction so different now?

lauren, to twitter
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

I've been using social media since long before the term "social media" was coined (e.g. Usenet, the earliest ARPANET mailing lists, etc.) I've avoided Facebook all along, used quite a bit in its heyday (and maintain an account there that I keep locked now), and I used Google Plus quite heavily. I have accounts on Post (which is about to go dark, apparently), Bluesky (rarely look at it), Threads (hardly ever visit), etc.

Of course the scale of these can be vastly different. An ARPANET mailing list on the subject of wine tasting with a few hundred members was enough to trigger a Pentagon colonel coming out to sites to remind us all about appropriate usage of a Defense Department funded network.

That didn't change anything of course, and eventually DOD realized that such lists were pushing the evolution of email tools rapidly in very useful ways.

Did you know that the very first ARPANET mailing list Digest was for SF-LOVERS (science fiction discussion, obviously) and was created quickly as a "temporary" expedient because the direct (immediate) distribution list had gotten "too large" (probably still just hundreds) for available resources? The digest format created for that situation has remained largely unchanged since then and is still widely used on the Internet today.

I mention all this because in some ways is a throwback to those very early days (with Usenet being perhaps the closest parallel, given the Mastodon topological model). And Mastodon still manages to be quite "low pressure" in significant ways, even as your follower count goes up (which is the exact opposite of the situation on Twitter, even before Musk took over).

That is, when I check here in the morning, I don't usually feel the need to steel myself for a deluge of potential nastiness.

And that's a good thing, especially these days.

That's all. -L

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@lauren I had an ARPANET account as well. If I recall correctly, I once read a paper about USENET that mentioned that, because it was "store and forward," you could save a huge amount of bandwidth and could schedule
transfers so that they occurred when the network was lightly loaded. For example,
each post from the rest of the world would be transmitted once, when links had very
little traffic on them, to places like Austrailia, which had a very limited connection to
the rest of the word.

soller, to random
@soller@fosstodon.org avatar

Which Easter are Christians celebrating? The Bible has multiple versions and they are not consistent. https://ffrf.org/component/k2/item/18418-leave-no-stone-unturned

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@soller With regard to consistency, you should see what they left out of the Bible! The Basilideans believed that, as Jesus was being dragged off to be crucified, he pulled a magic trick so that the Romans thought Smon was Jesus, and crucified Simon instead, while Jesus stood there laughing at it all. Some of the Christian sects in 1st and 2nd centuries CE make our Christian Nationalists look almost sane in comparison.

https://listverse.com/2014/02/07/10-bizarre-early-christian-sects/

gabrielesvelto, to random
@gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org avatar

So I just learned what "The Stack" is today: an aggregation of GitHub repos for machine learning from which I can opt out.

But I won't.

I won't because they scraped some hot garbage I wrote in bash and Python that would make you faint. Bottom-of-the-barrel throw-away scripts full of coding crimes. Stuff like

find | grep | awk | xargs | ugh

...invoked via subprocess.run() then fed into more garbage.

I want "artificial intelligence" to learn this. It's going to be fantastic.

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@gabrielesvelto Instead of Gabriele's "find|grep|awk|..." I once did roughly lex | lex | lex |.... I had used LaTex to write a chapter of a final report. Our manager decided we should use troff (this was 1980s). So, a few days before it was due, I wrote a series of lex programs, each doing part of the conversion & fixing some previous errors until I was left with something good enough that the rest could be easily done by hand.
Very ugly coding but also very practical given its one-time use.

soller, to random
@soller@fosstodon.org avatar

The party of cringe fearmongers wonders why their state of the union rebuttal was fearmongering cringe

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@soller I thought the best part of the State of the Union was the "after party" where Joe Biden was caught on a hot mike saying he was going to have a "Come to Jesus" meeting with Bibi. I imagined Bibi being dragged into Sarah Brown's Save a Soul Mission in the musical "Guys and Dolls," along with dubious characters with names like "Big Jule," "Harry the Horse," and "Nicely Nicely.:"

JamesWNeal, to random
@JamesWNeal@mstdn.social avatar

Y'know, I get lonely too, but still I'm not part of the "I'll take a call from a stranger" demographic

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@JamesWNeal It was quite a few years ago - I had just gotten 3-way calling - but I got a telemarketing call, so I said "can you hold?" and forwarded him to "Dial a Prayer" (it would take a miracle to get anything from me).. He called me back anyway, asking about the religious recording. I explained what I had done. He said, "Why are you wasting my time?" I replied, "You called me; I didn't call you."

soller, to random
@soller@fosstodon.org avatar

Hey Republicans you can either say life begins at conception and therefore IVF (which usually involves the "conception" of multiple eggs and discarding of most) is immoral or you realize life does not begin at conception and stop pushing this country towards Handmaid's Tale. I'm getting fracking tired of the have your cake and eat it logical fallacies you continue to push past your unskeptical base.

https://newrepublic.com/post/179263/republicans-panic-mode-alabama-ivf-embryo-court-ruling

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@soller The Alabama mess is an example of the "Mikado effect"": in this cute Gilbert & Sullivan operetta there's a fake execution of a 2nd Trombone who is actually the heir to the throne. The Mikado: "I know you had only good intentions & wanted to do my bidding. But the law doesn't say anything about good intentions. It should but it doesn't. You know how slovenly these acts are drawn. But don't worry. I'll have the law changed ... after your execution."

