weilawei

weilawei, 2 months ago to random

If the cost of 950 investigations was $8 million, that means that the maximum risk exposure (magnitude of cost wrt probability of occurrence) of a company across the industry is $8421/child at the worst. If they're catching 1% (I'd be shocked if they investigated more than that.), that means it effectively costs $84.21 to use a child for illegal labor.

https://www.al.com/news/2024/02/alabama-company-fined-117175-over-15-year-olds-fatal-fall-on-first-day-of-work.html

weilawei, 1 month ago to random

#stolenMeme #withAltText

weilawei, 4 months ago to RaspberryPi

What in the absolute fuck? #RaspberryPi no longer supports configuring your wifi directly, from bookworm on you need to use fucking cloud-init?!@ Are you shitting me?

Where is the configuration file that doesn't need a custom tool? Stop with this shit.

#enshittification

weilawei, 17 days ago to random

Whatever algorithm Steam is using to validate downloaded game content is terrible.

It's going at ~0.5 MB/s. I don't know what algorithm they're using, but that performance is garbage.

This machine bottlenecks on the drive at ~6 GB/s, RAM at ~18 GB/s, and a CPU core at 126 GB/s (if you're making use of all the AVX2 ports).

The same thing applies to when Steam launches. I get a full 5 minutes of cursor stuttering and the system is unusable.

weilawei, 2 months ago to random

It was really tough, but I picked my fantasy sportsball #MastodonCabinet finally.

President: @chargrille
VP: @mekkaokereke
Staff: @the_etrain
DCI: @blair_fix
STEM: @pluralistic
OMB: @AnarchoNinaAnalyzes
SBA: @carnage4life
CEA: @FluentInFinance
UN Ambassador: @LALegault
Trade: @Moira
DNI: @alissaazar
EPA: @ajsadauskas
Culturrr: @LRRRonEarth

#USPol

1/2

weilawei, 17 days ago to random

Things used to be so much simpler when savegames were just a file, and not some hideously overcomplicated 47 layer cloud thing that doesn't have any options for managing it.

Just try to get Steam to show the conflict resolution dialog so you can tell it to overwrite the cloud saves with your local one.

I got it to show -once-, it still failed, and now I can't get it to show again or do anything but fail with no options presented.

Again this is caused by people trying to be too clever by half.

weilawei, 26 days ago to random

When people say that defunding the police will lead to a wave of crime, I have to ask:

What about the wave of crime we wouldn't have been experiencing for centuries if we hadn't given "police" powers to slavers?

This mess is -because of the cops-.

No more standing armies in the street. It's way past time America got actual freedom and representation.

weilawei, 5 days ago to random

"Why is my computer using so much RAM?"

a) Stop running 3 or 4 browsers simultaneously; even the things that don't look like a browser might have a full browser under the hood these days. Browsers are memory intensive.

b) It's not using as much as you think. Allocated space that isn't resident in physical RAM has a very low cost unless you're actually out of physical RAM. Dynamic libraries that aren't in use will contribute to virtual memory, but not resident memory: browsers link a bunch.

weilawei, 4 months ago to random

#AdilaHassim: "#Gaza is a narrow strip of approximately 365 sq. km ... home to approximately 2.3 million #Palestinians, almost half of them children. For the past 96 days, Israel has subjected Gaza to what has been described as, "one of the heaviest conventional bombing campaigns in the history of modern warfare."

#SouthAfricaVIsrael #ICJ #CIJ

weilawei, 3 months ago to accessibility

Nicely done. /s

#a11y #accessibility

A picture of a LEGO person in a wheelchair on its back, unable to fit inside a building made of LEGOs. Caption: "Absolutely incredible accidental commentary by making him not fit in any of the buildings"

weilawei, 3 months ago to random

If I sound angry, and my takes sound vicious, it's probably from people repeatedly trying to kill me and my co-workers and enslave my neighbors.

I take that pretty personally, and someone has to get angry enough to make a stand about it, even when (like for me) it costs me my job.

And if you think they're not trying, I have the photos. If you're a lawyer and want to make a buck, you can have anything won in court as long as you make my former workplace safe for the people left there.

weilawei, 2 months ago to random

Does anyone have that meme where two guys are standing around during Jesus' crucifixion, and the first guy asks what he did, and the second one says something like, "be kind to your neighbors", and the first guy goes, "oh, that'll do it".

Something to that effect, I'm probably a little off. I got it on Mastodon originally, but it seems I didn't bookmark it or save a copy.

Edit: @pelikans found it! Thank you!

https://mastodon.online/@pelikans/112080488100468541

weilawei, 2 months ago to random

@hazelweakly I think you're interested in distributed systems; what are your thoughts on this approach (very briefly, FP language design for transparent distribution):

https://mastodon.online/@weilawei/111993367230388700

weilawei, 2 months ago to random

A common theme in industrial accidents seems to be people who want to appear as if they're doing something, no matter what, get flustered, lose track of what's going on... and don't -stop- themselves, instead choosing to make random actions.

An equally common theme is management who lets this stuff skate, either from being unable to identify it (lack of technical/social ability to assess someone else), or quota pressure of some kind.

Mix the two and bad things happen.

#musing

weilawei, 6 months ago to opensource

Seen many #OpenSource devs, some who apparently work on significant infrastructure projects, claiming they use a #LLM to plagiarise code from other open source projects without complying to the copyright of each project used for training data.

This is going to completely destroy any ability to rely on that software because now it's a legal landmine.

LLMs you didn't exclusively train on properly licensed data are plagiarism. Claiming someone else trained it or it was permissive is a BS excuse.

weilawei, 2 months ago to random

Modern programming languages are pervasively "single-threaded first" models.

And it's really a bear trying to get acceptable performance (I may have high standards) out of languages that really only have first-class support for single-threaded models of execution.

Most of the software out there is wasting your time by pretending you're using a computer designed in the 70s.

Even the advanced techniques we have for parallel computing date back to the 70s--and most programmers don't know them.

weilawei, 2 months ago to random

Famously excellent quality control: #Boeing

"What?! Quality didn't escape! A part of the plane did!"

Also Boeing lost another tire on takeoff yesterday. And they're being investigated for rudder pedals that don't work.

https://inv.tux.pizza/watch?v=Q8oCilY4szc

weilawei, 25 days ago to random

Hot take for the morning: interviews for dev positions don't need any code at all.

What they do need is to demonstrate the ability to take a problem in the business' interest, break it down into pieces, and describe (preferably draw, to ensure it's a clear mental picture) the flow of a concrete, actionable thing that could be built. Then, have them elaborate the weaknesses and costs of fixing those.

If they can do that, they can be full speed in 6 months from references and team guidance.

weilawei, 1 month ago to random

You don't stop Hamas by committing genocide. The world -got- Hamas by letting genocide go unanswered.

Maybe y'all missed it, but Hamas was founded by a child survivor of the Nakba. Watching your village get slaughtered might piss you off just a little.

There will be no security without peace.

Now, we're just supposed to arm Israel so they can invade every other country in the Middle East?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Yassin

#freePalestine #stopBombingEverything

weilawei, 1 month ago to random

asdfgsa it's that time of year again, and there is a carpenter bee sitting on the inside of my window.

sigh

time to begin the months-long relay race of bringing them outside.

weilawei, 1 month ago to random

Saw a quote of of an otherwise good post about software engineering, saying that anything you do more than once is worth automating.

I'd back that down a bit to anything you do at least 10x and expect to continue after that.

Making the automation takes at least 4x to do it the first time, putting you 3x behind.

If you save 50% effort per time, you need to do it another 6 times to break even.

Abstractions and automations are costs to be justified also.

weilawei, 2 days ago to random

"In one early experiment, conducted in the late ’70s, a group of 3M scientists fed PFOS to rats on a daily basis. Starting at the second-lowest dose that the scientists tested, about 10 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, the rats showed signs of possible harm to their livers, and half of them died. At higher doses, every rat died. Soon afterward, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose, 4.5 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, could kill a monkey within weeks."

weilawei, 1 month ago to random

So, $17.28 billion dollars to give weapons to Israel and $9.1 billion dollars to line their pockets because the Israelis sure af aren't letting any Palestinians have $9.1 billion.

weilawei, 1 month ago to China

Reasons to not start a war with China right off their coast: they are wildly outproducing us in the blue water navy category.

Our billionaires aren't about to stop strip mining the economy; we shouldn't be picking fights we are absolutely going to lose. Instead, we should be crushing the Russian invasion in Ukraine, which is more aligned with the things we do produce. Israel doesn't need all that stuff from us.

https://news.usni.org/2021/11/03/china-has-worlds-largest-navy-with-355-ships-and-counting-says-pentagon

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2023/10/pentagon-assesses-the-pla-navys-modernization-and-growing-aggression/

#china #taiwan

weilawei, 21 days ago to random

I found another one to block:

https://toot.io/@synlogic/112367188607203058