@janxdevil@sfba.social
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

janxdevil

@janxdevil@sfba.social

"Hey now. We devils can do a lot of damage in a classroom armed with nothing but the clothing God gave us. Sometimes all it takes is a carefully chosen pronoun or a noteworthy historical date and next thing you know it's blood and guts everywhere."

#nobridge

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JamesGleick, to random
@JamesGleick@zirk.us avatar

If the bribe you’re soliciting is $1,000 in a paper bag, the FBI will arrest you. If it’s $1 billion in dark money, does that make it legal?

https://wapo.st/3UBf4Fy

janxdevil,
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

@JamesGleick well you know how it is with a closely related thing: if you borrow $100K from the bank and you can’t pay it back, then you have a big problem, but if you borrow $100B from the bank and you can’t pay it back, then the bank has a big problem.

(And if you borrow $100T from all the banks in the world, and everyone knows you never had any intention of paying it back, then the whole world has a problem.)

ricmac, to fediverse
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Fascinating look at how is being used by the SFO art museum to help encourage revisiting its cultural objects. Still early days, but you can see the potential here -> “The reason I am telling you all of this is that SFO Museum has written it's own limited ActivityPub server implementation and we have, in fact, created an ActivityPub account – a social media, account – for every object in our collection.” https://orthis.social/@thisisaaronland/112339899293624779

janxdevil,
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

@ricmac I am reminded of the time I was out for a stroll in Tufello, a neighborhood near our apartment in Rome, and I came across a set of tiles in the sidewalk that contained a URL, so I typed it into my mobile web browser and found the cultural heritage museum for the neighborhood. And I’m thinking now about the several million interesting little bits of Rome that are in the collections of a vast array of museums and museum adjacent institutions for which it would be cool to have an ActivityPub account I could follow. I feel a burning need right now for an official Pasquino account, for example.

b0rk, to random
@b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

i uh spend a lot of time thinking about whether various surprising software design choices are

a) intrinsic to the problem domain ("it turns out it DOES make sense!”)
b) made sense historically ("this made sense in 1992, but it didn't age well”)
c) just a typo/mistake (the "Referer" header)
d) related to budget/time constraints (“well, prototyping with shell scripts is fast!”)
e) cultural/organizational (“well, Google is the main funder for this project, and…”)
f) something else

janxdevil,
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

@b0rk Consider the reasons that IPv4 (and IPv6 too) have no functional security layer (authenticated headers, encrypted payloads, etc.) on the public Internet. IPsec works only on virtual private networks, despite the clear public interest in the welfare to be provided by a public Internet with a working security layer. There are discoverable reasons for it, and none of them are in your “mostly legitimate” categories.

Also, mobility. Same basic reasons.

janxdevil, to mastodon
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

Here is a thing I hope instance administrators will consider doing in response to the new app from : pay very close attention to account migration.

Don’t enable account migration to Threads on any instance at which accounts are unable to migrate from Threads. I think a quid pro quo on this point is absolutely necessary.

Don’t let Threads take accounts unless they let people come back if they don’t want to be there anymore.

arstechnica, to random
@arstechnica@mastodon.social avatar

Apple apologizes for ad that crushes the sum total of human artistic endeavor

An ad that isn’t about generative AI but somehow manages to be about AI anyway.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/apple-apologizes-for-ad-that-crushes-the-sum-total-of-human-artistic-endeavor/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

janxdevil,
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

@Cassandra Which is totally on brand for the company that ran a giant marketing campaign touting their commitment to personal information privacy by showing picture of people aiming their cameras at the viewer in a way that obscured their own faces.

