drahardja

drahardja, 1 year ago to random

So one of the things that I feel is missing from #RemoteWork vs #RTO is the ability to shoot the wind and just hang out with people for a few minutes. Maybe ask them how their week is going, etc. I think this ability is vital to creating social networks in the workplace and indispensable for keeping up with important news and gossip, which is where a surprising lot of high value information lies.

People aren’t going to use Slack to shoot the shit, because everything is written down and ultimately legally discoverable.

Has anyone found a good way to provide this space for remote workers? I thought of just hanging around Slack Huddles that are specifically made for just casual chatter, like kids hanging around Discord voice lounges. Any experience with this, good or bad?

drahardja, 10 months ago to random

Where do I sign up?

Tech needs unions yesterday. Don’t listen to the insufferable one-percenter bunch of (almost always under-40, white, male) “unions are going to hamper my negotiations” population of well-paid, senior engineers. You need unions. NOW. It’s already past time.

#solidarity #unionStrong #engineeringUnions #techUnions https://mstdn.social/@annaecook/110725029125301647

drahardja, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to fediverse

#Mastodon #Fediverse server admins: Have you considered adding a Terms of Use clause that prohibits the use of posts for training #GenerativeAI #AI #LLM without explicit user consent? I feel like abuse of user-generated content (text and other media included) for training is already upon us, and I wonder if we shouldn’t set ourselves up for legal recourse at some point in the future if we ever need to.

Social media is one of the most ready pools of materials for training models. This tends to continue the trend of generating profits for private corporations by harvesting “public” goods without compensation, especially from artists who work hard to create quality media. I hope the Fediverse can exclude itself from this phenomenon somehow.

This seems especially relevant for #Pixelfed.

drahardja, 10 months ago to cars

This is not an improvement. You want your users to find and launch your app to change climate control settings? That is beyond ridiculous.

#Car makers need to stop putting everything behind touchscreens; operating a hand-eye-coordination video game is not what drivers should be doing while they drive.

Buttons, switches, and knobs can be operated by touch alone. They are superior to touchscreens for many commonly-used controls. Bonus: when designed well, they impart a sense of quality and luxury to your car’s driving experience that can’t be replicated by a touchscreen.

#cars #carDesign #humanInterface #uxDesign

“Porsche unveils revamped CarPlay experience with climate controls and more”

https://9to5mac.com/2023/07/10/porsche-carplay-update-climate-more/

drahardja, 11 months ago to random

It would be interesting if any stores would put up signs that says “NO WHITE CUSTOMERS, PLEASE”, or “WE DO NOT SERVE STRAIGHT PEOPLE”, because that’s what this #SCOTUS ruling allows.

Conservatives rely on the fact that they are somehow indispensable; that wealthy, cis-het, native-born, able-bodied, white people will always control the vast majority of wealth and opportunity in this nation; so they can pass judgments like these that are plainly absurd if they were put on the receiving end. But somehow, these ideas are fine as long as “the right people” are the ones getting abused.

drahardja, 10 months ago to mechanicalkeyboards

I love this. #mechanicalKeyboard #retro #retrocomputing

8bitdo Retro Mechanical Keyboard
https://www.8bitdo.com/retro-mechanical-keyboard/

drahardja, 1 month ago to stackoverflow

The Stack Overflow rugpull is another data point in my head which discourages me from contributing any content to a hoard owned by a corporation.

I’m hoping that ActivityPub will one day enable SO-style knowledge bases in which the individual nuggets of content are owned by independent servers and cannot be purchased by anyone.

#stackOverflow #rugpull #fediverse

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/stack-overflow-bans-users-en-masse-for-rebelling-against-openai-partnership-users-banned-for-deleting-answers-to-prevent-them-being-used-to-train-chatgpt

drahardja, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago) to ai

“Prompt engineering” is such a bizarre line of work. You’re trying to convince a machine trained on a huge pile of (hopefully) human-generated text to produce some useful output by guessing what sequence of human-like words you must put in to make it likely that the model will produce coherent, human-like output that is good enough to pass downstream.

