As part of my MSc, I'm getting a few lessons in technologies I'm not familiar with. I've found some of these lessons extremely confusing - even when I'm proficient in the language.
Here's an example of a coding fragment from one of the tutorials in the R language. Let me explain everything that I think is wrong with it....
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.
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.
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
@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.
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.
@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...
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.
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.
Meta are running an expensive ad campaign across the UK promoting the metaverse concept, pointing to the advantages of VR based occupational training - e.g. for surgeons.
This seems something of a tactical retreat. It’s not really a metaverse is it? It’s AR/VR based training, like a flight simulator. We’ve had that for years, and it can be genuinely useful for very specific things.
It’s not discussing Q2 sales figures in Zuck’s ghastly legless cartoon world that they tried to sell initially.
Convincing investors the metaverse dream is still alive with such a campaign seems really odd. Like, yes, there are useful niche functions for AR/VR headsets - occupational training, manufacturing, some medical settings. That’s always been true - see also: Google Glass.
They don’t make me want to go out and buy a VR headset. Pretty much the only significant consumer use case is gaming, and there still doesn’t seem to be any compelling use case for the average office worker.
@antlerboy I think step one is “buy an Oculus device”.
I think the ads in London are more about trying to get business, political and thought leadership and to convince investors that the metaverse hasn’t been a multi-billion dollar waste of money to satisfy Zuck’s ego, which it clearly has been.
The xz vuln is simultaneously terrifying and impressive. Can’t help but admire the ingenuity of it.
Also, it very much feels like a time to really properly invest time and energy into reproducible builds and other technical improvements to building and packaging… but instead we’ll get more timewasting checkbox bureaucracy and unpleasant attempts to impose legal liability on volunteer OSS maintainers (while the Fujitsu Horizon crooks aren’t in prison).
I heard recently about the practice of trying to listen to a new album every day, specifically as a way to try and personally defend against the "algorithmisation" of everything, and the resulting reduction of all culture to machine-generated slop.
It kind of feels a bit like trying to solve climate change through recycling bottles and cans, but still worth doing. What else are people doing in the same vein?
@lori Can stream the album... that's a whole separate issue. It's more about not relying entirely on recommendation algorithms for discovery, rather than the crappiness of streaming revenues.
I frequently have to deal with #PDF files that contain nested PDFs (which Adobe marketed as "PDF Portfolios").
They open fine in pdf.js in Firefox, but not in macOS Preview. They are just PDFs that have one page telling the user to download and use Adobe Acrobat (no way, fuck that), and then a bunch of attachments.
They're worse in every way than just distributing a zip/tarball of PDFs. Here's a 20 line Python script (with a nix-shell shebang) to unwrap 'em.
The main thing I hate about PDF is that every way it is used has a dozen different names and they're all poorly documented and drenched in marketing BS.
Also, the response of plenty of people is "just use HTML" which ignores the use cases for PDF—namely, archiving and digital representation of printed docs, esp legal/governmental.
I've been burned before when gov. docs have been taken offline without notice or explanation. Plus "it's on p.47" is still cognitively easier than "Ctrl-F for <str>"
Today, I needed to write a quick and dirty Python script to do some web page parsing and regexery, so just popped in python311 and python311Packages..
No pyproject.toml, no containers, no Docker, no venv. Run it, use result, then Nix's garbage collector will throwaway the dependencies when we're done.
@xerz@aral I've started writing a post also. I've noodled around with it a bit on Mac and have tried NixOS in a VM.
The ecosystem is quite overwhelming (and a lot of the docs are old or not great).
I'm starting by dipping a toe in and using it as a partial alternative to Homebrew, and using it for development environments and scripts... but the Nix language and Flakes etc. are somewhat mysterious. The learning curve is pretty steep.