@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.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

HeavenlyPossum, to random

I remember being pretty young and asking my parents—is this it? We go to school every day and then we get a job and go to work every day and this is our lives, forever? Just living each day according to someone else’s schedule, at someone else’s command? This is life?

And they were pretty flummoxed. Yeah, they said, this is life. What did you expect? This is what you do and then you die.

These are the same people who showed my Koyaanisqatsi when I was like six and encouraged me to internalize its message that capitalist modernity is catastrophically, irrevocably broken and unsustainable.

And I just think…a lot of people hold pretty good beliefs in the abstract but it doesn’t occur to them to live as if they were actually true.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@jargoggles @HeavenlyPossum It's also much easier to criticize the status quo than to craft a viable alternative that is an improvmenet.

Capitalism was an attempt to escape feudalism, which was an attempt to guard against raiders, who were responding to establishment of agrarian settlements, which were an attempt to improve on the unpredictability of hunter-gatherer life, which etc.

That's not to say there's no room for improvement, just that "The current arrangement is unsustainable" doesn't imply anyone has a better idea to implement at scale yet.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@jargoggles @HeavenlyPossum Unfortunately, that's part of the criteria. Not unlike "It'd be nice if feudalism wasn't useful for consolidating marshal power over an area to allow otherwise-separate people to create a coherent front of arms to stop invaders from stealing their stuff... But it actually did a pretty good job of that so it steamrolled alternatives that couldn't defend themselves." 😢

These systems don't have the luxury of developing in a vacuum or detached from the entrenched systems.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@HeavenlyPossum Not a lot of signal to interpret your criticism precisely... Are you saying I'm ascribing more intent than there was? Probably. I'm not claiming there was some mastermind doing these things as an intentional reaction to their environment... But I am saying these systems were new meta-stable constructs in the context of their environment.

I'd like to see capitalism improved upon but I've yet to see a new meta-stable construct develop that can displace the status quo.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@jargoggles @HeavenlyPossum Agreed; that's more accurate. And mercantilism sort of side-stepped the feudal power structure by creating systems where marshal power was less relevant (you can't beat people into creating a trade economy, and indeed, too much war tends to disrupt trade, not enhance it).

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@HeavenlyPossum Fair enough. It's off-the-cuff on a mini-blog service, so yeah.

... but I'm still not really seeing an alternative that can be implemented at scale.

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

This SEPTA regional rail train has an LED matrix marquis and two OLED HD screens built in.

... The screens are showing rotating ads and the marquis shows a static SEPTA logo. Emphatically not shown:

  • Time tables
  • Station names
  • What train I am on

... There's a lot wrong with American mass transit and some of it isn't actually hard to fix.

lauren, to mastodon
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

And incidentally, as long as we're talking about PR. Let me clue you into something. Practically nobody in the "real world" knows what the "Fediverse" is. The ones who have heard this word probably think it's a bank somewhere.

By this time at least a significant number of people know what is, and it frequently shows up in discussions of other social media platforms. But "Fediverse" just draws blank stares, and there's NOTHING to be gained by fostering confusion by didactically insisting that people should refer to the Fediverse rather than Mastodon.

Again, PR101.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@lauren Oh, is there a contingent out there still fighting the "Um actually it's GNU/Linux" fight but for federated protocol terminology?

sigh Best of luck to 'em.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Opinion: The automatic line ending translation in git is a very, very, very bad feature that has only ever made the world a worse place

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@mcc But like... What's the alternative for letting Windows and Linux users collab on the same project?

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

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@janxdevil @b0rk Is there more to this story than "When IPv4 was devised it was connecting machines behind locked doors, and when IPv6 came along they tried to do an incremental improvement on IPv4 and adding a whole security protocol would have been a bridge too far?"

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

I'm sitting in a meeting right now watching three high-level engineers at my company ask another engineer to spell out the meaning of equations in his design doc because "the ideas are simple but the formulas make them illegible" and I've never felt more vindicated about my feelings on math symbology in my entire life.

aparrish, to random
@aparrish@friend.camp avatar

I just posted the text of a talk that I gave last week at NYU, titled "Language models can only write ransom notes." I argue that LLM outputs are a kind of collage, and then work through Douglas Kearney and Samatar/Zambreno's theories of collage in an attempt to explain my own poetics. also surprise appearances of Anni Albers and Simone Weil https://posts.decontextualize.com/language-models-ransom-notes/