You really have no idea how your prompt caused the model to produce its output (yes, you understand its process, but not the actual factors that contribute to its decisions). If the output happens to be good, you still have no idea how far you can push your input before the model returns bad output.

Prompt engineers talk to the model like a human, because that’s the only mental model they have for predicting how it will respond to their inputs. It’s a very poor metaphor for programming, but there is nothing better to reach for.

#ai #llm #promptEngineering

drahardja, 1 year ago to random

Don’t forget to ask about how people with glasses are supposed to use them 🙂

#AppleVisionPro #VisionPro #wwdc #wwdc23

drahardja, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

3D Touch was one of those times when (very expensive) hardware was put into production, and software was forced to produce something—anything—to showcase it.

The 3D Touch strain gauge was impressive. It measured grams-force so accurately that you could use it as a scale. Problem was, humans aren’t that good at applying precise amounts of force, especially when operating a bar of soap single-handed.

In fact, having force sensitivity turned out to be detrimental to the UX because people would accidentally press too hard and trigger something unintended. It made operating a touch screen device harder for many people, especially those with less-than-excellent fine motor control.

#apple #iphone #ios

https://www.threads.net/@ridsdalek/post/C1S9KwsPpcV/

drahardja, 4 months ago to technology

#Veritasium published an AWESOME video about the very unlikely invention of the blue LED. It’s an incredible story and you really should view it. It also contains the best visualization of semiconductors I’ve ever seen.

I witnessed the drama of the blue LED live in the 1990s. I watched tech magazines show dim blue prototypes for years until Nichia suddenly burst on the scenes with a bright blue LED and it changed the world. I watched as they created their first white LEDs ($1 apiece) which I gawked at in person. I was at Honeywell when they finally made white LEDs in surface-mount format (still $1 apiece). We used 50 of them as the backlight in the aviation GPS navigator I worked on (at $50 the backlight was one of the most expensive components in the whole system). They were so hot (100 mW each for a total of 5 W) we used them as heaters when the unit was below operating temperatures.

When I read about how Nakamura got screwed by Nichia, I was livid.

#technology #history

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M

drahardja, 3 months ago to Typography

The longer you look at it, the worse it gets.

#typography

drahardja, 8 months ago to random

Hmm, I got a bottle of Cetirizine (Zyrtec generic) from Target, and the bottle in the (sealed) box is not sealed, and it contains not one, but two collections of the wrong capsules.

What’s the proper way to report this? I think this warrants a recall.

drahardja, 8 months ago to random

Meh, why should taxpayers pay for EV station repairs? If equipment upkeep isn’t part of your business plan, you don’t have a business plan.

It’s pretty obvious that EA and other commercial EV charger operators aren’t really competing with each other; otherwise they’d be tripping over themselves making their stations available (when have you seen half the pumps broken at a gas station?). They’re either maliciously compliant (EA, aka the VW punishment project), or just coasting by, soaking up government grant money as they come. I think giving them more money isn’t going to do much.

I think congress should drag VW’s ass back in front of TV cameras and ask them why their EA offering is so crappy, and if they’re trying to weasel out of their Dieselgate penance by doing the minimum amount of work, and whether they’d like an(other) investigation into their business practices. That would probably do more than this.

“Feds open up $100 million funding for EV charger reliability grants”

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/09/feds-open-up-100-million-funding-for-ev-charger-reliability-grants/

drahardja, 1 month ago to apple

Man, not again. #Apple sells seriously under-specced devices to maintain their “starting from…” price and then upselling people to actually-usable models. Remember those 16 GB flash iPhones they kept selling (2010–2016! I checked!), even though that meant people didn’t even have enough space to update their OS? 8 GB RAM is that, once more, but for runtime memory.

I think the 256 GB flash, 8 GB RAM minimum-spec Mac is a low-resource trap for anyone who wants to use a computer for more than light web browsing (and I mean light—web pages are resource hogs these days) or a messaging client. They are certainly not suitable for anyone wanting to locally store or edit media.

For 2024, I think 512 GB flash and 16 GB RAM should be minimum for MacBook Air, while 1 TB and 32 GB RAM should be minimum for MacBook Pro.

