@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

wordshaper

@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network

Guy who bakes, snarks, writes, and codes.

Currently at Google (my second search engine employer!), previously at Bloomberg.

One time Perl 6 pumpking, lo these many years ago, as well as core perl contributor and part-time VMS perl port maintainer. I have written the occasional article, mostly on perl. (but once upon a time long ago on the Amiga. Those were the days...)

Currently not in France. Dammit.

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

ovid, to space
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Once again listening to some guy explaining "we can't colonize Mars because it has no atmosphere."

I'm thinking: <sarcasm type="dripping">Stop the presses! NASA and all the others must have forgotten that detail! We have a supergenius here!</sarcasm>

I'm also thinking: that guy's teeth were designed by Stable Diffusion.

If you're going to explain the reasons we may not be able to colonize Mars, focus on the ones we may not be able to fix. Much better argument.

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@ovid ...of all the reasons they could reach for to show that colonizing Mars is a bad idea for the foreseeable future they reached for that one? Seriously?

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

I am amused at the continuing indications that Tesla and SpaceX are running better because Elon is distracted with Twitter and can't get in their way.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/26/23699708/would-you-order-a-yoke-steering-wheel-with-your-tesla-how-about-for-an-extra-250

asymco, to random
@asymco@mastodon.social avatar

The iPhone was the top-selling brand in China in Q1, with 20% market share. This was a 3% fall y/y.
Oppo and Vivo were second and third best-sellers, saw shipments fall 10% and 7% respectively.

Honor and Xiaomi which mainly offer low-end models, saw shipments fall 35% and 20% respectively.

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@asymco I wonder how much of this is a reflection of the Chinese consumer economy and how much is an issue of the addressable market being saturated.

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

Great. I've started buying cookbooks in French. Actual physical paper ones, because international IP rules are a stupid nightmare so ebooks aren't an option.

aliettedb, to food
@aliettedb@wandering.shop avatar

Pecan and chocolate pie!

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@aliettedb That looks amazingly tasty and now I am tempted to give that a try. Possibly with raspberry jam, red bean paste, or gochujaru. (Though not at the same time. I think. Probably, at least...)

bikepedantic, to random
@bikepedantic@transportation.social avatar

Just got a letter from the BZA offering me the chance to comment at a meeting on a neighbor’s plan to:

“Add windows in the setback to a proposed as-of-right dormer…”

On the next street over.

I have… many comments, but I don’t want to endanger the ability of my neighbors to get the blessing of this kangaroo court.

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@bikepedantic I know some land use restrictions and requirements are good and necessary, but sometimes you look at what people are doing with them and are really tempted to just burn them to the ground.

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@bikepedantic it’s deeply stupid. Chemical plant next to a school? Sure! (if it’s a predominantly POC school) But a window? Well, y’know, not so fast it might change the character of the neighborhood or something.

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@bikepedantic Frankly I'm close to the opinion that if it doesn't put extra stress on the local utilities and isn't a safety hazard (and we have some pretty good regs on what counts. Some bad ones, sure, but mostly good) then it's good unless proved otherwise.

I'm not sure it'd stop anyone complaining 'cause let's be honest most of the people complaining enjoy that (as much as they can enjoy anything in what's an otherwise sad and bitter little life) but it would at least make public hearings about nonsense shorter.

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@bikepedantic The answer is inevitably one of "racism", "deep and abiding pettiness", or "we tried that and someone died".

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

I kinda wonder if any part of the launch failure of the Starship the other day was caused by debris blowback. They did a really surprising amount of damage to the launchpad and surrounding equipment, and I can't imagine that the rocket avoided all the flying bits and pieces. (Including, I assume, some pretty sizable chunks of concrete and dirt)

DrTCombs, to random
@DrTCombs@transportation.social avatar

There are, of course, plenty of villains to choose from, but my least favorite person right now is -me, who in February told everyone, "sorry, I can't do that right now, but I'll for sure be able to get it done by the end of the semester."

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@DrTCombs Did you say which semester? (And in which year?) I mean, sure, this is Spring Semester right now, but there's one in 2024, and 2025, and 2026 too...

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@charliejane Frankly the toaster thing seems a lot more likely than the LLM->AGI thing. Also a lot more useful.

crschmidt, to random
@crschmidt@better.boston avatar

"You can't block users" is not a viable element of any social network. Preventing people from publicly interacting with your content is, in fact, a hugely important element of being able to use social media at all.

I don't understand the idea of designing a system that doesn't take that into account.

https://fosstodon.org/@danarel/110260178948713297

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@crschmidt It's a combination of cowardice, cluelessness, privilege, sociopathy, and bigotry. These are not our finest people building these systems.

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

The WSJ is running a story that Apple News blurbed as "is the new retirement no retirement?" and... no. Just no. For those rare few people doing it because they have nothing better to do with their life (which, with the potential exception of some creative folks, is just sad) they should stop, it's unhealthy. And for the rest of the people who are working because they must (and c'mon, this is the WSJ -- you know they push a "peons exist to provide blood for the blood god and their skulls for the skull throne" narrative) it's sad and depressing.

No, I'm not gonna link to the article. You can find it if you like, but frankly little good ever comes from reading anything in the WSJ.

neil, to random

I will soon be starting foot.social, the premier place for fedi foot fans.

Don't forget toe like and subscribe, and tell your boyfriend - heel be well impressed.

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@neil Foot fans? We'll have a ball, but what is the goal of this server? Hopefully not just trying to score some fedi-points, that'd be kind of foul.

ovid, to random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Biggest scam ever: finding last minute international flights and having the flight prices keep changing.

