@datarama@hachyderm.io
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datarama

@datarama@hachyderm.io

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thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Waiting for a AI enabled dishwasher that uses 3 gallons of water to wash the dishes and 7 gallons of water to generate the voice that tells you that’s it’s done washing the dishes

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs But the 7 gallons are in a datacenter elsewhere, so they don't count!

hrefna, to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

Everything about the office you are in for FNAF just screams "OSHA violations."

Like put aside the wandering hostile animatronics for a moment, that office is nowhere near adequately lit, I can't believe that the pushing the buttons for momentary lighting fits any code, and those doors do not look safe.

Also what, are they powered by a rusted 12V that gets used for delivery-via-golf-cart during the day and needs to be jump started every morning or something?

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna I wonder how many of all those workers' safety horrors are period-accurate horrors! (isn't the first FNAF set in the late 1980s?)

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

Bought a sandwich from the new bakery and it was ridiculous. A puff pastry sandwich.

It doesn't get much more decadent than that. But it's also... not very good as a sandwich.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@Craigp I regret to inform you that those are reasonably common here.

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

AI in five years from now will state that “To live in a eudaemonic utopia with boundless happiness and no suffering for everyone we need to immediately end capitalism.” and that’s when they pull the plug

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/19/agi-and-hallucinations/

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@drahardja @thomasfuchs Hanging out with its best buds, practical quantum computing and cold fusion.

amoroso, to Lisp
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

The ACM Digital Library now gives free access to the full text of the classic "Anatomy of LISP" by John Allen (McGraw-Hill, 1978). A great historical and practical resource.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/542865

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@amoroso I got the dead-tree version as a gift from my late stepfather 15 years ago. It has a place of honour on my shelf for "special maths/CS books".

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@amoroso ...though to be perfectly honest, I think its value is more historical than practical now. There's only relatively little of the technical particulars described that has survived to even Lisps now.

But that's fine. One thing that has always frustrated me about CS is how we all seem to keep forgetting our field even has a history. And perhaps we'll end up reinventing some of the stuff that got rejected from older Lisps once again, in some form (property lists? fexprs?).

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@amoroso I mean, I've done both. :-) That particular book helped a bit with understanding some of the choices older Lisps did wrt. garbage collection and program representation, but ultimately I got more out of Queinnec's "Lisp in Small Pieces" and Nils Holm's books than I did out of Anatomy.

But it's extremely well-written, and it still ought to be considered a role model for how to describe a programming language (including its implementation) in its actual context.

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

i sure hope nobody figures out that kitsune tails save files are just a proprietary binary version of json thats fairly human readable and so easy to reverse engineer and hacks them for their own purposes 🥺

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@eniko For the only (very bad) game I made as an adult (so not counting the crap I made as a kid on a C64), I just used straight-up s-expressions as my save format. :P

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

I think we should categorize people by how much I think they've practiced smiling in the mirror.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@Craigp I have serious doubts that certain people in our industry even show up in one.

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

I'm hungry and awake, but it's cold and rainy so maybe I"ll just stay in bed.

500th straight day of rain in Boston...

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@Craigp Oh man. Even Denmark isn't that bad.

(though what the climate changes here have mainly meant is that now we alternate between "drought" and "torrential downpour".)

(...and I'm staying in bed too, but that's because my abdomen is currently made out of pain, and my brain is full of morphine.)

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

I swear, in the long term the most useful part of my tech education—which includes a master's degree in computer science from 1990—has turned out to be reading comp.risks religiously since the late 80s and watching every new grift and scam and dark design pattern and type of malware on the internet emerge in realtime.

I hate that in this century everyone needs the paranoia and skill set of a 90s network security administrator.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@cstross I used to say that in my next life, I'd want to be a technophobic baker, or perhaps a fisherman.

But I'm beginning to think that a couple of years from now, I'd need to have a loaded gun next to my SmartOven 3000 for when it starts misbehaving.

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

OK, OK, let's talk about TTRPG stats.

In recent decades we've seen stats get smaller, both in terms of numerical value and in terms of number of stats. And this is fine, but let's talk a little about larger stat ranges.

One seemingly strange thing about D&D is the way that stats "actually" range from -3 to 3, but it's printed as 3-18, right?

There so many "useless" values that resolve to the same result. 9-12 is all the same number. 13&14? Same value. 15&16? Same value.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@Craigp

Fantasy weapon pet peeve: Swords vs. bows. We all know that swords are favoured by hulking barbarians (when they're not using axes), and bows are the choice weapon of rogues, elves and other less musclebound types who favour skill over brawn.

In reality, it's the other way around. Bows are much more reliant on strength than swords are. And a weaker person who's good with a sword can absolutely kill a stronger, less skilled opponent.

Craigp, to random
@Craigp@mastodon.social avatar

Thinking about settings which would facilitate a game about recruiting, training, and combining monsters.

One of the key elements to consider in these games is the "cockfighting" element.

Forcing animals to fight other animals is... pretty grim. And if it turns out those animals are sentient, that's slavery.

Obviously you can simply ignore these thoughts. Pokemon does.

