@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

mark

@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com

Career software engineer living something approximating the dream he had as a kid.

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netbsd, to random
@netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

New development policy: code generated by a large language model or similar technology (e.g. ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot) is presumed to be tainted (i.e. of unclear copyright, not fitting NetBSD's licensing goals) and cannot be committed to NetBSD.

https://www.NetBSD.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@netbsd Figuring out code is tainted by use of copyrighted code from another source is as straightforward as string-matching, maybe some fuzzy matching.

How would one identify code generated with the assistance of an LLM if the contributor doesn't admit to doing that?

mark, to random
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

The Strong Force Infinite Matter Glitch is super-useful when you're trying to create your Build a Universe any% speedrun.

cfiesler, to random
@cfiesler@hci.social avatar

truly the stupidest timeline https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/14/on-elons-whim-x-now-treats-cisgender-as-a-slur/

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@cfiesler I feel like this guy is engaging in a one-man (well, one-man-and-the-whole-fucking-company-he-owns) crusade to prove right the libertarian-leaning idea "Internet services are infrastructure and should be politically-agnostic."

Which is a shame, because things could be so much better if we stopped deluding ourselves that we have to keep handing people weapons to hurt each other because it's only fair if everyone has them.

lauren, (edited ) to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

***** A few words about Google's future *****

At I/O today, the firm is publicizing an array of new projects. Some of them seem flashy and relatively useless, others seem like they could be very worthwhile. How many of either category will still exist five years from now is of course a crucial question given Google's history.

But Google I/O is merely the gloss, in many respects what has become the so-called "lipstick on the pig". Because Google executives have permitted their race for the golden and in many respects false prize of "Artificial Intelligence" to cloud their vision, and to permit an increasing number of basic services that billions of Google users depend on every day to, in effect, rot away.

The collapse of Google Search, once a global technological wonder, has been profound. Often incorrect or even inane generative AI responses now often supersede links to the very sites from which Google is obtaining the raw material for their AI systems (usually without any form of compensation, while driving down user click-throughs).

A similar decline is obvious in various other core Google services.

Of great continuing concern to me is the very foundation of how virtually all Google users access most Google services -- Google accounts themselves. I continue to be flooded by persons who have problems with their Google accounts through no fault of their own, including lockouts and permanently lost crucial personal data, with Google's automated systems providing them with no resolutions, only horrific frustration. Google's frankly poorly conceived and rushed implementation of passkeys -- and the pushing of users to them who typically do not understand them and have more problems as a result -- is making matters even worse. What good are fancy new services when your Google account needed to use them may lock you out at any time with effectively no genuine ability to appeal?

Some groups of Google users -- such as seniors and other users with special needs who may not be technologically sophisticated -- are especially affected by these sorts of problems and suffer mightily as a result. I don't think Google actually "hates" these users -- I think Google simply does not want to make the minimal efforts required to help them, basically treating them with much the same disdain as you might flick a bug off your shirt.

There is so much that would be relatively simple for Google to do that would vastly improve the user experience for these users and others -- but Google seems to only care about the majority, and if you're in the minority, well, if you swing slowly in the wind locked out of your account, too bad for you. Google's got other fish to fry to keep the profit centers humming.

I could go on, but you get the gist. I don't hate Google. I still have major respect for the firm and especially for Googlers (Google employees) in general. But I am enormously disappointed with the direction executives are now taking the firm, and this seems to be getting worse at an accelerating rate.

And that's very, very sad to see. -L

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@lauren I worked with a colleague at Google who's byphrase was "Don't optimize for the unusual case." Every time I hear about someone losing their account permanently and being lost in the labyrinthine halls of the recovery process that assumes a particular type of spherical point-like user, I think about the fact that he still works there and his philosophy is closer to the centroid of Google's philosophy on software than mine.

... anyway, a friend's parent got his Yahoo account compromised a little while ago, and he was able to reclaim it with one phone call. Someone at Yahoo checked the recent access logs, confirmed that it was obvious that someone had radically changed the access pattern of the account immediately after a password change, and just reset the password back. No muss no fuss.

So now I tell people to get a Yahoo account if they can.

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

Okay, since I'm on laundry today, a little story.