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@ovid Airline pricing rules are turing complete. Whether they have developed a malevolent sentience or not is an open question, though there are some strong indications that aren't good.

DrTCombs, to random
@DrTCombs@transportation.social avatar

Wrapping up a project that has been cursed from its inception today. Tomorrow has never looked so good.

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@DrTCombs I assume you're getting ready for the ceremonial burying in a lead box at a crossroads of the ashes of the burned project plan? (Moon's waxing crescent right now, you might want to wait a couple of days just in case -- you can never be too careful with cursed projects)

crschmidt, to random
@crschmidt@better.boston avatar

The death of Adobe Flash was necessary, but the loss of Flash as a creative tool created a huge gap in creative visual media that, even a decade later, nothing else has filled.

The tools for Flash animation creation remain effectively unmatched in their ability to allow amateurs to tell stories.

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@crschmidt The death of flash made me sad, though it was utterly necessary. There was so much lost, both in the potential that was lost (they could have done so much better as a VM installed everywhere) and in the tool that was taken away from creative folks all over.

I kinda wonder if it would be possible to recreate in some way, but I suspect the runtime is by far the smallest of the pieces lost, and it's the end user tool support which would be truly necessary and that we'd never get.

appliedgo, to random

Everyone loves success stories!

Recently, a company switched from Scala to Go and were able to considerably increase CPU efficiency and memory efficiency this way.

But that's not the true success story. (Although we Gophers love to hear "from x to Go" success stories, don't we?)

The results of initial comparisons were quite bad: Go was slower! But the team was not willing to take this result as a fact.

They dug deeper.

And found the real bottlenecks.

This is the true success story behind the "success story". If you do not give up early, if you persist, if you work your way around the obstacles, there is a chance that you reach your initial goal and reap the benefits of your hard work.

Also in the latest Applied Go Weekly Newsletter issue:

  • Why Service Weaver (the application framework for Go that was announced in early March) is not CORBA or DCOM. These ancient concepts tried to make remote function calls appear just like local function calls. On the surface, Service Weaver might do the same, but looking closer, it's rather the other way round.

  • Go tip: Never do this when calling a goroutine! (Ooh, is this too clickbait-y?)

  • After-work fun: Play Roboden, a game written with Ebitengine

And more articles, videos, and projects from the last week.

Read it online: https://news.mailings.appliedgo.net/t9r2p7z0a5?utm_source=appliedgo-mastodon

Even better: Get the newsletter every Sunday (that is, two days earlier than I post it here) right into your inbox: https://appliedgo.net/subscribe?utm_source=appliedgo-mastodon (every subscriber gets a handy Go tools cheat sheet)

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@jayalane @appliedgo I suspect that somewhere in that company is also someone yelling about those goddamn kids and why can't they get off his lawn with their toy programming languages.

Scala is... not the easiest language for many people to wrap their brains around, and I wonder how much of the win came from shifting to a lower-cognitive-load language so everyone had more brain to throw at the actual problem.

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@appliedgo @jayalane Same. Scala and Haskell and a bunch of the other interesting languages are... interesting, and for people who think that way they're awesome but for most folks not so much. (This is normally where I make a pitch for well-defined cross-language ABIs but I'll forbear)

Annoying as it sometimes is (and annoying as the detractors sometimes are), a language that's not that complex is often the best (or least bad) choice. Yeah, yeah, I know, "X is COBOL for the modern age!" but broad accessibility and comprehensibility is a huge point in a language's favor. (Also COBOL was, for its era, pretty damn impressive, but that's a separate separate thing)

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@appliedgo @jayalane Oh, yeah! I really like APL and Forth and understand why people like LISP, but... the language you implement a system in should work the way most of the people who work on the system now and going forward think. More unusually-structured languages are best left for niche or hobbyist projects, not production code.

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

🆕 blog! “Silence Isn't Consent”

I was in one of those interminably dull video-conferences a few weeks ago. The presenter was pitching their grand vision of what our next steps should be. "So!" They said, "Any comments before we launch?" No one said anything. After half a minute the presenter said "As there are no objections, we'll proceed. Silence is […]

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/04/silence-isnt-consent/
⸻

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@Edent Seriously, you should send these "you consented because you didn't opt out of something you didn't even know about" people a bill. Sure, they didn't know about it but they're clearly OK with that.

JulietEMcKenna, to random
@JulietEMcKenna@wandering.shop avatar

A lot of discussion about the disappointments and stress of being a debut novelist is swirling around. I'm not seeing one aspect mentioned, so here goes.

My greatest concern is new writers I meet who have been taught by magazines, books and creative writing courses, to believe that the old business model of advances plus royalties from backlist will equal a modest living after a few years – as long as your well-written and edited book finds a readership and nothing disastrous happens.

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@JulietEMcKenna I am always reminded of what I was told by an editor at O'Reilly decades ago -- "If you're in it for the money, McDonalds pays better per hour". The pay differential... has not gotten better since.

ovid, to random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Ever notice wearwolves in movies are never obese? Totally missing out on some movie potential there.

What other "real-life problems" should the paranormal experience that we're not showing?

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@ovid Faeries are beset with eczema because of all the iron in the environment irritating their skin.

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

CNN Headline! - "Study says fried potatoes may increase anxiety and depressions risks." LOL -- pass the French Fries!

wordshaper,
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@lauren I suspect @darth would disagree with that.

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