tilton

tilton, 3 months ago to random

If you want to know why software is getting worse: the current trend, for a while now, has been to eliminate QA departments entirely. This sucks, because I have a TON of respect for QA engineers. The ones I’ve had the pleasure of working with have come up with ways of breaking my software that I never would have dreamed of.

tilton, 6 months ago to random

It is my opinion that LLMs are fundamentally a dead-end technology. They are a parlor trick that provide amusement, but cannot actually reliably accomplish what we ask of them, and are therefore even WORSE than useless; they're actively misleading, in a dangerous way. A gold rush for venture capital grifters, but not much else.

tilton, 7 months ago to random

I have 48.14 hours of PTO available for the rest of the year. Of those, 24 hours have to be used for mandatory three day Christmas shutdown, leaving me with 3 days of PTO. That has to cover me if I get sick, or if I want to take any days off. Gotta love the American Way.

tilton, 7 months ago to random

I have such mixed and conflicted feelings about generative AI images. On one hand I'm glad people are having fun with them! On the other hand, they feel so unethical to me, to the point that I can't enjoy them. I'm genuinely not sure where I stand.

tilton, 6 months ago to random

There's a certain brand of leftism that insists you can't enjoy anything as long as anyone anywhere is suffering. You can't live like that, though, you'll burn out and you won't actually help anyone. If you want to help people, you need to help them find some joy in this bitter world, no matter how small, and you can't do that if you won't let yourself experience any either.

tilton, 5 months ago to random

Iceland has weaponized cuteness to teach you the Icelandic alphabet

tilton, 4 months ago to random

Someone I know offline mentioned this as a joke, and it struck me as a perfect "is it real or not?" parody of every single New York Times headline from the past decade, so I grabbed the right font and turned it into one.

tilton, 6 months ago to random

Holy cow, this might actually get me to use Signal! I've hated their "phone number as username" policy since day one. https://community.signalusers.org/t/public-username-testing-staging-environment/56866

tilton, 4 months ago to random

I was listening to an NPR show about how experts are deeply concerned about a loneliness epidemic and how people used to spend over 6 hours per week with friends, but it’s down to like an hour and a half per week now. Well, I only see friends maybe once every month and a half, on average.

tilton, 4 months ago to random

There’s been someone on Fedi lately saying essentially that we must convert all images to WebP because it’s the superior format and I just do not agree.

tilton, 6 months ago to random

One huge drawback to running my own Mastodon instance is that when I click on a popular post from somewhere out there, I don’t get to see the replies to it. I have to click through to see the post on the original server if I want to see replies. It’s a bother and a real issue of federation.

tilton, 6 months ago to random

I can't believe I used to like web development.

tilton, 6 months ago to random

tilton, 4 months ago to random

Yeah the area I used to call home is just completely normal, it’s fine, nothing to see here 🙃

Two very average mid 20th century homes for sale in Santa Clara and Cupertino, CA. The first is listed at $2,650,000, and the other is listed at $2,960,000

tilton, 4 months ago to random

“Why are Americans so poorly travelled?”

Even with sales and discounts, you’re extremely lucky to find airfare to Europe or Asia for under $800 to $1,000 round trip per person, and it’s very often more. Add to that a hotel. And then there’s the woefully inadequate amount of paid time off work that many Americans have. It’s hard to just decide to drop $5,000 and say “let’s take the kids to France for a few days to get some culture” unless you’re wealthy and privileged.

tilton, 19 days ago to random

Me, all day long: "Man I can't wait to work on that project after work!"

Me, after work: "Good God work took a lot out of me, I'm way too tired to work on that project."

tilton, 2 months ago to random

Not a day goes by that I'm not grateful I didn't get on the Internet until I was 19, and that social media as we know it didn't really exist until I was in my 30s

tilton, 1 month ago to random

Someone gave me this Sun Ultra 2 last year, and I haven’t even opened it up to check it out yet. I think today I will explore to see whether it’s even functional or not.

tilton, 4 months ago to random

I find it deeply concerning at some kind of fundamental level that anyone uses generative AI like LLMs as search engines, or to try to find answers to questions where you care about the validity of the response for anything more than entertainment value.

tilton, 1 month ago to random

Infosec friends, you want to have nightmares tonight? Let me tell you what it was like to work in Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s. I worked at SGI, a major computer manufacturer. When I started, I was given an SGI Indy workstation running IRIX 5.3. It had no root password, setting one up was completely optional. I had full control over all software installed on it, and I could install anything I wanted from our internal dist server, including reinstalling the OS. New OS patches were occasionally available, but finding them and installing them was up to you. That workstation had a publicly routed IPv4 address and was connected to the campus Ethernet, which was in turn connected to the public Internet. There was no firewall, so I could access it from anywhere in the world (and since ssh wasn't much of a thing yet, that connection was unencrypted Telnet). And finally, to add to your nightmare, every workstation ran sendmail and received email directly: you could email me at <name>@sgi.com or directly at <name>@<workstation>.corp.sgi.com, and mail would be routed to my workstation. And yet... it all worked! And if I'm honest, I really miss it. Bad people broke things and ruined the good times for everyone.

tilton, 4 months ago to random

This Telegram update is making me want to go back to just using UUCP for communications.

You don't have a right to know when I'm currently online, and you don't have a right to know whether I've read your messages or not yet, and I don't owe anybody an immediate reply.

tilton, 4 months ago to random

There’s an all-hands meeting at work this morning and I can’t take it, I literally just left. It’s nothing but self-congratulatory capitalist wankery, name dropping about Davos, and AI hype. God, the AI hype. Actual quote: “Our challenge to you: Everyone MUST build a product that incorporates AI this year!” Nothing about “these problems seem ripe for AI so we should look into how it can help,” no, it’s literally “Figure out how to use AI and use it, we don’t care how”. OK, have fun with that, you’ll be doing it without me.

tilton, 4 months ago to random

I’m upset about the state of phones. I think I’m done buying Apple products for good, I really don’t like the direction of the company and how locked down the ecosystem is, but I also fundamentally hate Google, so don’t want to use their products either. GrapheneOS only runs on Pixel phones, but maybe getting a used one would be OK. Less money in Google’s hands.

tilton, 3 months ago to random

I should quit tech and open a used book store.

tilton, 2 months ago to random

My pizza box is trying to guilt trip me into recycling it, but we’re not allowed to recycle pizza boxes here. I must regretfully slide it into the trash.