Wyatt, to random
@Wyatt@fosstodon.org avatar

Do I really want more than 32GB of RAM? Yes.

Should I buy more than 32 GB of RAM? :thonking:

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@Wyatt 32 GB? To put this in perspective, some decades ago (sorry if I got a name wrong), I met Paul Baran, who invented packet switching. He told me about once writing a proposal that would require a computer with a whopping 32 kilobytes (this is not a typo) of memory, and that John von Neumann reviewed it and said that he didn't see why anyone would need more than 16. Paul responded by saying that if his programmers were as capable as Dr. von Neumann, he could get by with 16 too.

bzdev, to random
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

I've seen an original 3-button mouse - wheels turning potentiometers to track the position with the case made of wood. There was a reason for having 3 buttons: on the other side of the keyboard there was a pad with 5 piano-key-like levers. With 8 in total, by pressing multiple keys you could in effect type an 8-bit ASCII character, saving the time needed to move your hands to the keyboard just to type a couple of characters.

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@deshipu It was originally 7 bit + a parity bit (e.g., for teletypes where error detection was needed). There's an extension describe in https://www.ascii-code.com/ Eventually keyboards added a key that could set the 8th bit, and that in addition to the control key ended up being used for editing commands.

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@deshipu Your claim that "The editing commands are in the first 32 positions of ASCII" is not true in general: try using emacs.

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@deshipu The link I provided has an extended set of characters in addition to the original 7-bit ones It's not at the top of the page, though. BTW the first time I used emacs was in the 1970s and at that point, the keyboards were basically what you had on a teletype. Monitors that could display characters on a CRT were the latest innovation. If characters were not encoded in the same way as a teletype did, you wouldn't be able to hook it up to anything.

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@deshipu You can find a picture of the setup at https://history-computer.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/image-5.webp and there's a keypad with 5 levers + a 3-button mouse. The version I saw replaced the separate keyboard and monitor with a terminal containing both. They really sent 8 bits: 7 bit ASCII + a parity bit, and they used the parity bit as an eighth bit. I've seen people use this device while editing documents. How things evolved decades later is not relevant.

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

This is funny, but also actually a really bad sign for general enshittification of the web. The most alarming detail here is that Amazon is actually promoting the use of LLMs to create fake ad copy.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/lazy-use-of-ai-leads-to-amazon-products-called-i-cannot-fulfill-that-request/

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@emilymbender Amazon's botch is funny, but it could be worse without using LLMs. Some years ago, a right-wing, on-line "news" site had a policy of not allowing the word "gay" and would use a case-maintaining query-replace to change it to "homosexual". Then they "published" an article about a runner whose last name was "Gay", and the results were eye-rolling.

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@emilymbender Why is it worse? The error rate is probably a lot higher. See what it would do with the title of the Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers film, "The Gay Divorcee" or a line from the 1950s film Sabrina, where a cooking-school chef says, "And now, mesdames et messieurs, soon we will see how you have learned the lesson of the soufflé. The soufflé, it must be gay. Gay, uh, like two butterflies dancing the waltz in the summer breeze."

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@emilymbender But the errors are similar in that an inappropriate response was used: in once case it was a simple text replacement without considering meaning. In the LLM case, Amazon seems to have used an error message as the replacement text: either the server providing the LLM send the wrong HTTP status code or Amazon ignored the status code.

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@emilymbender Instead of a pinned post, me me suggest
https://restfulapi.net/http-status-codes/ --- the point was that (a) a LLM is not obviously doing worse than what would have been used before, possibly doing a lot better on the average, and (b) the Amazon example can be explained by a failure to use or provide appropriate HTTP status codes: a mundane programming error.

shawnhooper, to programming
@shawnhooper@fosstodon.org avatar

Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of the Pascal programming language, author of "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", and more, passed away on January 1.

Wirth's law, named after him, is an adage which states that software gets slower more rapidly than hardware gets faster.

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@shawnhooper I have a copy of Niklaus Wirth's book, "Programming in MODULA-2". One fun quote from it is the following gem:
After all, complicated tasks usually do inherently require complex algorithms, and this implies a myriad of details. And the details are the jungle in which the devil hides.

The only salvation lies in structure.

If only more people wrote like that! (Page 86 of my printed copy, but
Google suggests Page 89, possibly due to counting unnumbered pages)

bzdev, to random
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

Merry Christmas, everyone. Went for a run this morning before visiting some friends, curiously going right past Rossotti's, a watering hole/hamburger establishment noted for being the site of an early Internet test using packet radio from their parking lot.
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/40-years-on-the-Internet-transmits-every-aspect-9187484.php

zachleat, to random
@zachleat@zachleat.com avatar

📮 One YouTube Embed weighs almost 1.2 MB

https://www.zachleat.com/web/youtube-embeds/

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@zachleat The idea that one 'youtube embed weighs 1.2 MB' reminds me of something I heard years ago. A government project required developing software going into an airplane. "What does it weight?" "Huh?" "Everything in an airplane has to specify a weight." So, they listed the weight of a floppy disk. This caused a major complaint: "You are way out of line on the price per pound ratio." Finally they explained it as "tooling costs."

dangoodin, to random

I so, so, so don't want to drive any new car that can do this:

A federal appeals court refused to bring back a class action lawsuit alleging four auto manufacturers had violated Washington state’s privacy laws by using vehicles’ on-board infotainment systems to record and intercept customers’ private text messages and mobile phone call logs.

The court ruled that the practice does not meet the threshold for an illegal privacy violation under state law, handing a big win to automakers Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors, which are defendants in five related class action suits focused on the issue.

The plaintiffs had appealed a prior judge’s dismissal. But the appeals court ruled Tuesday that the interception and recording of mobile phone activity did not meet the Washington Privacy Act’s standard that a plaintiff must prove that “his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation” has been threatened.

A suit filed against Honda in 2021, argu[ed] that beginning in at least 2014 infotainment systems in the company’s vehicles began downloading and storing a copy of all text messages on smartphones when they were connected to the system.

An Annapolis, Maryland-based company, Berla Corporation, provides the technology to some car manufacturers but does not offer it to the general public, the lawsuit said. Once messages are downloaded, Berla’s software makes it impossible for vehicle owners to access their communications and call logs but does provide law enforcement with access, the lawsuit said.

Many car manufacturers are selling car owners’ data to advertisers as a revenue boosting tactic, according to earlier reporting by Recorded Future News. Automakers are exponentially increasing the number of sensors they place in their cars every year with little regulation of the practice.

https://therecord.media/class-action-lawsuit-cars-text-messages-privacy

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@dangoodin How does it work? Do they trick people into giving permissions to read their text messages, etc., or are they exploiting a bug, in which case computer-crime laws should be applicable.

mcnees, to random
@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar

The first message between two computers on ARPANET was sent in 1969. The “LO” of “LOGIN” was successfully transmitted and then one of the systems crashed.

Charles Kline’s IMP Log: “Talked to SRI host to host.”

Image: UCLA Kleinrock Center for Internet Studies

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@mcnees Some years ago, I was at an informal event held at Rossotti's Alpine Inn in Portola Valley celebrating the first TCP/IP transmission over two networks,, which was done from a van parked at Rossotti's, a local "watering hole". The van provided a packet-radio system.

stux, to random
@stux@mstdn.social avatar

Super logical!

"When bankrobbers hold up a bank with hostages the police simply bombs the bank to rubble.."

I wonder in what reality this sounds plausibel

:nkoFacepalm2:

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@stux As an historical note, the statement you criticized is a variation on a statement by a U.S. major (?) made in the 1960s during the Vietnam War - more or less, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." There were several renderings of it - some use "town" instead of "village". A journalist apparently quoted an unnamed major. I'll leave how accurate the quote is to one's imagination.

soller, to random
@soller@fosstodon.org avatar

Mike Johnson, Republican Speaker of the House, is a young earth creationist. The Republican Party in general supports this absolutely thoughtless set of beliefs and the kinds of policies they spawn, policies that choose feelings over evidence where they conflict, often dressed in fundamentalist religious rhetoric. Atheists such as myself, alongside many other groups, are in danger in a religious conservative America, and I cannot in good conscience vote for anyone who labels themselves as such.

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@soller I once had some religious nut walk into a lab and say, "Beware the four horsemen." I told her, " I do a lot of climbing so I'll just scamper up real high and avoid the flood." She thought I was nice - the usual response was probably "Get the (#$& out of here." Then she said, "Computers are evil." I pointed to one and said, "Especially this one - it has been a real #$$#*$& all morning (hardware problems)."

bzdev,
@bzdev@fosstodon.org avatar

@soller The first microprocessor commercially available for general use was the Intel 4004. Why 4004 and not some other number? Well, sometime around 1650, Bishop James Ussher "calculated" how old the world is by using events and genealogy in the Bible, together with other ancient texts, and came up with October 22, 4004 B.C. for the date it was created. So rumor has it that wise guys at Intel picked 4004 because their device was "the start of the world".

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