When hubs and I first got married, we were very much enjoying our little Honeymoon Bubble, and we were being lazy as Hell. We didn't do many chores, but the laundry we really let go. We weren't wearing many clothes at home anyway, so why bother. Anyhow, after weeks we finally reached the swimming suit bottoms situation, and decided it was time. It was loads and loads of laundry that needed done, so I had my husband back the trunk of the car up to a window of the house, then he popped the trunk, and I started tossing laundry out of the window into the trunk. We went to the bank, got about $30 bucks in quarters, and found the emptiest laundry mat we could, and did it all in one fell swoop. We folded it all and loaded it back into the car using those wheeled laundry carts. We never let it get that bad again, and decided it was time to be adults, and do regular chores, but it still makes me laugh imagining what the neighbors and the laundry attendant thought.

Feel free to share your own laundry story, if you feel like it, I love hearing people's stories!

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@RickiTarr I envy your ability to cross the adulting threshold. 😉

Past forty, and I just emptied the laundry room of clothes wanting to be washed for the first time in two years. And that only happened because my wife went out of town and I was so bored that I had to find something to do.

(My new trick is to aggressively pare down the clothing I own so that I have to keep doing laundry or I will run out.)

davidaugust, to Russia
@davidaugust@mastodon.online avatar

The Russian government warned Ukraine that Ukraine’s new fleet of F-16 fighter jets will be treated as a "nuclear-capable threat" by Russia, and “nuclear-capable threat” is also the nickname Putin has given his tallywacker.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@davidaugust This sounds like the old military chestnuts "Everything is air-droppable at least once" and "Everything is amphibious if you can get it back out of the water." 😉

davidaugust, to random
@davidaugust@mastodon.online avatar

Boeing’s Starliner crewed mission was postponed shortly before launch on Monday because of a last-minute issue that cropped up with a valve on the spacecraft’s rocket. Turns out the spacecraft was made by Boeing, which is concerning because recently Boeing makes things that fall apart easily.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@davidaugust Fortunately, their space and air divisions are so separate they may as well be different companies.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what to predict as a result...

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

One of my favorite philosophers stories is someone was trying to start an argument with Diogenes that motion did not exist, and he just didn't acknowledge them and kept walking to prove it in fact does.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@RickiTarr I'm going to have to look this one up. I wonder if they were trying to get into a Xeno's Paradox debate with him?

(One thing I find fascinating about that paradox is that it really was a head-scratcher for mathematicians for millenia. We are now operating in a post-Xeno world, but it required some real gymnastics to get there. IIUC, Newton cracked the code with limits---"Maybe the paradox is real, maybe it isn't. Doesn't matter. Give me an arbitrarily tight limit and I will prove the equation still holds true, so you'll never find a tightness where the equation breaks, so the paradox is irrelevant now let's go predict some planetary motion" was actually kinda clever as hell.)

(p.s: I wonder what the ancient Greek colloquialism for "Debate me coward" was?)

Lazarou, to random
@Lazarou@mastodon.social avatar

Boeing again, wheels this time.
Watch those sparks fly and know that the Shareholders are getting their cut and that makes everything ok on Planet Earth

https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/watch-this/boeing-767-crashes-into-runway-during-emergency-landing-4620876

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@cstross @Lazarou It'll be interesting to find out what happened to the landing gear.

I can't decide if I'm hoping more for something mundane ("The service tech left their sandwich in the joint") or something novel ("Oh, now we have to account for this kind of metal fatigue?! Why do you hate the universe being predictable, O uncaring gods?!")

Lazarou, to random
@Lazarou@mastodon.social avatar

Just a third of voters expect Joe Biden to act ethically in office.

Just a third.

Blue MAGA trying to spin this as a positive, because it's all they've got (aside from shouting at Young People)

Are you going to call the Pew Research Centre 'unhinged' Kim?

How many of you Blue MAGAS want to beat the Limey shit out of me right now? Be honest 😀

I see you....

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@Lazarou Yes. This is not an era of massive confidence in the office of President.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@Lazarou I suspect they don't have any particular plan that can improve it.

There are several factors against improvement:

  1. All metrics (that aren't "American isolationism and racism") during the Biden administration are objectively better (and the ones that aren't would not have been better under Trump; for example, there's no reason to believe Trump wouldn't toady up to Netanyahu. He is known to respect strongmen). Voters don't care. Voters want solutions, not incremental improvement. And "solutions" look a lot more like "Getting my way right now" than "Figuring out how to co-pilot a country with people who want the opposite of what I want."

