thomasapowell

thomasapowell, 6 months ago to mastodon

An unexpected benefit of having an Activity Pub focused open ended project for my SE class is I get test follows.

Hi👋 everybody from #Ucsd CSE. Have fun exploring the #Fedi. #Mastodon is just part of it.

If folks have suggestions requests for some CS Graduate student teams to build something for the Fedi as a class project reply below. They’ll see it or I’ll bring it to class for sure.

Maybe @lisamelton
Or @atomicpoet boost this for visibility. 🙏

thomasapowell, 9 months ago to ChatGPT

Filter approaches couldn't secure shit web apps from injections 100%, why do people think it would work for #ChatGPT !?! Wired has a very accessible article talking about just this https://www.wired.com/story/ai-adversarial-attacks/

#LLM Toxicity is a training fail. The ugly data in the model simply can’t be band-aided via a filter full stop. The REAL solution is to not have toxic training data to build the model which means no big quick web scrape train method, but rather quite a lot of hard work. Why not try that?

thomasapowell, 6 months ago to webdev

So my detail hunting #webdev students noticed that in #HTML and #CSS DarkGray is somehow lighter than Gray. 🫠

While that's a fun observation, has anyone ever noted that not very inclusive names like “NavajoWhite”, “Indian Red”, and “Moccasin” are also found in the named color space for CSS? "Peru” is also there? I get HTML with old-school presentation keeping them, but why CSS!?!

Source: Wikipedia shows them & the actual latest spec at the #W3C includes them - https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color/#named-colors 🤔

thomasapowell, 4 months ago to retrocomputing

My collection is thriving. All work and all are a blast. Yes that is a Vectrex and yes I know it isn’t a computer. #retrocomputing #retrogaming

thomasapowell, 3 months ago to VisionPro

Twas the night before #VisionPro, when all through the lands techies were hoping soon to stop using their hands

The hot takes were pre written all with much care, with hopes that St. Jobs spirit would still be somehow in there

The nerds all nestled all snug in their beds, with VR visions not AI nor crypto danced in their heads.

My girl in her LuLus, and me with emails still,had just settled our selves for a long Netflix and chill.

/1

thomasapowell, 10 months ago to threads

Has anyone else noticed the Techies don’t seem to be on #Threads. I looked for a slew of software folks, devrel people, tech pundits, etc. and found far less then expected. The ones I found had one post. The active ones were more tech personalities or news folks. It feels like the part of Tech Twitter that fled are all here still. Did anyone have a different take?

Asking more for interest. Unlikely Threads is a thing for me esp if they stay true to federation.

thomasapowell, 5 months ago to Colorado

Cue the GOP continuing to loudly support the 1st and especially the 2nd amendment of the US Constitution but not the 14th because that one is apparently woke.

#colorado #Trump #GOP #hypocrisy #USPol

thomasapowell, 11 months ago to random

Just finished up the Intro #SoftwareEngineering course tonight at UCSD. After a quarter we now have nearly 300 agile practicing, ci/cd employing, user and test focused devs who even wrote docs from ADRs to JsDocs. Lots of work but the teams rose to the occasion. We even did LLM impact on SE investigation. Kept their expectations in line by making the project Fortune Telling! Hard work but worth it to bring my industry practices to academia.

thomasapowell, 10 months ago to random

Has anybody else noticed that the market for used Teslas appears to be tanking?

Since Jan the old Model S I saved for my son has lost > $500 per month per Carvana. Wild ! I can imagine it has at least a small bit to do with brand erosion.

thomasapowell, 1 year ago to random

I know some hate #succession this season but some of these lines are just genius

“It’s like Jaws. If everyone in Jaws worked for Jaws.”

"Cat food Ozymandias"

“Bodega sushi? Are you insane?”

"They’re not all crypto-fascists and right-wing nut jobs. We also have some venture capital dems and centrist ghouls. Dad’s ideological range was wide.”

“Congratulations on saying the biggest number, you fucking morons.”

"Greg, do not put any more lemon water or wasabi in his eyes, OK?"

thomasapowell, 10 months ago to random

Eons ago in a different world a useful concept came out that was powered by theft. It was destroyed by those who it stole from yet later made legit. That was Napster.

Today LLMs & generative AIs are interesting but are also fueled by theft.

So will lawsuits from the Getty & content folks personified by Sarah Silverman Napster it or more likely will big tech shrug it off? Also could Govts step in now that geopolitical issues exist?

🤷who knows but 23-25 are gonna be interesting years.

thomasapowell, 9 months ago to mastodon

If certain people are bagging and saying the Fedi is where old techies go to live out their golden years online, then sign me the fuck up now, and also can I have an account with a view? Ok, now that is all settled, who is up for 68000 assembly bingo?