“Apple argues in favor of selling Macs with only 8GB of RAM”

https://9to5mac.com/2024/04/12/apple-8gb-ram-mac/

drahardja, 1 month ago to TeslaMotors

Reminder to not work yourself to death for the sake of your employer.

THEY ARE NOT LOYAL TO YOU.

“Tesla Rewards Dedicated Worker Who Showered at Factory and Slept In His Car By Firing Him”

#ev #cars #tesla #employment #workers

https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-worker-showered-factory-slept-laid-off

drahardja, 10 months ago to random

Hey my #BahasaIndonesia friends: is “kembali” the best translation for the “return” key? I feel like it looks…kinda weird, but I don’t know what other word I would use.

drahardja, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to macos

Protip: rsync -avzE is almost 10x faster than Finder for copying a large number of small of files in a directory over local network.

And it’s resumable.

Performance on my 2.5 Gbps network:

• rsync: 230 Mbps sustained
• Finder copy: 25 Mbps? Hard to tell because it fluctuates a lot.

Edit: Added the -E option to make sure to copy xattrs.

#macos #commandLine

drahardja, 11 months ago to iOS

Here it is: A comprehensive look at NSItemProvider: what it does, how it works, and how to use it properly. I want this to be a one-stop-shop reference for anyone using this class in their projects.

NSItemProvider is a key class in iOS and Mac Catalyst, used in everything from Drag and Drop, to Pasteboard, share sheet, and beyond. Understanding how this class works will help you make better apps and gain insight into what the system does for you.

Please read the post, and send me feedback. Share it with your iOS developer friends. Let me know what you think!

https://www.humancode.us/2023/07/08/all-about-nsitemprovider.html

#iOS #iOSDev #macOS #MacCatalyst #apple #Xcode #Swift #ObjectiveC #UIKit #AppKit #programming

drahardja, 4 months ago to random

If you use a Philips #CPAP machine, you might want to return it right now. 561 deaths have been linked to a failure where pieces of foam break off and are sent down the breathing mask where they can get inhaled.

#sleepApnea #productRecall #productSafety

“FDA says 561 deaths tied to recalled Philips sleep apnea machines”

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-sleep-apnea-philips-recall-cpap/

drahardja, 11 months ago to macos

Protip for #macOS users on the #Fediverse: You can press ⌘I to inspect an image file in Finder, and type #altText into the Comments field there. That way, you can copy and reuse your alt text for the next time you post a commonly-used image.

Works great for memes!

Pro protip: This string is stored as an xattr, and you can read it on the command line using this invocation:

xattr -px ‘com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment’ file.jpg | xxd -r -p | plutil -p -

Yes, it’s a string stored as a plist.

Maybe @MonaApp or @ivory could provide an option to automatically extract this xattr and populate the Alt Text field?

drahardja, 13 days ago to random

A Brit just explained to me that a lot of homeownership in England is based on a leasehold arrangement, where you own your house, but RENT the land from a landowner. When the lease expires, the land AND THE HOUSE IT CONTAINS reverts to the landowner, even if you’ve paid for it. While leases can be extended basically indefinitely, it is possible for it to lapse and for landowners to seize the house that YOU BUILT for zero money.

Can someone confirm this? If true, that is…landlording and “generational passive income” taken to a WHOLE new level.

#england #uk #landowner #homeowner

drahardja, 4 months ago to random

I’m gonna guess this photo was taken in some tech company’s break room.

drahardja, 5 months ago to llm

Plagiarism for me, but not for thee

#llm #ai #openAI #chatGPT

“OpenAI suspends ByteDance’s account after it used GPT to train its own AI model”

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/15/24003542/openai-suspends-bytedances-account-after-it-used-gpt-to-train-its-own-ai-model

drahardja, 30 days ago to ai

This is anecdotal, but I now personally know two employees of #AI-related companies whose valuations have imploded within the past month, and they are now looking to bail. One company lost 73% of their (publicly traded) value in a month. The other one is a startup whose founder (according to my friend) has “finally snapped”, and the company is now in freefall.

It feels like the bubble is bursting right now.