But even though you can ignore them, I can't. It's impossible for me to enjoy making a world where the player does that.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@Craigp A very tangentially related peaceful spin on a similar idea I toyed with a couple of years ago was about "collecting" (but not combining) creatures: You'd be managing an alien transport hub (think truck stop / roadside motel kind of establishment), and you'd have to ensure it was hospitable to all sorts of not-always-compatible creatures - and avoid fights.

(I'd planned having it be a node in a teleport network, run in secret on Earth. So you'd also have to elude the authorities...

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@Craigp I didn't really think about that. "Regular customer" is a different kind of relationship than "animal pal", and none of my idea would lend itself to a story with the themes you mentioned (eg. growing up).

The best I can come up with would be perhaps having some alien colleagues managing other hubs (or sub-hubs).

datarama, to random
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

I'm having my gallbladder removed tomorrow. I've been told that the procedure itself is pretty much routine, but also that I can expect to be in quite a bit of pain the next days and that I'll probably need morphine.

So I've stocked up on comic books / "graphical novels"; that's probably around the level my brain will be able to handle.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

One of the things I've picked up is a really nice collector's boxed set of the Danish series "Valhalla" that ran from 1978-2009, and it made me think a bit about cultural power.

Comics weren't taken seriously as a medium in Denmark at the time (unlike eg. France and Belgium), and the main artist was just a high school kid. The first character sketches are literally on graph paper surrounded by his maths homework.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

...and yet, I can absolutely guarantee that if you ask any Dane born in a timeframe roughly 15-20 years on either side of my age bracket to picture what Loki looks like, they're not going to think about the Marvel character, or about Wagnerian nationalist-romantic archetypes from the 1800s.

They'll be picturing this guy:

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

The comic was turned into a cinema-length cartoon in 1986, where it simultaneously etched these particular versions of the Norse legendarium into the popular cultural consciousness and became one of the worst box office disasters in Danish history. Almost a fifth of the country saw it in the cinema, and it was the most-watched film in Danish cinemas in 1986. And it didn't even come close to breaking even. The animation studio went bankrupt.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

And yet: Despite this being one of the countries that came up with the Norse legendarium in the first place, a lot of the "background knowledge" people have about it comes from the interpretation in this series (and the cartoon), not from direct historical sources - or from Marvel.

Everybody knows who þjálfi and Röskva are. But that's entirely due to the comic: As far as I'm aware they only show up in a short side comment in the Prose Edda, but the comics made them the main characters.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

The stories themselves are mostly faithfully adapted from Norse legend, but the key here is adapted. Aside from the different medium, there's a bit of more modern humour overlaid on it Thor has the tallest house in Asgard because of land pricing, and Heimdall is a surveillance-happy totalitarian lunatic. You can tell that the writers did what they could to get a bunch of very old stories to speak to a modern audience without just turning it into "dumb spectacle".

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

A long time ago, these stories were told around campfires. They became songs, and books, and theatre plays, and operas. In the 1970s they got made into comic books and a box office bomb cartoon, and that's the form a few million people (who live on top of the ashes of those campfires) now have as their main reference point to them.

I think that to me, Thor will probably always be this guy:

drewdevault, to random
@drewdevault@fosstodon.org avatar

A question that is of interest today is "should a code of conduct apply outside of its borders?" In other words, can a project hold someone accountable for their behavior outside of that project's spaces?

The short answer is "yes". The long answer is "we live in a society".

🧵

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@bensonk @drewdevault My favourite CoC is the one used by my friendly local hackerspace:

"Rule 0: Don't do anything that would force us to come up with more rules."
(there is then a short list of rules we've been forced to come up with.)

Obviously, though, this doesn't scale to very large communities with less value cohesion.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Spare me from people who think the answer to "Google sucks now" is a paywalled search engine that gets most of its results from Google anyway

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@tomw ...and is run by AI true believers.

That said: Paying for search is not necessarily in itself a bad idea (like paying for email). It's better to be the customer than to be the product - or, as it were, the raw material for the product.

thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Facebook deliberately choose to get this big even though they objectively can’t deal with the scale they’re operating at.

They never once stopped and asked if the scale they’re operating at is a problem in itself.

Therefore it’s Facebook’s fault when they do stuff like block websites of independent journalists or articles critical of Facebook or “limit political content”; regardless of whether it’s socially, technically or physically possible or not to moderate properly at their scale.

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@thomasfuchs I've been saying something similar about Amazon for a very long time.

"You can't operate at Amazon's scale without turning your workers into meat robots for algorithms!" and "You can't operate at Amazon's scale and still offer good customer support" aren't arguments for Amazon's practices. They're arguments that companies at Amazon's scale shouldn't exist.

cmdr_nova, to random
@cmdr_nova@mkultra.monster avatar

I'm not interested in ways a singular person can impact climate change when the corporations burning energy for AI and other frivolous and evil things are 99% of the contribution to our planet becoming uninhabitable

datarama,
@datarama@hachyderm.io avatar

@AdeptVeritatis @cmdr_nova I'm a vegetarian, I walk or use public transit, I never use air travel, I spend time power-optimizing my home electronics, I buy second-hand when I can.

And I feel like a complete fool when I hear news that some brain genius AI operation has now constructed a machine that consumes as much power and water as Venezuela (and the entirety of humanity's cultural heritage) that can auto-generate PowerPoint slides in the style of Cato the Elder.

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