  2. For as risky as running Biden is, they know that running someone else is historically riskier. Parties, at their core, have to exhibit strength of conviction or they aren't parties. Failing to back the guy currently running the executive sends the signal that maybe they shouldn't have backed him four years ago. I personally think that's dumb but it is the X-factor in all of this---Americans generally expect the party to back a try for a two-term President instead of a one-term followed by someone else entirely.

  3. For as awful as he polls, he polls better than the other candidates the Dems think they can field. Ultimately, a President isn't decided just on the people in his party; he also has to pull votes from people in the other party. So the Dems are always going to field someone closer to conservative viewpoints than left-wingers would choose.

There are some problems parties are the wrong tool to solve.

All of that having been said: I do share your concern that their calculus is off and they really aren't thinking about how many young people are checked out. But that's the devil they don't know, so they'd be rolling some huge dice to make a guess at what that demographic wants (their signal on them is weak because they don't engage as much in traditional political channels so they aren't showing up on the signal pathways the Dems can see most easily). And if those dice come up wrong, we get a fascist. Dems can generally be trusted to make the play they perceive to be safest; they don't like rolling dice.

I think the real issue is that Biden is a terrible choice but I also can't suggest a better choice. Not one I seriously think more than half of American electors (not voters; states distort "one person, one vote") might vote for.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@alexanderhay @Lazarou I was honestly impressed by the administration's decision to build a humanitarian aid pier. That is a very clever hack to get around the political roadblock: it delivers concrete aid and, most importantly, it puts American skin in the game---both Israel and Hamas know that if they harm or kill one American soldier, the wrath of an unhinged God will come down on them and their families. They know how an angry America reacts.

Because that's the thing---Biden isn't a dictator. He can't just wave a wand and end the crisis, both because that's not really feasible (without killing a lot of people) and because he's actually legally barred from doing so (Congress makes the laws, and ages ago they made an awful one that the US is required to offer aid to Israel somewhat detached from what Israel is doing). And ultimately the American people are still torn on their opinion of the entire crisis. But they'll be a lot less torn if an American soldier catches a Skysniper or Qassam to the face.

Now, am I happy I am impressed by this? Fuck no. It's a half-measure. It's not the path a courageous country invested in its own convictions of freedom and peace should take. But that's the thing about Americans... We're cowards mostly. Not willing to risk skin in our convictions. And our Congress is way too divided to act with purpose, instead embroiled mostly in the art of doing as much nothing as possible to keep their (deeply-divided, gerrymandered) seats.

Prior to World War I, Woodrow Wilson knew the war was going badly for our allies. But Congress enacted neutrality laws that, ostensibly, tied his hands. In response, he used old anti-piracy law to arm trade ships by executive order, which ratcheted up the temperature of US involvement in the overseas conflict and was in obvious defiance of Congress's intent. He also positioned the navy so that if we entered the war it would be ready to go... Again in defiance of Congress. They were ratcheting up to impeach him in response.

... They didn't get the chance because the Germans responded by loosening the rules of engagement and sinking US ships with submarines, and we ended up in the war. Public opinion turned overnight.

That's the kind of bastard, awful, half-measure, weak-wristed action that makes for a good President in an era when Americans don't know what they want. Biden's actually quite good at it. Most Americans don't see it because they aren't scholars of their own history.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@alexanderhay @Lazarou One thing that interests me is how much we gloss over pre-colonial English History, which is also relevant to the US because politically speaking, it's our history.

We threw out some key political elements, but retained huge swaths of the existing English system as infrastructure (including the entire common law system), And I wish more Americans understood how their government is grounded on those norms and precedents every bit as much as the laws passed by Congress and the Constitution itself.

TheConversationUS, to religion
@TheConversationUS@newsie.social avatar

To make the moon a graveyard goes against the beliefs of various human religions.

Here’s a look at what believers would say about this winter’s attempt to send a probe holding the remains of paying customers to the lunar surface

https://theconversation.com/why-having-human-remains-land-on-the-moon-poses-difficult-questions-for-members-of-several-religions-221399
@philosophy

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@TheConversationUS @philosophy Which is fine, but they have no right to claim exclusive control of the moon.

mark, to random
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

Portland, OR to San Jose, CA.

