@datarama@hachyderm.io
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

datarama

@datarama@hachyderm.io

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datarama, to random
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

I make fonts as a hobby. I've been using this one as my terminal daily driver for a while, and it's pretty much come to be just "what the terminal looks like" for me now.

Should I put it up in public somewhere?

(It will, of course, be scraped so someone can use it to make an AI font generator and extinguish a little bit more joy from life.)

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

The current version supports:

  • the entire Basic Latin block
  • the Latin Supplement block
  • a subset of the Greek/Coptic block (only Greek letters with no accents)
  • the Russian and Ukrainian subset of the Cyrillic block
  • a large pile of arrows, letterlike symbols and mathematical operators
  • mathematical fraktur

There's a regular, bold and (true) italic - but no bold italic.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“VCs are selling shares of hot AI companies like Anthropic and xAI to small investors in a wild SPV market | TechCrunch”

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/01/vcs-are-selling-shares-of-hot-ai-companies-like-anthropic-and-xai-to-small-investors-in-a-wild-spv-market/

Looks a bit like we're heading into the "cash out" or "quick! find the greater fool" portion of this bubble

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@falcennial @baldur Here, the bubble is bursting or deflating. On the orange site, AGI is coming and the end of work (and/or human life) is nigh. In RL, I see some people thinking the next industrial revolution is underway, and others thinking it's a bunch of marginally-useful dancing bearware.

There are knowledgeable people in all those camps.

I've resigned myself to not even trying to predict anything with confidence.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@phi1997 @falcennial @baldur Hacker News. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Firefox is adding on-device AI alt text for images.

Generally assistive technology is of course a good thing, however:

  • How accurate is it?
  • How accurate can it even be if it doesn’t know the intentions of the poster? (The exact same image can be illustrative to diametrically opposite opinions.)
  • Where does the training data come from?
  • Will it discourage authors from adding alt text?
  • Is there telemetry that could be used to invade privacy? What if that data gets sold or stolen?
datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs I can't answer the three first questions, but:

  • I don't think it's going to change authors' attitudes towards alt-text. Firefox has a small userbase, and the sort of people who already write alt-text won't stop just because Firefox has added an AI for it - for exactly the three first reasons.
  • They claim it's entirely on-device, and at least the same claim for their translator is true. (Fire up Wireshark while it's translating; it doesn't phone home at all.)
freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

There must be capitalists or economists who can see that we've made the switch from low-hanging-fruit consumption to self-consumption. Cory Doctorow obviously sees it, but he's neither. Tyler Cowen or Nassim Taleb maybe? Has either written about this phenomenon? Cowen has The Great Stagnation, which is Part 1. Taleb has Incerto, but I've only read part of book 1. Does he write about the shift to self-consumption?

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@freakazoid Ed Zitron calls exactly this "the rot economy".

He owns a PR company, so at least by one definition he's a capitalist. I don't know what his educational background is, though.

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Things coming “next year” for the last 20 years or so:

  • self-driving cars
  • artificial general intelligence
  • Linux on the desktop
datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs @drahardja I mean, right now Microsoft seems to be working hard on the third one.

inthehands, to random
@inthehands@hachyderm.io avatar

Less about tools that boost productivity, more about tools that reduce total workload.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@inthehands I don't think tools can reduce total workload. That is not what tools can do, so the people selling tools are necessarily selling increased productivity. It only functionally leads to reduced workload when a tool has become so effective at increasing productivity that the human has been automated away almost entirely. (Eg. a washing machine).

What reduces total workload when total automation isn't possible or desirable isn't tools - it's social processes.

eniko, (edited ) to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

kitsune tails is officially feature complete

i am taking time off until monday

note: feature complete doesn't mean done >_>

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@eniko Enjoy your time off!

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

I heard many folks at PyCon — including a few very prominent ones who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty! — claiming that “black text on a white background” is uniformly and obviously the superior accessibility choice for conference presentations, for various reasons. This is, at the very least, debatable, and I think it would not be too spicy of a take to say it is straightforwardly incorrect. Some evidence follows: 🧵

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@hynek @glyph @chrisjrn My coworkers look at me like I'm some kind of weirdo for doing something like this with code on screen.

I use bold and italic for most normal syntax highlighting. A darker color for comments, an accent colour for strings, and bright red for syntax errors.

I don't know if this makes me more "productive", but reading code is much more comfortable.

hrefna, to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

"I miss the old internet, when the cruel people were contained to one or two websites I could ignore"

What internet would that be, exactly?

It certainly wasn't any internet I've been on, and I've been around since the 1990s.

This "nostalgia for the 'heyday of the internet'" almost always seems to be rooted in these rose-colored glasses about how things were.

I won't argue about whether things are better or worse overall, but this idea that the internet was somehow nicer is weird to me.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna If I'm being brutally honest with myself here, I can't ignore the coincidence that "the heyday of the internet" happened to coincide with me being 18, and the awful enshittified internet happens to coincide with me being increasingly old, tired and bitter.

I think things are worse ... but I also remember how awful the 2000 Slashdot commentariat (and a large chunk of Usenet) was.

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

It's amazing how easy it is to unsell me on a game.

Marketing: City-building! With politics! A unique world!

Me: Yeah? YEAH?

Marketing: Brutal!