As | argued earlier, maintaining the anonymity of “the hand behind... the cut” is precisely the aim of both large language models and ransom notes. Large language models are designed with the intention to obscure the cut between tokens; likewise, ransom notes specifically draw attention away from the material-level cut and toward a reading of the surface text. Both of these forms of collage work against the affordances of collage: they have “decentralized” authorship, but with the seams of the cut smoothed over, the result is a text that is neither “intertextual” nor “intertextural.”
Let us love this distance; we touch the objects of our love. Computational text collage is suited to many forms and emotions—form letters, satire, poetic juxtaposition, avant- garde linguistic exploration—but I'd like to believe love is among them. More broadly, | would claim that the act of making a collage always has stakes that are interpersonal, historical, and contextual. In my own work, | prefer to face those stakes head-on, by using only corpora whose relation to me | can know and understand, rather than the “unfathomable,” coercively dematerialized corpora of large language models. In my work, | want to make the distance manifest, rather than hide it away.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@aparrish It's a reasonable mental model.

But it does beg the question "To what extent is human-to-human communication not this?" It's not like there's anything magically correct about English (or Spanish, or Mandarin, or Hawaiian, or any other human language); we are, all of us, trying to push ideas out of our heads and into someone else's by manipulation of abstract symbols that we learned to manipulate by collecting correctness patterns from training data.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@Andres4NY @aparrish Interesting. That doesn't match with most communication I experience; hardly anyone I know ever provenances what they're saying, and I suspect if pressed many don't actually know where the pieces they use came from.

We have knowyourmeme.com because people don't keep provenance attached to the meme.

samir, to random
@samir@functional.computer avatar

It took me a long time but I finally figured out that Copilot and friends are not meant for me, they’re meant for JavaScript programmers.

One of the reasons I’m enjoying Rust is because there’s a culture of being very thoughtful about every line of code you write, and every dependency you add.

Conversely, in JS land, “just add this dependency” is now a meme.

In a land where you’re encouraged to “just” add more boilerplate (thanks, create-react-app), why wouldn’t you outsource that?

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@cstross @samir But less is what the JavaScript ecosystem strives for: doing more with less code.

Why write, again and again until we retire or die in our chairs, the algorithm to pad out a string when left-pad exists?

Why repeat ourselves like a distributed, planet-sized Babylon if we can make a stronger ecosystem that already knows how to do what we're trying to do, we just have to ask it?

(There are answers to these questions, and they orbit around "Not everyone is on the same team." But the core goal is to make the machine more expressively powerful so we can spend our time solving problems human beings want solved, not teaching sand to think.)

StillIRise1963, to random
@StillIRise1963@mastodon.world avatar

Dear women,

ALWAYS have secret money just in case you find yourself in a situation.

Love,

An older woman

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@StillIRise1963

This.

We had an aunt pass away not too long ago. God bless her, she married a hard man to be married to who got much softer as he got older. She was the best thing to ever happen to him and damned if he didn't know it.

... and when we were going through her effects after she passed we found the secret ledger. She sewed, and she kept a chunk of the money she made selling baby quilts in a kitty... Just in case. Her husband wasn't mad at all when we found it. His gave a long, quiet smile and said "She was the smartest person I ever knew, and if I'd married me I'd have done that too."

(We don't actually know how many shops she put her work up in for sale, she didn't keep records like that. To this day, he gets checks for $30 here, $50 there from one of her baby quilts selling that was hanging on some cottage's wall in a sleepy resort town for years. She had a reach in this world that is going to echo long after her soul left her body and we miss her dearly.)

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

Finally got an end to end of my little telnet project working yesterday--- with an Ethernet shield to .

It worked, but my fake telnet on the Arduino required a little tweaking. "What do you mean control codes are in band?"

The solution is delightfully not spec compliant. 😉

lauren, to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

Oh yeah, count me OUT! - What could go wrong? - Chrome devs working on automatic micropayments to websites without user interactions directly from wallets. - https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/13/google_micropayments_plan/ - Also, scroll down for the comments on Slashdot: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/02/13/2244212/chrome-engine-devs-experiment-with-automatic-browser-micropayments

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@lauren This idea has been floating around internally for aeons (under the names "Nads" [bad name] and "Xads"). Under the first draft, you'd become a bidder in the ad network system with the money in your wallet, and if you win the bid no display ad would be vended (essentially, you'd compete with the advertisers for your own eyeballs).

TBH it's not a bad idea for providing an alternative to the ad-based support model (that Google keeps getting strong signal people hate, so of course they're trying to find an alternative that doesn't turn the web into an "only the rich can play" theme park)... if the UI can surface enough usable information to the user that they can basically treat it as "micro-Patreon." I can imagine that working---sites could advertise how much they need you to pay to turn off ads, you could consent or not, you could set a payment ceiling or agree to a value, and the whole thing would be brokered by the browser.