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

Seriously heard someone saying they don't listen to many black artists, because they aren't really into rap. Bitch please, feel free to share songs from Black artists from any genre. Here is one of my favorites, if you like this song please check out her other work:

https://youtu.be/KovrJ8HXI1Q?si=HOYIG7YMuAUTsJz6

janxdevil,
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

@RickiTarr https://youtu.be/Yl7spTDEVLU?si=a3tL992JQwKIu34K

janxdevil, to animals
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

Look at this ridiculous goob.

janxdevil, to random
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

Denying people healthcare is “lawful use of force” not violence.

janxdevil, to random
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

One of the things that happens to you after you watch enough of your family and loved ones descend into dementia is you start to lose your patience for the popular view that the body is a vehicle for the brain and the brain is a physical container for an immaterial mind. That is just quite obviously Not How Anything Works.

And you start looking at problems like pollution and the climate calamity and biodiversity collapse and thinking about how there are definitely certain people who should never ever again feel safe appearing in public without a phalanx of bodyguards.

janxdevil, to random
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

Meanwhile the President of Uganda (where anti-LGBTQ laws are already unbelievably harsh) has just sent a bill that would apply the death penalty for homosexuality back to parliament because he wants it toughened further to allow for the construction of “rehabilitation” camps.

Uganda is a bit further along the road to Christian Nationalism than Missouri but not by all that much. When we tell you what bullshit to expect next if they get away with their current round of bullshit, it’s because we’ve already seen what came next after they got away with this.

janxdevil, to random
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

Interesting to note where in Texas the crimes are clustered: dense urban areas where LGBT people are more visible.

From: @TexasObserver
https://texasobserver.social/@TexasObserver/110616673271904581

janxdevil, to SanFrancisco
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

So dear locals. My favorite automobile mechanic retired and closed shop a couple years ago, and now I need to find another. Used to be there were independent customer experience rating services that you could rely on to help you choose where to go for things like that, but the last several times I’ve tried to use one, the experience was not good. I think they somehow got enshittified.

So two questions: anybody know a good car mechanic? Also, anybody know a good referral service for things like that?

janxdevil, to random
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

So that was amusing.

Just caught a new dark pattern at play in the ongoing war against people who exercise their right to opt out of tracking cookies on web sites.

The window opens to show the specific switches that you have to click to opt out, with the settings showing them as opted in, and you start clicking them, then just as I was about to click CONFIRM MY CHOICES, all the switches toggled to show that I had just toggled them from opted out back to opted in, forcing me to click them again.

I’m gonna stop reading anything from The New Republic now. You’ll let me know when it’s safe to read them again, right?

janxdevil, to random
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

People coming into my feed with BlueSky invites remind me of the dipshits trying to sell booze at an acid rave.

janxdevil, to random
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

So my employers are hiring a lot. And now that I’m a manager, we need to find somebody to take over my coding responsibilities. You know, so I can spend most of time doing manager things instead of half of it, with the other half devoted to coding on something that needs a full time engineer leading it.

Are you, or is someone you know, a giant TCP/IP nerd like me, with a mastery of C++-14 and software architecture? If so, then send me a PM and I’ll hook you up with our recruiter. Employer is in Foster City, CA and we’re on a hybrid schedule 3-day in and 2-day at home.

janxdevil, to random
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

Today I’m feeling especially demoralized about the state of politics, at all levels: local, state, national and global.

The impression I have is that a certain similarity can be observed in the dysfunctions at every level: an absolute refusal even to consider the possibility of long-term consequences of policy choices.

It’s like the entire world of human politics at every level has adopted the axiomatic view that the long-term future simply does not exist and therefore any reasoning that accounts for it is obviously invalid.

I simply don’t know how to live in a world where that’s the dominant mode of thinking. And today I’m despairing more than usual about it.

janxdevil, to random
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

Can’t help notice which profanities still get bleeped out in the NSFW versions of these.

