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weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

We're going to need a new Turing test.

Since a willingness to fucking swear seems to be something authoritarians don't like, we could lean into that.

Assume AI unless proven otherwise by anti-billionaire behavior.

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

One of my least favorite aspects of American nationalism is the part where it causes people to think that "rah rah my team!" is an actual strategy with respect to geopolitics and other, significantly larger countries.

I live here, so there's some bias, but pretending that everyone else is magically inferior because they're not on Team Murica is a shortsighted strategy.

China is kicking our ass in so many ways, and most of the American public seems stucks on stereotypes from decades ago.

rticks,
@rticks@mastodon.social avatar

@weilawei

the ccp is terrified of anything that embarrasses them

China is responsible for COVID not as the origin point (who cares where it started) but for letting it fester for a month so the party wouldnt look bad...a government like that is not sustainable

far more terrifying is the Modi government and India which is embracing technofascism and MAY retain enough democracy to upend the world on ways we wont like...India and Brazil are still BRICS and dont care about democracy

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

Amazon might want to change its name to something less associated with wildfires. Maybe Sahara?

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

Less "productivity"; more "fuck you, pay me".

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

Every time I hear the word "productivity" it seems to be a synonym for "magnitude of stolen labor value".

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

A material representation of a profit motive is probably unlikely to exhibit prosocial behavior at any significant scale.

weilawei,
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

tl;dr: corporations will steal your shit, piss on you, insist it's raining, and then try to rent you the poncho they stole from you, but only after they cut telemetry holes in it.

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

"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,
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

When I say that our continued existence is incompatible with their remaining billionaires, it's stuff like this. Just one example of so many.

weilawei,
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

"Almost as soon as Hansen placed her first transparency on the projector, the attendees began interrogating her: Why did she do this research? Who directed her to do it? Whom did she inform of the results? The executives seemed to view her diligence as a betrayal: Her data could be damaging to the company."

This is how they think. These people are sociopaths, and we need them out of power.

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

The disassembly of the UTF-8 validator in firefox shows that it uses 1871 instructions. 🤪

Vs the < 400 to do it the completely obvious way or the 45 (plus a small static table, not code) to do it the slightly less obvious way.

https://bjoern.hoehrmann.de/utf-8/decoder/dfa/

weilawei,
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

I threw together a godbolt example with the sample code from that link to count instructions. Pretty nice.

(Ignore the unsafe stuff; I'm just counting instructions in the one function decode(), and wouldn't put all that unchecked stuff in production code.

EDIT: Which is probably good since my code--not theirs--has a pretty bad bug in it that doesn't affect instruction count. That's what you get without tests.)

https://godbolt.org/z/48j1bjnce

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

"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,
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

Where SHTF is when you run out of physical RAM to page in the virtual allocations. Until then, it's all gravy.

For instance, this box has no swap. It's disabled. If I actually ran out of memory for the kernel, it would panic and hard lock.

Fortunately, this is very unlikely in modern systems, and the OOM killer will terminate misbehaving userland apps--and this is a good thing, because it rescues the part of the system that matters for continued operation.

weilawei,
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

Anything that's too clever to be turned into the clever form by an optimizing compiler should probably have more documentation comments than actual code.

I can tell you that comparing bytes to -65 is a fast way to differentiate UTF-8 leading bytes from continuations; but that's a trick no compiler will do for you, because it involves treating one kind of data as another, seemingly unrelated type. So that code warrants a big comment explaining how it works.

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

Slack is taking the approach of, "we know people would opt out, so we made it impossible without switching to a different product."

This is almost somehow worse than not offering an opt out, because Slack is also insulting their customers.

gdinwiddie,
@gdinwiddie@mastodon.social avatar

@weilawei
A group I'm in is trying out mattermost.

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

All that tech being used to murder Palestinians is coming home to be used on you.

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

Signs your library may not be ready for production usage in the wild:

Your documentation doesn't say what file(s) to include or import.

Your examples use types and functions you don't explain anywhere.

shalien,
@shalien@projetretro.io avatar

@weilawei The fucking example doesn't work

anthropy,
@anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz avatar

@weilawei the amount of library creators that literally tell you to 'just read the code' and then their code looks like something zalgo would be proud of 😭

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

So we have pro-genocide billionaires with connections to the Israeli government causing US police officers to commit violence against US citizens.

People need to be tried for this. Specifically the foreign agents.

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

For a variety of reasons, I don't use the Ubuntu version of firefox, namely it's snap and it locks down the preferences by creating these policy files. No bueno. I just use a downloaded build from Mozilla directly.

New problem discovered: moving the binary itself breaks its ability to find the profiles.

Not moving the profiles, which would make sense. Moving the binary itself.

JFC, why people? What on earth motivated a design so broken? headdesk

weilawei, to random
@weilawei@mastodon.online avatar

That was frustrating. VLC opened but the mouse cursor would switch to this giant cursor (clown shoes, like 4x as large as the regular pointer, and a different color) when mousing over the window.

Resetting settings didn't fix it, reinstalling didn't fix it.. going into MATE pointer options, changing the cursor to another one and back did finally fix it.

It worked in every other app and on the desktop; it smells like VLC is doing questionable things behind the scenes (crossplatform, whee).

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