mattb

mattb, 11 days ago to Youtube

Dear #YouTube, I don't want to see shorts ever. If I selected a short, that was a mistake. It means I'm currently swearing at your abysmal UI, frantically trying to make some inane babble fuck off before inevitably giving up and killing the entire app.

mattb, 17 days ago to random

User (to me: maintainer): why don't you just do this incredibly obvious thing that you would have obviously done already if it was possible because it's so fucking obvious.

Me (externally): because... rtfm link.

Me (internally): oh, just fuck off.

mattb, 19 days ago to random

"The Abyss Gazes Also"

mattb, 19 days ago to random

German speakers: how old is the Barbaras Rhabarberbar tongue twister? Is it something like She Sells Seashells, or How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck, that almost every child would know.

I was introduced to the version done by, presumably, a couple of comedians recently, and it's quite wonderful.

mattb, 26 days ago to random

I'm not (at least not yet) persuaded by the argument that the output of an LLM is a derivative of all the material it was trained on. The problem with the argument is that it also applies to me: if I see some cool code you wrote, you bet I'm going to make a mental note of it. The trip hazards here are patents and non-free licenses, but they also apply equally to people.

There are other problems with LLMs, but I'm not convinced by that one specifically.

mattb, 26 days ago to random

English(English) speakers: you all know what a leat is, right?

mattb, 1 month ago to random

A few years ago I confirmed experimentally that the theorised condition known as "too much cheese" exists in practise. The apparatus primarily consisted of fondue.

However, a few years on these results still feel improbable. I wonder if I should try to replicate them again.

mattb, 1 month ago to random

It's peak #bluebells season in England.

mattb, 1 month ago to random

I've got 24 hours in Paris in July with my 14 year old son. We've done the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, Sacre-Coeur, and the Arc de Triomphe before. We didn't do the Louvre last time, so we'll book tickets to take selfies with the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo (total expected visit time <1hr if we drag it out or the queues are bad).

What would you do?

mattb, 1 month ago to random

What is the function giving the probability of having a number of odd socks N in a sock population of size P?

And if, as I suspect, I'm way at the improbable end, is this evidence I'm in the Matrix?

mattb, 1 month ago to random

One of the few good things to happen during the pandemic: they opened our town's main shopping street to humans, and it was wonderful.

Then they closed it again, of course.

mattb, 1 month ago to random

Birth scene on TV: congratulations, it's a healthy 6 week old boy!

mattb, 1 month ago to random

I have always preferred the Dolly Parton original of I Will Always Love You over the Whitney Houston cover.

Is that a hot take?

mattb, 1 month ago to random

Punk really was shit. I can understand liking it if you have fond associations with your youth, but otherwise I don't get it. Musically it's completely without merit. Uniquely without merit, I think. I'm struggling to think of any other mainstream music genre from any age which is so uniformly complete excrement.

mattb, 1 month ago to golang

#golang folks, can anybody tell me why this doesn't do what I expect: https://go.dev/play/p/VQB02JKAaNG

tl;dr errors.Is(MyError{}, MyError{}) returns false 🤔

mattb, 2 months ago to Cats

Our cat, Luna, who has been missing for 6 days, just wandered back in like there was nothing wrong. I'm so happy and pissed off with her!

#cats

mattb, 2 months ago to random

Watching Tenet. I'd heard the sounds was bad, but oh my word, the sound is fucking bad. Subtitles on

mattb, 2 months ago to random

Support: My customer wants to frobnicate their foobars. Can they do that?

Me: No, but if you explain what they're trying to do, maybe they can do it some other way.

Support: Well, they've got some foobars. And what they're trying to do is... frobnicate them.

Me: As I said, they can't do that. But if you can explain WHY they want to do that, maybe I can help.

Support: They want to do it so their foobars become frobnicated.

Me: ...

mattb, 2 months ago to Cats

Help, I can't find Harry! Also this box is making a strange noise like an engine.

#cats

mattb, 2 months ago to random

The concept of performant Python is weird to me: if you needed it to be fast you wouldn't have written it in Python. PEP 734 is an attempt to spit shine a turd. I hope they don't spend too much complexity on it.

mattb, 2 months ago to random

Bubble tea is... a thing that I have now tried.

I think that's the best I can say.

mattb, 2 months ago to random

I am offended 🇬🇧

mattb, 2 months ago to random

I have often wondered why France and particularly Spain (which is due south of us) use GMT+1 instead of GMT. Thanks to Tim Traveller I now know the answer: the Nazis did it! (Literally)

https://youtu.be/TTQJ5jOTJJA

mattb, 2 months ago to random

#DuoLingo just completely reset the Chinese course while I was doing it. It 'migrated' my progress to the new structure, but the vocabulary is completely different. I'm supposedly still on the fourth module, but I now don't know most of the vocabulary from the first module, and it won't let me retake it. I've reset my progress, starting again 😞

mattb, 2 months ago to random

Good morning, Fediverse!