@vidar@galaxybound.com
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

vidar

@vidar@galaxybound.com

Techie, #scifi writer (galaxybound.com).

Live in Croydon, London, UK. Originally from Norway.

#sf #sff #sciencefiction #books #author #science #space #linux

He/him

Anti-authoritarian, left-wing, allergic to bigots. Breakthrough Party

(This account is strictly personal/for my writing; nothing I publish here is on behalf of my employer at my day job.)

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

vidar, to random
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

My physiotherapist has just sent me a message asking me if "tomoz" is ok for me, and the language purist in me is sorely tempted to find another physiotherapist.

vidar,
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

@sfwrtr I don't care that he's informal - it just really grates on my ears...

vidar, to random
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

Running out of editor improvements to use as procrastination to avoid writing.

Contemplating designing a custom font to optimize my procrastination, I mean writing, next.

I don't know why. I enjoy it during. I know exactly where the story is going. There are scenes I'm looking forward to writing.

(I got about 1k words written yesterday, which is better than in a long time - how I long for when I did 3k words on average, and 11k words on the best day, for my last book)

kenthompson, to books
@kenthompson@mastodon.world avatar

#enshittification, anyone? Perfect example from publishing. A publisher is using AI to write crappy nonfiction, then assigning author names that almost match leading experts in that field (to trick search engines). No doubt other AIs will now search those texts as authoritative. This is done solely to make money and only makes the world a worse place.
#books #reading #ai #bookstodon @bookstodon @pluralistic

https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsletters/book-club/

vidar,
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

@hexbatch @OhOkKay @kenthompson @bookstodon @pluralistic How would that offer proof of any kind? I write start to finish, and then do linear edit passes. That'd be trivial to fake with AI. So either a tool would deny me the ability to write the way I do or force me to fake an edit history to seem human enough, or their attempt at requiring evidence would be worthless.

vidar,
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

@diazona @hexbatch @OhOkKay @kenthompson @bookstodon @pluralistic My process isn't really incremental like that. I write a couple of paragraph synopsis, and then a list of scenes, and then I write start to finish, and then do a linear pass of edits. That process would work very well to prep prompts for an AI too, and so any records I have would prove nothing.

My take is if I ever get challenged, then fuck that - I'd go elsewhere. But writing isn't a living for me, so it's easy for me to say.

nyrath, to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

https://newatlas.com/robotics/openai-1x-eve-humanoid-work/

vidar,
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

@isaackuo @nyrath @60sRefugee I think the main reason for an appeal for a semi-human form factor is that efficiency and even total cost will be trumped by the ability to do gradual rollouts.

E.g. wheelchair accessible is not enough because people can place things in the way, so whether wheels or legs a robot would need to be able to move things out of the way or step over it. That'd be a great reason for "hanging arms" robots, but now it's an installation job.

vidar,
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

@isaackuo @nyrath @60sRefugee A variety might well appear in the long term, once people are already sold on the idea and do refits, but a "good enough" humanoid one would compete for all the spaces that have not been adapted and where a refit might be a too hard sell, but a lease on a single unit might not.

kimlockhartga, to bookstodon
@kimlockhartga@beige.party avatar

@bookstodon @lgbtqbookstodon

Did your parent(s) try to hide certain books from you, while you were growing up?

I think my mom would have done better to just mix Rubyfruit Jungle in with all the other books, instead of putting it by itself on top of the bookcase. Curious teenaged me found it.

vidar,
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

@kimlockhartga @bookstodon @lgbtqbookstodon Not really intentionally, I think, but my dad had placed the Morgan Kane series (Norwegian pulp Western from the 1960s; it's dated and the English translation is reputedly awful) behind other books, out of lack of shelf space, and that of course made it irresistible long before it was age appropriate.

vidar,
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

@kimlockhartga @bookstodon @lgbtqbookstodon I realize now that I really missed a trick with getting my son to read more when he was younger by not "hiding" some in places he'd find them... (was a struggle to get him to read for years; now he goes through books at a ridiculous rate, so it worked out)

rolle, (edited ) to Korean
@rolle@mementomori.social avatar

A question for bilingual/polyglot people: Do you post both in English and in your other, native languages? How do you decide which one? I see my English posts get more reach, probaly because some people have filtered out other languages.

I find it easiest to post in the language whatever I feel like writing in. I don't give it much thought. How about you?

Boosts appreciated.

vidar,
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

@rolle Almost entirely in English. Every now and again I'll post in my native language (Norwegian), but the audience is so much bigger for English it's an easier choice.

I mostly post in Norwegian or the other languages I know when replying to something written in those languages because I usually feel it'd be rude of me to switch languages on people if/when I know how to reply in the language the conversation is taking place in.

vidar, to random
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

If you want to really lose faith in LLM's, try to get them to write x86 assembler. I sometimes do, and it must be a symptom of some deep-seated self-loathing - it's just magnificently bad it has to be babied like a junior developer with no exposure to anything but Visual BASIC that has just had a massive dose of magic mushrooms.

Of course, x86 assembler looks like that even when well written.

vidar, to ChatGPT
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

It is quite funny that OpenAIs documentation pages gives its examples in a severely constrained set of languages when they could trivially have GPT translate the examples into nearly any programming language

vidar, to ChatGPT
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

It is so much easier to read computer science papers where they insist on peppering the paper with mathematical notation when I can just paste the diagram into and have it translate it to $preferred_language. I can read most of the math I encounter, but I can read the code much faster and often want to implement it anyway and now I don't have to.