The most surprising part of the story to me is the "brokered by the browser" part---the original design was to broker it through the ad engine. Maybe Google is trying to figure out how to do this while preserving as much privacy as possible (given that it's impossible to do it totally anonymously, because money is involved so somoene's gonna want an audit trail somewhere...).

lauren, to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

It's crazy that you can buy an easily programmable standalone Wi-Fi camera for $8.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@lauren David Brinning intensifies

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@lauren Brin wrote a book called The Transparent Society ages ago where he talks about the effect that incredibly cheap and ubiquitous surveillance tech will have on how we live our lives.

Some parts are delightfully dated and some quite prescient. The tl;dr is that his opinion was the genie was well out of the bottle (the tech is so well-understood, miniaturizable, and cheap that outlawing it is functionally worthless because it's a very much in the "Only criminals and governments will have it" category), so we had to grapple with what it would mean to live in a world where any fleck of dust or pinhole in a wall could be a hidden camera owned by whoever tracking everything that goes past it.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@lauren Off the top of my head I'm not sure how to parse "in disagreement with it" because to my memory it didn't have a proscription, just an observation of what was coming and a couple possible outcomes depending on choices made. Do you mean he made a fundamental error in his assessment that undermines his claims about the ubiquity of surveillance in the future?

lauren, to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

Very disappointed in Jon Stewart's return to Daily. He seems to feel that the world is the same as when he left the show years ago, and that risking fascism is worth a few laughs.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@lauren I'm not sure he knows what else to do. I've been interpreting it as kind of an "If all you have is a hammer" move.

He's good at communicating in that venue via that approach. It won't reach across the aisle, but if anyone knew how to do that we wouldn't be in this mess to start with.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@lauren I might be missing a step; I don't see how him returning to the Daily Show depresses votes for Biden.

mia, to CSS
@mia@front-end.social avatar

The WG resolved to officially work on native custom functions and mixins.

The explainer: https://css.oddbird.net/sasslike/mixins-functions/

The discussion & resolution: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/9350#issuecomment-1939628591

The spec: (working on it!)

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@mia Yes, yessss.

One step closer to the day I can implement a LISP in CSS.

... so that I can read my email with it, of course. 😉

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

Version control had to be invented because Linux filesystems never implemented 'undo.'

lauren, to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

It's fascinating that the experience of using computer CLIs (Command Line Interfaces) has essentially changed not at all since the early days of interactive computing and timesharing. In fact, for those of us using Linux systems, the experience is pretty much identical to what it was on the earliest UNIX systems of the 1970s, and in fact we still commonly use the same commands, utilities, and other command line tools. So about half a century. That's either amazing or terrifying depending on your point of view. Or more likely, both.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@cstross @lauren @trouble It's been real interesting to see the transition of people comprehending these tools from reading man pages to Googling for a StackOverflow result.

I'm not sure if that was a natural outgrowth of the Internet happening coupled with the notion that people generally are using their computers to solve a problem, not to play with software... Or if there might have been an opportunity to add some kind of intelligent "How do I...?" feature to documentation tools that didn't happen.

(I suspect the answer is "No, no opportunity got missed... Open source authors were never going to be able to keep up with the raw labor power of crowdsourced documentation." The crowd brings not just the answers to the questions but the relevant questions that the original developers didn't even think of).

lauren, to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

FCC has voted to ban AI-generated misleading robocalls. Which will have essentially no effect on actually reducing the number of such calls.

mark,
@mark@mastodon.fixermark.com avatar

@lauren There's a big gap in my understanding of how scam callers stay on the network.

My uncle gets about three a day. All probably from the same company, because the prefix audio (the sounds their robocall machine makes patching through to a human being) are all the same. They call from dozens of different numbers.

Where has the phone network broken down that carriers can't just say "These numbers? They're scammers. Cut 'em?" The phone network isn't like the IP network where all you need is a computer and an Ethernet cable... Someone has to be signing off on these customers.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • mdbf
  • ngwrru68w68
  • InstantRegret
  • magazineikmin
  • thenastyranch
  • rosin
  • khanakhh
  • tacticalgear
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • Durango
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • provamag3
  • ethstaker
  • GTA5RPClips
  • modclub
  • tester
  • Leos
  • osvaldo12
  • cisconetworking
  • everett
  • cubers
  • normalnudes
  • anitta
  • megavids
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •