@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

glyph

@glyph@mastodon.social

he/him

You probably heard about me because I am the founder of the Twisted python networking engine open source project. But I’m also the author and maintainer of several other smaller projects, a writer and public speaker about software and the things software affects (i.e.: everything), and a productivity nerd due to my ADHD. I also post a lot about politics; I’d personally prefer to be apolitical but unfortunately the global rising tide of revanchist fascism is kind of dangerous to ignore.

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foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Terrible idea: an author writes a book, but instead of releasing it, they train an LLM on it, and release the model.

So readers can ask the LLM to generate text based on it, but can never know the original text.

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@foone I seem to remember a performance-art bit in the floppy disk era which was a single-user experience (a hypertext book, IIRC) that deleted itself after viewing, and was never put online. This reminded me of it but I cannot remember what it was called. Fitting, perhaps.

wxcafe, to random
@wxcafe@social.wxcafe.net avatar

lmao this makes me want to die

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@wxcafe @Phyxis cc @simon icymi, this is the most practical prompt injection attack yet

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@donw @johnlogic @wxcafe @cstross it’s important to remember that in addition to making it easier to survive, any large corporation where certain departments may be doing good work may still have terminally MBA-brained dipshits attempting to squeeze cost centers like HR to death with junk like this. The quality of the hurdles to get in to a place are not necessarily perfectly correlated with the actual work going on in that place.

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

Had the dissonant experience today where I saw a newsletter claiming that it had “content in this issue” from … me … and when I looked to see what that meant, it meant that they linked to my blog. They’re not pirating my writing or anything, and more exposure via links is fine so… good, I guess? I don’t want to complain but it seems like such an odd and misleading way to phrase it

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I have a soft spot for Libertarians even though I shouldn't and they don't deserve it. When I was a kid I had a weird neighbor who was always giving me Libertarian books... I wish I still had some of them they were WILD. He was a thorn in the side of the local, school board as well insisting that if they had an event at the school that involved politics Libertarians had to be included.

And in defense of the guy, he was about as likable and earnest as a Libertarian could be.

1/

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@richpuchalsky @futurebird @jonquass @ehproque @moira yes sure whatever, but the voting itself is not a piece of performance art that expresses your abstract endorsement of “the state” as a concept. It’s a mechanism you use to exercise control over the state. It’s not direct, perfect control to align it with your values, but it is the control we have got. By not voting, you are sacrificing collective praxis for personal aesthetic preference.

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

honestly not sure how I feel about this trend discovery, exist.io

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

Sci-fi story prompt: someone invents a drug that allows its consumer to remain cognizant of all the stuff that they doom-scroll through but without any impact to their executive function or mood. Like they still feel the moral impetus to act but they don’t feel any of the paralysis or despair. Not “limitless” style infinite executive function or anything, just regular neurotypical function that isn’t impaired by constant oppressive knowledge of the omnicrisis. How does this change the world?

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

Absolutely blew through this game in a few hours with the kiddo, and while it is disappointingly short, it is absolutely a worthwhile experience. If you’ve ever recited that now classic quote about wanting shorter games with worse graphics, buy it immediately: https://kotaku.com/duck-detective-secret-salami-how-long-1851497669

zzzeek, to random
@zzzeek@hachyderm.io avatar

I'm drinking this pretty decent cotes du rhone for the past few hours and let me just say it's made my one off opinions and social media takes of things totally awesome

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@zzzeek cheers, here’s to you not regretting them tomorrow

zzzeek, to random
@zzzeek@hachyderm.io avatar

write a fairly inflammatory toot then see how many of them blocked you. but I've been thinking about this a lot, for literally decades, and I can't avoid this conclusion.

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@zzzeek @faassen I keep falling into this trap myself. Yelling at pudding-brained anarchists who are ostentatiously posting about not voting, while I know that they're this vanishingly small population who have such a fundamental misunderstanding of the political system that it's a waste of time to try to convince them of anything. But it is precisely because they are such a perfect crystallization of a particular type of misunderstanding that they are such an attractive nuisance

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

Does anyone happen to know if it is possible to get a projector for an open space at ? I have some ideas that involve discussions of code where it would be useful if a participant could share their screen with a larger group.