From: @dgar
https://aus.social/@dgar/111697521167831684

nanographs, to random
@nanographs@chaos.social avatar

TFW you work on electron microscope controls with @whitequark and she immediately turns it all into a compiler problem. Watching her write Amaranth is something else, @isabel and I learned a ton!

https://mastodon.social/@whitequark/111987067448322106

janxdevil,
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

@nanographs @whitequark @isabel I contend that the dirty secret of software engineering is that every program is some kind of compiler.

janxdevil, to random
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

Thinking about the theory in TECHNOFEUDALISM: WHAT KILLED CAPITALISM by @VaroufakisDE and the narrative structure of THE BEZZLE by @pluralistic it occurs to me that we are now living through an epoch that I’m thinking to call The Ultimate Bezzle: the interval of time between when the neofeudalists have reduced the capitalists into vassalage, but the capitalists do not yet recognize it.

janxdevil,
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

Also, just for kicks, check out this piece from the Carnegie Endowment that I randomly found when I went looking for a good explanation of the term “bezzle” — turns out to be a flying anvil of cluefulness, and I strongly recommend it.

https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/85179

jwz, to random
@jwz@mastodon.social avatar

How to make the upcoming Neuromancer adaptation not suck:

Go full Lisa Frankenstein, e.g. 80s as understood by TikTok kids.
Barbiemancer.
Muppets.
Jodorowsky's Dune's TRON.

I really think those are your only options.

I joked earlier that I hope...
https://jwz.org/b/ykNq

janxdevil,
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

@jwz why would you do that when Abel Ferreira already did New Rose
Hotel?

janxdevil, to random
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

I’d be more sympathetic to arguments for making bridges out of fedspace opt-out rather than opt-in if they didn’t dismiss entirely the problem of how the bridge acts as a proxy in any and all moderation disputes between instances in each bridged network, and that’s not a role I want filled by some random techbro with a stack he’s desperately trying to find a way to monetize.

janxdevil,
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

Seriously people. Stop huffing the paint thinner. Some random tech-dude sees a place to build a bridge where a bridge doesn’t currently exist, and the first question to ask them is about how they are thinking about the opportunity to charge a toll for crossing it. When the answer comes back “you’re already crossing it now, and I’m not even thinking yet about how to charge you for it,” the first thing to do is destroy the bridge.

tef, to random
@tef@mastodon.social avatar

yesterday i said that building a whole app in rust reminded me of "let's build the entire plane out of the black box"

and like, i know my poetic license is still being renewed but at least one person decided to interpret it as literally as possible

rather than "aiming to build large pieces software in the most expensive way possible is not the most efficient use of engineering"

janxdevil,
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

@whitequark @tef @unlambda It doesn’t require much ego to recognize that you’re not going to replace millions of lines of C++ that required thousands of people to write and billions of dollars to test with anything you and anyone you could recruit to join you would write in Rust over the next few months.

I’d give almost anything to be working in Rust on this stuff, but it’s just not remotely feasible, and it’s pretty damned tiresome to be told that it would be simple as pie if I weren’t such an egotistical idiot standing in the way of progress. But thanks anyway.

janxdevil,
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

@tef @whitequark @unlambda Don’t ask me why I’m not agitating to rewrite the whole autonomous driving software at $EMPLOYER in Rust instead of C++. (I’m a manager in the core robot software engineering organization, so I have a real voice in that choice.)

Don’t ask, because I just don’t have time to explain real software engineering to people who don’t care to learn it.

janxdevil,
@janxdevil@sfba.social avatar

@whitequark @tef @unlambda Not you. I have followed you long enough to know that’s not you. But I do, from time to time, encounter people who have never worked in a large software project, and who want to argue with me over why the choice to write the logic for the nine ton robot that can go 70 mph and drives on streets where lots of pedestrians are present is written in C++ instead of Rust (or whatever other new hotness they prefer) was a bad choice, and I’m a bad person for not resisting it more, and I just don’t have the time to hold their hand through all that. The recruiters screen most of them out before they ever get to me, but sometimes I find them in the social mix. Guys (they are always guys), do you understand the sheer volume of logic and the level of testing burden you’re talking about? This is not your hobby open source project.

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