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tommorris

@tommorris@mastodon.social

Eternally damned techno-priest heretic, curly brace balancer, and pesky citation requester.

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tommorris, to Horizon
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Another #Horizon thought: tech teams seemingly didn't know Horizon data may be used for criminal prosecution.

If devs don't know how a system is to be used, they can't exercise good judgment in making it.

People snark about "software craftsmanship" being hipstery, but there's truth to it: good software is far more Savile Row than it is Henry Ford. Business may want interchangeable cogs but good software needs skilled people empowered to think carefully, do good work and give a shit.

tommorris,
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That's not even an ACAB "they wouldn't work on a system they knew would send people to jail" point (thought it might be for some developers depending on their ethical views), it is a "if you want to build a system with the sort of data integrity and reliability such that you can put the data in front of a court, please let me know ahead of time because that's an important set of constraints the developers need to understand" point.

tommorris, to random
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Lots of crypto guys are suddenly acting incredibly surprised that "I wrote some code" isn't a magic cheat code that gives you immunity from criminal liability.

https://www.dlnews.com/articles/regulation/tornado-cash-dev-alexey-pertsev-guilty-of-money-laundering/

tommorris, to random
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"Modern" front end webdev continues to be indistinguishable from satire.

https://hachyderm.io/@hbuchel/112434817499467925

nevali, to random
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polyglottery is hard work

tommorris,
@tommorris@mastodon.social avatar

@nevali I tried Mermaid recently for a very large flowchart but the rendering leaves a lot to be desired compared to Graphviz.

tommorris, to random
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AAA: please preorder the deluxe digital edition of our game, £99.99, then we'll have three separate rounds of DLC, a battle pass, and we'll shut the game down six months later

Hades II: it's £24.99 in early access, it's fucking amazing, and you get endless queer shitposting about it for free

tommorris, to random
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The people who are mad about tech journalists and YouTubers honestly and fairly reviewing the product actually in front of them (and not blithely accepting that the stuff on the "roadmap" will ever happen) are basically asking for participation trophies.

Odd. I heard that giving participation trophies at school sports days is a signal of the imminent collapse of human civilisation and screws kids up for life.

Perhaps that doesn't apply to tech companies. Or maybe just the VC-funded ones.

tommorris, to random
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: looking for a PC. Mostly for headless home server—Linux w/containers. Currently using a Pi4—but RAM/CPU/mini-SD doesn't quite cut it.

Desiderata: not a full tower if poss (prefer Mac Mini form factor), mainstream architecture, reasonable price, efficient power use.

May wish to add gfx card later for gaming. (eGPU on mini PCs—doable?)

Have built boxes in the distant past, but I value my time.

(Reply guy pre-empting—actual experiences please, avoid "you ACTUALLY want Y not X" etc.)

tommorris,
@tommorris@mastodon.social avatar

@Edent Thanks for that - I vaguely recall reading that post when you published it.

tommorris, to random
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Three, the UK mobile network, includes the Internet Archive on their "adult content" filter.

tommorris, to random
@tommorris@mastodon.social avatar

The simplest, lowest cost intervention against spread of airborne illnesses is also the one British businesses, public bodies, schools, universities (etc.) seems remarkably incapable of doing, namely opening the fucking windows to let some fresh air in.

It also has the added benefit of making the building nicer to spend time in and making people feel better.

luis_in_brief, (edited ) to random
@luis_in_brief@social.coop avatar

I was introduced last week to the concept of an “accountability sink”; a structural technique for saying “the rules/tools/processes made me do it” and therefore avoiding accountability. They aren’t universally bad but booooy is AI going to create a lot of them in bad places, like (checks notes) killing civilians.
https://kolektiva.social/@danmcquillan/112377379849654399

tommorris,
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@luis_in_brief Post Office Inquiry is a daily highlight that the combination of bad computers and inept corporate governance makes one hell of an accountability sink.

tommorris, to random
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RClone may be my new favourite piece of open source software.

It lets you sync and/or mount a variety of cloud file storage providers (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.) without having to install their proprietary apps that are increasingly being sagged down with surveillance, pointless redesigns and AI BS.

On macOS, for mounting, you can use MacFUSE, or FUSE-T if you want a userspace FUSE implementation without having to install a kext.

https://rclone.org/

tommorris, to random
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It's weird how in so much of post-apocalyptic fiction, the focus is on what happens after the proverbial nuke goes off... but only in America. The rest of the world is given pretty summary treatment.

The apocalyptic scenario would shift the power structure of nations: economic or military strength, global alliances, political power etc.