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@matt I did other things during the open spaces and did not attempt to cut against the grain like this :-)

gvwilson, to python
@gvwilson@mastodon.social avatar

Using Python 3.11 or higher, I want to create an output file and add a line describing it to a log file as an atomic operation: either the output file is created and the log entry is added, or neither happens. fcntl.flock() is only advisory - will something else give me stronger guarantees, preferably on all three major OSes? -lock -operation

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@gvwilson uh, generally speaking this is not going to be possible, flock or not. You can’t make this atomic. You could write a write-ahead-log journaling system that would allow replay of these actions in a sort of bespoke two-phase commit but you would need to fully control the file I/O to the “log file” as well, and it would probably need to be a non-textual format, something like an SQLite database. Are you talking about writing to a system log or something else?

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@gvwilson (I am fascinated by this use-case and also super curious what the higher level requirement is)

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@bhearsum @gvwilson the file system is within its rights to replay the move or the log line, though; making the creation atomic is easy, queuing up the log-file write in such a way that it will un-happen in the event of a power loss is not

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@bhearsum @gvwilson testing this sort of stuff is also a complete nightmare, because 99.99% of the time or thereabouts a modern OS & SSD will make a technically “wrong” solution look like it works fine

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@vaurora @gvwilson RIP WinFS

hynek, to random
@hynek@mastodon.social avatar

No Apple Watch, I’m not exercising. I’m trying to get to terminal 2F.

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@hynek more of a “yes, and” situation if you ask me

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

Poking my head in on Twitter to do my monthly check for new crypto scams and block and report a bunch of bots, and … folks, it is dire. If Black Twitter is still willing to tolerate this level of dysfunction order to avoid interacting with the problematic elements of the Mastodon experience we have GOT to find a way to do better over here

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

The notifications page is just a bunch of loading spinners stacked on top of each other. 95% of the content is ads for weed products or financial or AI tech scams. There’s an upsell interstitial every 90 seconds or so if you’re actively interacting with the site. This one is probably specific to my ad-targeting profile but there are special, super-ads (just UI elements, not tweets) desperately begging me to get an API key and make apps that use it. It is unusable

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@cmdr_nova I confess I don’t really get it either, but people tell me they experience more racism here than on twitter and I believe them. I suspect it’s a confluence of differing norms, tech, and network effects. White people are more racist than Black people, so if everyone is white—even if most of them are well-meaning—it might feel bad. much as I don’t think the average mastodonian is more racist than the average twitterer, I can’t deny that not all of us here are particularly well-meaning

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

Everything is securities fraud but some other things are also copyright infringement https://mastodon.social/@verge/112503541018323185

AlSweigart, to random
@AlSweigart@mastodon.social avatar

I'm filling out the attendee survey and they asked what the highlight of the conference was for me.

Finding out 1) what funiculars are 2) riding a funicular and 3) finding out that "Funiculi, Funicula" opera that Pavarotti sang is about funiculars are in the top 10.

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@AlSweigart do it

rmondello, to random
@rmondello@hachyderm.io avatar

Would it be a little too extra to bring a tiny roll of electrical tape in my standard luggage to block annoying LEDs in a hotel room? Has anyone done this?

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@jack @rmondello @hotdogsladies gaffer’s tape is incredibly generally useful and not obscure at all. I understand the impulse you are trying to avoid but I assure you this one is worth it :-)

Sauce_, to random
@Sauce_@duck.haus avatar

Today I was at work, looking at a stack of identical Chromebooks that all needed different repairs. How do I tell them apart? Most days that means a scribbled mess on a sticky note. But what if there was a better way? A system. Yes, a system of markers to let me know what was broken, when it needed to be done, and what classroom it came from. Why, a marking system like that would almost be… magic.

@hotdogsladies @siracusa

glyph,
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

@Sauce_ @hotdogsladies @siracusa I understood that reference

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