#Mastodon #Fediverse #Joke #ILoveThisPlace

thomasapowell, 4 months ago to random

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050478/apple-ios-17-4-browser-engines-eu

Merry Browser Christmas? (at least in Europe) @slightlyoff

thomasapowell, 1 year ago to internet

I know how we beat #Bluesky

We should just remind everyone that our top Masto instance shitpost.social is powered by the Web5 BS protocol running on a quantum computer backed by the blockchain.

Users who have an exclusive invite to this instance get a welcome air drop of some ElephantCoin and a chance to buy an exclusive @donmelton NFT.

Elite users who had more than 50k followers at the birdsite qualify for an exclusive meet and greet with #JohnMastodon

#shitpost

thomasapowell, 7 months ago to Starwars

Dave Foloni of obvious age to have been all into Star Blazers I have questions 🤔

#starwars
#Ahsoka
#conspiracy

The Blue Skinned Grand Admiral Thrawn of Star Wars universe

thomasapowell, 7 hours ago to ai

I asked ChatGPT another #AI BS engine to calculate Google’s BS engine’s failure cost and it came up with about $10.4 billion. Is that accurate who knows? Hilarious ? 💯

Cost calc below from ChatGPT

“Total Estimated Financial Impact:

• Ad Revenue Loss: $2 billion
• Increased Operational Costs: $300 million
• Legal and Regulatory Costs: $600 million
• Brand Damage: $7.5 billion

Total Estimated Loss: $2 billion + $300 million + $600 million + $7.5 billion = $10.4 billion”

#shitpost

thomasapowell, 7 months ago to random

Oddly one thing I actually like about Marc A’s screed is that it puts the apolitical denialism I observe running both thru CS departments & Industry on full display. There is so obviously politics in computing esp considering just how financially powerful SVC has become.

So let’s all stop a head in sand stance or “well I don’t want to pick a side” hand wringing and look at the space. It’s the proper thing to do as ignoring it is in effect tacitly approving of it.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/93kg5d/major-tech-investor-calls-architect-of-fascism-a-saint-in-unhinged-manifesto

thomasapowell, 1 month ago to random

As an SWE Prof, I warn students about the MVP rush, that iteration can't fix releasing too early making you an R&D release for others and tainting initial users.

Today, I had a sad example with a possibly cool documentation platform, Butterdocs. It could be a contender, yet it lacks code formatting, code blocks, & has no embeds, so it is pretty much useless for its best target audience as it stands. 😢

TL;DR - Release software when it is actually ready not early because of start-up beliefs

thomasapowell, 10 months ago to javascript

The best part about these #JavaScript and #webdev stickers is they are @slightlyoff created and approved!

thomasapowell, 8 days ago to ai

Last year I told my team we have to get off #Slack because this #AI train wreck would likely happen and I wasn’t ok with info leakage like that of our private and customer chat. Sadly as we are finding out it happened. We had picked #Mattermost and found it was fine as a replacement but the migration has been a slow effort. At least now it will accelerate.

thomasapowell, 6 months ago to webdev

In an effort to develop some better ways to help students get into semantic markup and abstract thinking in #webdev I started playing with the Lynx browser again just for a demo and (re)discovered that many modern approaches simply kick it to the curb. Sure simple page can render but many sites are utterly pointless to use with it and many security appliances immediately nuke the connection.

One surprise Lynx renders some crazy #HTML 3 leftover element unimplemented elsewhere...crazy!

thomasapowell, 10 months ago to webdev

Apparently, in #webdev we channel our inner Fight Club as .club domains have many like

https://nocss.club/ - No CSS allowed!

https://no-js.club/ - Somewhat sensible the way some use JS

Size related clubs
1 MB - https://1mb.club/
512kb - https://512kb.club/
250kb - https://250kb.club/

Seems pretty fat compared to the old 5k contests and 20k contests back in the day.

thomasapowell, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago) to random

Just stating the obvious.

Public service announcement, emergency, and government facilities should be provided solely on non commercial services and not things like Twitter or Facebook no matter who the owner is.

thomasapowell, 4 months ago to random

Rabbit R1 feels like someone saw Panic’s really cool Playdate (I own one and it is great) and said let’s do a quick and dirty Humane knock off on that type of hardware.

thomasapowell, 9 months ago to webdev

A pretty good article about the death of craftsmanship in #webdev using CSS and the rise of Tailwind as the protagonist. This is not CSS specific in my view. React and other things are just variations of this theme. Fundamentals don’t pay💰& dx > ux for far too many devs these days.

If you want to see the pointlessness of this CSS & HTML wise read any of Jason Knight’s articles about “failwind” on Medium. He has the receipts & proves it all with rewrite demos.

https://pdx.su/blog/2023-07-26-tailwind-and-the-death-of-craftsmanship/