Odd that science fiction is able to set constraints of the current time aside (particularly re. science/technology), but struggles to do so with the state.

tommorris,
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@davidallengreen I guess the difference is in 1984, post-apocalypse, authoritatian super-states coalesce. (Which mirror the geopolitical concerns of post-WWII Britain...)

Hadn't really had that in mind so much as the anarchic, Hobbesian war-of-all-against-all societies (replete with skirmishes between factions driven by greed, ideology or both) that are often depicted as the consequence of the Big Bad.

The camera sometimes doesn't quite zoom out far enough to show the global effects...

tommorris, to random
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I love it when you see normie business/media thoughtleader types promoting self-proclaimed "AI experts" and my immediate thought is "I bet you a few years ago the 'AI expert' was an expert in crypto/web3/DeFi etc."

Bingo. Seconds later I find a podcast where they excitedly interview the founder of a crypto company who is now awaiting multiple criminal and civil trials for a scam where billions of dollars were lost.

It's all so predictable.

tommorris, to Horizon
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The #PostOfficeInquiry has just been told that internally, #Horizon was described as having "military level encryption".

Remember, yesterday, we found out they were using MD5 for hashing the audit log data despite being being built after 1996 (and apparently having fairly shaky security on the stored hashes).

Also, remember the training slide: "Link for instance is unable to decrypt the encryption we have, so we have to decrypt before sending!" (para 80 of the Technical Appendix).

tommorris, to Horizon
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One more #Horizon #PostOfficeInquiry thought for the day—the email threads that are shown in the Inquiry are a synecdoche of the hellscape of working in the big corporate world.

Pages of blathering from deeply mediocre people incapable of thinking beyond hashtags, KPIs, bullet points and mission statements. Neverending CC chains for arse covering. Constant prioritisation of comms over reality. Hideous typography.

It's both aesthetically repulsive and morally bankrupt.

tommorris, to Horizon
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Today at the #Horizon #PostOfficeInquiry emails from Post Office were shown discussing what terminology could be used in place of “bugs” which was considered both “slang” and “emotive” (despite being a completely normal term used by software developers).

They considered using “defects”, and seemed to settle on “exception” which they treated as synonymous with “anomaly”.

(Let’s ignore the fact that “exception” has a very specific technical meaning in many programming languages…)

tommorris, to random
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This morning I saw an advert on the tube for overpriced luxury apartments in Wembley. It was marketed as being in London’s “hottest new neighbourhood”.

“New”. Did it not exist before? It was terra nullius? Has it been gloriously discovered by landlords?

tommorris, to random
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Crypto rewards are inherently destructive of peer driven projects.

This incidentally is why blue checkmark VC dipshits like crypto: peer directed communities can be quite resistant to the ways the rich and powerful control the world. You can’t just just acquire Linux or Wikipedia etc. but with crypto you can incentivise wasting volunteer time at scale and undermine the viability of cooperative, non-commercial ways of making things.

From: @web3isgreat
https://indieweb.social/@web3isgreat@indieweb.social/112305757654763045

tommorris, to random
@tommorris@mastodon.social avatar

Meta demonstrating how to use AI in tasteful, well thought out ways that won’t offend anyone.

https://www.404media.co/facebooks-ai-told-parents-group-it-has-a-disabled-child/

tommorris, to random
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After the BloomTech/Lambda school mess, I urge people who want to get into tech, before you drop lots of cash on a boot camp (or a degree or certification), please reach out and talk to people in the industry.

There are so many low/no cost options. Free events for networking, hackdays, online courses, friendly communities that are really generous with their time like Codebar.

Come to meetups and events, and message people—mostly they are lovely and want to help.

tommorris,
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Boot camp courses might be the right choice for you. So might a traditional degree, or for certain specific areas of work, certification courses. Some boot camps are scammy, some aren’t. Some degrees teach outdated stuff or stuff that won’t necessarily get you the job you want.

None of them are magic job-getting cheat codes, they’re a possible route that might get you closer to where you want… or not. Talk to a different people and ask.

tommorris, to random
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Things I've seen being described as likely to remove the need for programmers...

  • naturalistic programming languages ranging from COBOL to AppleScript
  • OOP
  • Domain Specific Languages
  • Fourth Generation Languages (4GL)
  • SQL
  • Visual Basic/Delphi/Borland Pascal
  • XML
  • Low Code/No Code

Turns out each thing that is going to replace programmers ends up being either massively overhyped, or really broken and needing a bunch of programmers to make it work reliably beyond toy use cases.

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