Me: OK, not interested. Bye.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@Craigp I think the main counterexample I can think of is Spiritfarer.

It's a platformer - but it's a very easy one where you cannot die (it wouldn't do for the ferrymaster of the dead to die, would it?). It's also a resource management sim - but you have all the time you want. There is no way to lose the game, and you cannot truly get stuck. You care for the deceased spirits until they're ready to move on, and the only gameplay challenges are explicitly optional.

ahfrom, to random
@ahfrom@fedi.ahfrom.synology.me avatar

To achieve the same brain/body weight ratio as my cat, I would have to weigh, like, 200 kg.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@ahfrom Useless trivia of the day: Tiny weaving spiders (the ones we call "lykkeedderkop" in Danish) have enormous brains for their size - their brains are star-shaped because a little bit of brain pokes out into the legs.

This is likely because there's a minimum absolute brain size to be able to spin a good web, and they have exactly that.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Remember: They're not AI PCs, they're Surveillance PCs https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/112475611939997391

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@mcc I hate it so much. I don't even use Windows, but I know that the things they'll be building using this will be deployed against me nonetheless.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@mcc Of course it won't be kept local. Same with the "we'll listen in on your phone calls to check for scammers!" features Google is hawking.

"We're running out of high quality language data!" ... "It's a total coincidence that we've made this decision right now, but we've decided to listen in on every phone call / watch every software interaction anybody ever makes ever again".

They're after more training data.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@mcc Short-term: I am personally lucky that I live in a country that has some fairly restrictive regulations on workplace surveillance. I'm sure that this will spawn even worse spyware, but there are upper limits to how much of it I can legally be forced to use.

Longer-term: The end-goal of all the AI training is of course to build the Mass Layoff Machine, and that's going to fuck people here over too, if they can just get enough data from people in countries without a history of strong unions.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@mcc Remember when people were saying "you're not the customer, you're the product"?

You're not even that. You're the raw material for the product.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@garrett @mcc And again: The end-goal of all the AI training is Mass Layoff as a Service. Even those of us who opt-out (perhaps by not using their product at all) will be screwed by that, inasmuch as they succeed.

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

my advice to anyone who wants to make a hobby programming language would be to make a lisp, except to simultaneously not worry at all about being anything like the big lisps in terms of design or syntax

so basically what i'm saying is use s-expressions

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@joshg @eniko I vote for guillemets! Who wouldn't love:

«define «factorial n»
«if «= n 0»
1
«factorial «- n 1»»»»

Bonus if you use a font that kerns groups of guillemets tightly together!

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@abucci @joshg @eniko We want opening and closing to be syntactically evident.

Spanish to the rescue!

¿defun fibonacci ¿n?
¿if ¿< n 3?
1
¿+ ¿fibonacci ¿- n 1?? ¿fibonacci ¿- n 2?????

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@abucci @joshg @eniko @abucci @joshg @eniko You've heard of lisping. Are you ready for shouting?

¡defun fibonacci ¡n!
¡if ¡< n 3!
1
¡+ ¡fibonacci ¡- n 1!! ¡fibonacci ¡- n 2!!!!!

hrefna, to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

"But you will be using AI in…"

Possibly! I don't dispute that it may happen! I've seen a lot of thoughts in that direction for other technologies that never panned out, but I've also seen it go the other way.

Finding a use for the generative AI tools in the development process won't surprise me. Especially if the cost comes down.

What I balk at are replacement narratives or the idea that somehow it will invalidate human engineers.

Also: you should unionize to fight them trying.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@Jackiemauro @hrefna I'm a union member and a software developer. Lots of developers (and engineers in pretty much every engineering discipline) in my country are.

Unions are a defense against all sorts of labour abuse and every worker should be in one, but if full-on replacement actually becomes possible, I don't get why people think the union can protect them. The union can threaten to withhold labour, but what good is that if that labour has just been rendered valueless?

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

Imagine what an anti-abortion red state or a fascist Trump administration (or some other future evil administration) would do with features like #Microsoft's "recording everything you do on your PC" and the #Google and Microsoft plans to listen in on your private phone calls.

I don't give a damn if these firms claim the data is stored on the devices. Devices can be confiscated, stolen, or courts can order pretty much anything done with that data.

These firms are selling us all down the river with this stuff.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@lauren Also, does anybody really believe that they're not going to extract whatever they deem valuable from data and use for more AI training?

"We're running out of high-quality language data" -> "It's a total coincidence, but from now on we're going to be listening in on every phone call and watching every desktop software interaction anybody ever makes ever again".

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

Ohhhhhhhhh. He stole Scarlett's voice because he saw a movie where she voiced a hot AI assistant.

Nearly all this nonsense is like that. That's the level of genius we're dealing with. The whole thing is driven by an absurd obsession with fiction.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@Craigp Or, as I've said elsewhere - they did. They may be fucked-up robot cultists who want to make the AI that dumps humanity.

drahardja, to random
@drahardja@sfba.social avatar

I’ve been so tired and forced into constant emergency mode for so long that I’ve forgotten how to make.

This is bad. I need to start making again. Gotta set some time aside every day to MAKE SOMETHING.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@drahardja My problem is: I'm mostly good at making things with computers.

And everything we do with computers from this point is either kept secret or stolen by AI bros and used to build the Unemployment Machine.

Both options makes it feel kinda pointless.

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