judell

judell, 4 days ago to random

"orcas have been observed developing “cultural ‘fads,’” including carrying dead fish on their heads, and the incidents with the boats may be nothing more than a “fashion trend.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/05/14/orcas-yacht-ambush-gibraltar/

judell, 9 days ago to random

"...the emerging field of searchable encryption. It allows you to search encrypted data without decrypting the entire database."

What Pater Wayner's seminal Translucent Databases foresaw is becoming real? Excellent!

https://thenewstack.io/a-postgres-proxy-for-searchable-encryption-for-data-in-use/

judell, 11 days ago to random

Here's one for the @b0rk compendium of git oddities.

Today I learned there is a difference between a lightweight tag:

$ git tag v0.20
$ git cat-file -t v0.20
commit

and an annotated tag:

$ git tag -a v0.21 -m "this is an annotated tag"
$ git cat-file -t v0.21
tag

I have only ever used the former, but it's possible for software to care about the difference between the former (the type of the object is commit) and the latter (the type is tag).

What a tangled web we weave.

judell, 12 days ago to random

I was the perfect reader for this chapter. Without realizing it, I had always needed an explanation that I could wrap my head around and (not that I have done, but could!) reproduce. https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/112337153507129104

judell, 18 days ago to Ergonomics

I've long thought I probably should stand vs sit in front of the computer, but never made it happen. Now it looks like a sore tailbone will force me to, at least for a while. I have so many questions, and will appreciate any thoughts and advice.

Ideally I'll find a way to keep using my beloved Captain Kirk Chair which is ergonomic for my hands and wrists if not my butt, but maybe I'll need to mount the keyboard on a standing desk.

https://blog.jonudell.net/2014/10/17/voyage-of-the-captain-kirk-floating-arms-keyboard-chair/

#standing #sitting #ergonomics

gvwilson, 27 days ago to random

sigh cron alternatives with more readable config syntax? please?

judell, 1 month ago to random

There's much talk of AI-driven unemployment, not so much about AI-powered employment. Reflecting on a week in which I accomplished a lot more than I could have two years ago, I'm feeling conflicted. It's exhilarating to be empowered by tools that make me a more effective thinker and doer. It's also starting to feel exhausting. As with all forms of augmentation, we need to find balance. Just because we can exercise these new superpowers doesn't mean we always should.

gvwilson, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

Starting to wonder if AI is like spreadsheets: for every programmer pointing out flaws and deficiencies, a double dozen people are using 'em to do something they find useful. 1/4

Added: please see https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/112265751571981599 for clarification.

judell, 1 month ago to random

"Processing unstructured data is one of the most directly useful applications of Large Language Models."

I worked hard to syndicate event data from iCalendar feeds, but they were and still are scarce. Much real-world data lives inaccessibly in event posters; that's always felt wrong.

It also feels wrong (to techies) to make feeds from pictures of posters.

"That isn't data!"

But for normies it makes total sense.

"Of course it's data, I can see it plainly!" https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/112243754613807997

judell, 1 month ago to random

These two items were adjacent in my feed.

https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/112237545994624170

https://octodon.social/@jalefkowit/112238324590392720

I hugely respect both @simon and @baldur. How to square their opposing views? Two things can be true. Some who use LLMs are experiencing a massive boost. Others are fooling themselves about AGI.

judell, 1 month ago to random

"What's happening at the data level that allows these very different complex systems with billions of moving parts to exhibit similar behavior? Theres's some sort of generality, but not generality of intelligence, I think it's generality somewhere deep inside the training data that's going into both human brains starting at birth and into large models as they're being trained."

One of many provocative insights in a long but rewarding podcast.

https://thegradientpub.substack.com/p/venkatesh-rao-protocols-intelligence-scaling

gvwilson, 1 month ago to random

In Search of Balls and Sticks: https://third-bit.com/2024/04/07/in-search-of-balls-and-sticks/

mhoye, 1 month ago to random

I strongly suspect that in the long run we're going to discover that the rush to write documentation with AI, rather than code, is where these tools are going to cause the most damage.

judell, 1 month ago to LLMs

I've been thinking for a long time about tools to help people learn to be better writers. The latest experiment wasn't a resounding success, nor did I really expect that. But it feels promising, and I'm interest to compare notes with fellow travelers. I know wattenberger@bird.makeup is one, who else?

#llms #writing #education

https://thenewstack.io/using-ai-to-improve-bad-business-writing/

judell, 1 month ago to random

Although we are on opposite sides of the LLM conversation, I agree with all of what @baldur says here. Grim news, powerfully delivered, at a moment when many are wondering: "What should I do?"

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-one-about-the-web-developer-job-market/

judell, 2 months ago to random

If you've never tried a Khan course, or anyway not recently, now's a good time to dive in and see what you think.

Imperfect? Of course. Useful? I think so, and I agree with this assessment.

"Khanmigo is the best model we have for how to develop and implement AI for the public good."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/22/artificial-intelligence-sal-khan/

judell, 3 months ago to random

"The IRA also spurring a wave of private sector investment in U.S. clean energy manufacturing facilities for solar, wind and electric vehicle parts, the majority of which will be located in Republican congressional districts represented by lawmakers who voted against the bill."

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/02/joe-biden-30-policy-things-you-might-have-missed-00139046

judell, 3 months ago to random

There is a special place in hell for devs who cannot be bothered to write the regex to recognize a phone number with spaces vs hyphens.

As always, if the dev responsible for this abomination had to actually use the form they created, this would be fixed pronto.

#UX_Crimes_Against_Humanity

judell, 3 months ago to random

"You’re almost always inheriting a code base that’s been around for a long time, so the hard part isn’t writing the code to implement the feature or fix the bug. It's trying to understand why the application works the way it does, who the best person is to talk to, when these changes were introduced, and contextualizing all that to move forward."

Dennis Pilarinos on what Jack Ozzie once called context assembly, less vividly known as enterprise knowledge management.

https://www.itshipped.fm/episodes/20

judell, 3 months ago to ChatGPT

I wanted to sum up recurring payments to a merchant. Their billing history is, of course, not available in convenient digital form. So I took a screen shot and pasted it into ChatGPT. It reported the numbers. Then I asked it to sum them. It wrote and ran a Python program to do that.

More on this capability here: https://thenewstack.io/how-to-learn-unfamiliar-software-tools-with-chatgpt/

I used to scrape the DOM for this kind of thing, more recently I've had LLMs write DOM scrapers for me. Now they can scrape screens.

#ChatGPT #DataLiberation

judell, 3 months ago to random

I'm collecting hopeful stories about the energy transition, and this is a really good one. tl;dr Use carbon fiber cores to double capacity, halve transmission loss, avoid permitting and building new towers, monitor temperature and sag in realtime.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/one-easy-way-to-boost-the-grid-upgrade

#EnergyTransition #Reconductoring