Tempted to write a script to pre-process papers to pre-emptively feed figures to chatgpt and output an annotated version.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Enshittification intensifies:

vidar,
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

@petealexharris @cstross I don't know if it's still as creepy as it was and I'm not inclined to go to check, but at least a few years back the "People also viewed" tab on the profiles of younger women on LinkedIn was often so dominated by attractive young women that it very strongly suggested a significant number of people had distinctly unprofessional reasons for "also viewing" a lot of those profiles.

vidar, to amiga
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

I find it fascinating how many of the solutions to responsive UI code are still found in the design of the . E.g. reworking my terminal is largely informed by how AmigaOS worked: Instead of the terminal largely hanging of an event loop that does most of the work in one thread, on the Amiga it's spread across multiple threads passing events. Reworking my code to do that instantly resolved responsiveness issues further down on my todo list without any extra work.

vidar, to random
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

It's too easy to forget that a grammar works in both directions: To both recognize and generate data. This is one of the compelling reasons for the use of formal grammars for software protocols (as opposed to programming langs, where they're good for people but generated parsers are still a pain to work with): Using it to power both the client and server-side of an API from the same code.

(subtext: The code powering "my" Ruby X11 client would work as the protocol layer of an X11 server too)

vidar, to random
@vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

My first time at a cash point/ ATM in years and it's stuck on a Windows boot screen complaining about a corrupted drive.

weirdwriter, to Pubtips

deleted_by_author

    •
    vidar,
    @vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

    @unixwitch @cstross @weirdwriter @bookstodon Case in point, they did it to Terry Pratchett, and he was not amused, and he also claimed Iain Banks supposedly tore out one of the offending pages and ate it at a con (I don't want to dig into the veracity of that, as I'd love it to be true)

    https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/terry-pratchett-and-the-maggi-soup-adverts/

    lauren, to random
    @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

    In the 21st century you will be able to buy 256GiB of nonvolatile memory from a major manufacturer on a tiny little card for about $14. Yeah, there's cheaper, but that's good enough for jazz, as the saying goes.

    vidar,
    @vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

    @lauren Johnny Mnemonic would have been very different if he didn't need to stuff the 40GB in his brain but could just smuggle it in any orifice. Nostril? Sure, can fit hundreds of GB there.

    futurebird, to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    People who understand office politics are terrifying. I struggle to tell what anyone is getting at and have no idea why anything is happening and just try to do my job well and not get yelled at. That is literally all I can manage. I have this coworker who keeps asking "why did they schedule me like this and you like that?" I don't know. It's making me want to cry.

    vidar,
    @vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

    @futurebird I tend to think I do, but largely because it's a fascinating athropology and game theory problem.

    In the "Here you can see two rutting males involved in a ritualistic combat by passive aggressive e-mails. Oh, wait, we're about to see something very exciting - one of them has escalated by Cc:'ing the other ones manager while giving what on the surface looks like a compliment. But is it?"

    But it's exhausting, and I can't be bothered to play along.

    cstross, to random
    @cstross@wandering.shop avatar

    I can't help thinking that we'd be in a better place as a society if we assigned a notional value of, for example, 1 human lifetime per ten million dollars lost through financial crimes, and punished white collar criminals who cause >= $10M in damage as if they'd committed the corresponding number of murders.

    (Lower the valuation if you want: $10M is plausibly a working lifetime’s earnings for a very well-paid professional. I went high because I'd rather err on the side of mercy.)

    vidar,
    @vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

    @jwz @cstross This sounds like the start of a VC pitch deck. Surely there is a novel financial instrument in trading murder-offset derivatives and leveraging investments to offset the murder of just the right people to maximise your return on investment and thereby increase your ability to leverage your murder-offsets even further.

    vidar, to random
    @vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

    I don't know who taught to knit a "hat" for the Royal Mail mailbox, and add LED Christmas tree lights, but it actually looked quite nice...

    Benhm3, to random
    @Benhm3@mastodon.social avatar

    @pluralistic has a way with words:

    "This "AI debate" is pretty stupid, proceeding as it does from the foregone conclusion that adding compute power and data to the next-word-predictor program will eventually create a conscious being, which will then inevitably become a superbeing. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding faster and faster horses, we'll get a locomotive:"

    vidar,
    @vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

    @Benhm3 @pluralistic This rests on an assumption that we know what causes consciousness and so know that the differences between "the next-word-predictor program" and humans fall on different sides of that divide. But that is both massively exaggerating what we know about consciousness and massively downplay current AI. To start with, the "next-word-predictor programs" are Turing complete with just a basic loop around them.

    vidar,
    @vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

    @Benhm3 @pluralistic It may not be inevitable that they will reach consciousness, but we simply don't know. Absent any evidence of anything supernatural in human brains that deviates from regular cause and effect, we don't know of any barriers to it.

    But, sure, we also don't have any evidence to support the notion that it is inevitable.

    Helen50, to books

    when do you abandon a book?
    I'm not very good at it, but I might be about to do it again.
    @bookstodon

    vidar,
    @vidar@galaxybound.com avatar

    @Helen50 @bookstodon Either right at the start (within the first few pages), or pretty much never. The only books I've abandoned in the middle were books that I started over again later and that became among my favourites.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • thenastyranch
  • magazineikmin
  • osvaldo12
  • khanakhh
  • Youngstown
  • mdbf
  • slotface
  • rosin
  • everett
  • ngwrru68w68
  • Durango
  • anitta
  • InstantRegret
  • GTA5RPClips
  • cubers
  • ethstaker
  • normalnudes
  • tacticalgear
  • cisconetworking
  • tester
  • Leos
  • modclub
  • megavids
  • provamag3
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •