mhoye

mhoye, 7 months ago to random

So, funny story: remember how that Stanford professor described last years' layoffs as a "social contagion" exercise, where CEOs were just doing it because everyone else was doing it?

https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/

Well, funny story, everyone get your surprised face ready, but it was in fact a coordinated effort spurred by large shareholders and hedge funds to suppress wages:

https://www.teamblind.com/post/How-we-got-here-Some-inside-scoops-from-Microsoft-on-handling-early-days-of-pandemic-to-cutting-over-20K-folks-in-2023-7ndQwLAU

mhoye, 8 months ago to random

"Automated translation of web content is now available to Firefox users! Unlike cloud-based alternatives, translation is done locally in Firefox, so that the text being translated does not leave your machine."

I got to see the early demos of this and it is jaws-on-the-floor bonkers wizard magic. Entirely local - and good - translation with no cloud service and like six megabytes of disk space.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/118.0/releasenotes/

mhoye, 6 months ago to random

Microsoft paid money for this. A lot of money.

mhoye, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago) to random

A slide from a presentation I just finished.

mhoye, 9 months ago to random

Re-upping this again: I wish more lefties could internalize the idea that hypocrisy is not a meaningful accusation to the right. Of course they're being hypocrites. That you are bound, by rules, standards, logic, human decency, some fundamental moral consistency, anything at all, and they are not? That is their conception of what power is, and why they seek it. So they can exercise power, without constraint, and you cannot.

That's the whole point.

Hypocrisy is the virtue-signaling of fascism.

mhoye, 10 months ago to random

Holy shit this paper, and the insight behind it.

You know how every receiver is also a transmitter, well: every text predictor is also text compressor, and vice-versa.

You can outperform massive neural networks running millions of parameters, with a novel applications of gzip.

https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.426/

mhoye, 9 months ago to random

I felt this in my teeth.

mhoye, 8 months ago to random

If you're switching to Firefox this week, I collected a list of the team's favourite hidden features back when I worked there:

https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2020/10/25/navigational-instruments/

mhoye, 7 months ago to random

I think that the biggest reason I believe that we need universal basic income is so that people always have an out. A bad relationship, a bad job, a bad situation, even discovering you've overrotated on something that's turning into a scam or a cult. You should always be able to walk away without fearing destitution.

mhoye, 11 months ago to random

Holy shit: Causal evidence that the Shingles vaccine prevents a significant fraction of Alzheimer's cases. So 1, vaccines are a god damned miracle get your ass vaccinated, and 2 the implication that Alzheimer's disease is a preventable byproduct of viral infection is tectonic.

https://www.metafilter.com/199451/Dont-miss-your-shingles-shots

mhoye, 6 months ago to random

One of the thing I’ve learned about the consequences of bullying is that when people tell you things like “I’m pretty bad at math” or “computers aren’t for me” or “I don’t really get art or fashion” and you talk to them for a bit what you often find - not always, but often - what that really means is “somebody treated me like shit for trying to like this when I was 9.”

mhoye, 6 months ago to random

People go to Stack Overflow because the docs and error messages are garbage. TLDR exists because the docs and error messages are garbage. People ask ChatGPT for help because the docs and error messages are garbage. We are going to lose a generation of competence and turn programming into call-and-response glyph-engine supplicancy because we let a personality cult that formed around the PDP-11 in the 1970s convince us that it was pure and good that docs and error messages are garbage.

mhoye, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago) to random

I wish I could convey to you the psychological swoop of remembering that there is a whole section of the first Terminator movie where Kyle Reese is teaching Sarah Connor how to make pipe bombs and how differently that will land once you've read this.

(from https://mastodon.social/@stavvers@masto.ai/111181614978897879 )

mhoye, 6 days ago to random

As always, domestic abuse is the flagship infosec threat model, the one where the victim has the least resources, the least recourse, where they're closest to immediate physical harm.

That this industry has failed at and mostly abandoned the idea of even pretending to try dealing with a threat model that's difficult and unprofitable and mostly hurts women is not news, but this new Windows Recall feature is next-level professional negligence.

mhoye, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to random

Everyone thinks, haha, these squirrels don't even remember where they hid 90% of the nuts they store for the winter they are so dumb, but nobody ever asks if the squirrels might be out there thinking, my ancestors planted this forest that provides for us all, and my children's children will know the same of me.

mhoye, 9 months ago to random

This has absolutely no business, none whatsoever, being as good as it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzR9HwhhlkA

mhoye, 11 months ago to random

Tired: Organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful.

Wired: Owning the web and middle-manning every interaction in the world, thus maximizing ad revenue.

Inspired: Using ML to middleman the whole idea of knowledge into an unreliable stochastic word-slurry so people need to quadruple-check every piece of information they ever want or need by clicking around to dozens of other sources, thus maximizing ad revenue.

mhoye, 4 months ago to random

As someone coming off a decade of working there, I can tell you with some confidence that “you should use Firefox despite Mozilla’s leadership” is far more true and has been true far longer than you realize.

But you should also understand that original market-share vs ceo salary meme is a creation of Brendan Eich, presumably born of a grudge, and notably elided his tenure as CTO, during which the worst of that decline happened.

You should still use Firefox though.

mhoye, 9 months ago to random

I heard a confession from a friend the other day who's working on ML in health care, who's leaving that field as soon as he can, because as best as he and his team can measure, the most important thing ML analytics can bring to hospitals is the mathematical certainty they should have taken the money they spent on ML analytics and hired nurses instead.

mhoye, 5 months ago to random

If you ever wondered what happened to that TextBlade kickstarter project, the answer is "they succeeded in building what they set out to build, and then a patent troll cut them off from being able to ship anything, ran them out of funding runway, and now they have several shipping pallets of working hardware stored somewhere in California, a stack of legal bills and no way to ship the finished, working product they've built."

mhoye, 8 months ago to random

The team that wanted to guarantee adblockers didn't work last week is deciding what bookmarks you get to keep this week.

Firefox is good. You should try it. But FFS you all need to stop using Chrome.

https://strangeobject.space/@silvermoon82/110969122337810598

mhoye, 7 months ago to random

The design of women's v. men's pockets: https://pudding.cool/2018/08/pockets/

My daughter inherited a pair of my cargo pants a while ago and spent a good hour yelling HOW DO YOU HAVE SO MANY POCKETS, THIS IS AMAZING, THE POCKETS EVEN HAVE POCKETS IN THEM AND MY HANDS FIT ALL THE WAY INTO THOSE POCKETS

mhoye, 1 month ago to random

Since I see that a notable VC-famous is now telling us that he wish he'd "stood by" Eich way back, I'd like to tell you a true fact that situation: Eich didn't lose the CEO's job for his (reprehensible) Prop-8 donation.

Everyone wants to believe that's true, because fits nicely into narratives a number of invested camps want to believe, whether it's somebody being ousted for reprehensible views the woke SJW mob somehow pulling down a great leader (tm) but that's not what happened.

mhoye, 1 year ago to random

I think it’s important to repeat: you don't "have something to hide" when you put blinds on your windows or close the door when you're on the can or wear clothes.

Privacy isn't about having something to hide. It's not about keeping secrets. It's about you being the person who chooses what you reveal about yourself, and when, and to who, and the other word we have for that is "dignity". Your inherent dignity, as a human being.

Your privacy is the agency you have over your dignity.

mhoye, 1 month ago to random

Just a staggering engineering feat. Absolutely incredible.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/