  • Plane - 2 hours and costs $180.
  • Train - 25(!) hours and costs... $170.

There's just no way ground-based mass transit in its current format competes city-to-city.

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

“Fluent Python” is an excellent example of a “good programming language book” — it’s not cluttered with “enterprise examples” it’s focused on how python works and goes into detail on edge cases. This lets one write code with real confidence that you know everything it’s doing. It is also written with the aim to justify why python is the way that it is. Which I need or I get irritated.

If you like python you should probably have a pdf or buy a copy.

Now which book on Java is analogous?

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@futurebird I'm not sure we'll find one because I'm not sure that Java is fluent. 😉

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

There is an interesting article titled "Please Don’t Share Our Links on Mastodon: Here’s Why!" about the startling load that Mastodon's mass-distributed link preview generation has on small independent webservers. But I cannot link it to you, because of a reason

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@mcc Is it worse than getting Slashdotted?

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@mcc Oof, that's an interesting challenge.

Also feels like a hole in either Mastodon's use of Fediverse or Fediverse itself. If node A is cloning posts to node B, it's already generated a preview and should clone that too!

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@robryk @mcc In what sense? The preview my personal node generates can also be a lie because the server can inspect the source requester and change the output depending on who's asking.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@robryk It may be just personal preference, but it seems an odd place to draw the line of trust at "I trust this other node to tell me what posts its users made and the images they uploaded but not the link previews it generated and cached."

mark, to random
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

I want every UI change in Windows passed through a very specific testing focus group. High school seniors.

Not just any high school seniors, but high school seniors studying the thing that Windows UI is supposed to control. So networking students for interface config and firewalls, communications students for word, business students and math students for Excel, etc.

I'm not expecting your interface to work for every lay person out there. But if you can't pass the "dedicated young person who is studying this field specifically but hasn't used your particular UI yet" test, you're probably fucking up.

... All this to say I want the guy who designed the static IP user interface in Windows 10 to spend the rest of his life using computer forms with the same level of feedback for invalid input that he thought was appropriate for his interface.

ErikUden, to random
@ErikUden@mastodon.de avatar

Shoutout to the people of North Sentinel Island for protecting and hence creating one of the few places on planet earth that have never been colonized.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@ErikUden ... Except by the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, of course.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Worst downsizing I ever went through (short of "company is bankrupt, go home") was 10%, and that fucked our operational efficiency for a quarter. Spotify laid off 17% and are suffering. The C-suite were fools to assume there was 17% slack in the system, much less that middle management would choose the right 17% to fire (or that competent workers wouldn't see this coming and jump ship to better jobs, leaving time-servers behind).
https://toot.cafe/@baldur/112325661237678117

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@cstross I think management really underestimates the secondary effects regarding competent workers.

Layoffs are a shake-up. On my team, we had a re-org that resulted in some half the staff getting cut (technically "not rehired"). And then my team, personally, lost one of our most creative and pioneering engineers simply because he no longer felt like the company was interested in letting people build a legacy there, and he'd rather work somewhere he could do that.

Layoffs signal to employees that the company is short-term focused.

futurebird, (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

This is Tulip, the median carpenter ant worker. Today she enjoyed some wet cat food. I can’t seem to find Pepper, the ant with the green spot, I think she might have cleaned the paint off (she was very dusty) — stay tuned for more important Tulip updates.

Tulip is about two years old. It's been nearly two years since I marked her. The queen of this colony is 4.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@futurebird This is the first time I've ever realized I have no idea how long individual worker ants live in the wild.

I've always assumed their lifespans were measured in months, not years. Amazing!

ernie, to random
@ernie@writing.exchange avatar

I made the mistake of pointing out that a new AI app that scrapes YouTube videos was ethically questionable on Hacker News and a dude is just non-stop replying about it.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@ernie This is why I think hbomberguy's latest video was such a solid run at the material: everybody arguing over whether AI is a "plagiarism machine" and Harry's over here making the extremely solid point that humans don't know (or, more likely, are being extremely disingenuous about their ignorance) they're plagiarizing other humans.

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