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• Post #4370257

  *opens the hood of your laptop* welp i see your problem. you got transistors in here. lil electric switches. maybe billions of 'em. not much i can do for you

• Post #4367798

  ok i'm putting together notes for my intro to computer programming class, and i just don't see a way to teach computer programming in 2026 that isn't explicitly rooted in like... hardcore leftist ideology

• Post #4090032

  yeah assholes do this shit all the time, but claiming to care about someone's "agency" in the text of an *opt-out* form is still genuinely revolting https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceCode/in-the-stack

• Post #4017489

  so let me see if i understand this correctly. the big selling point of your coding assistant is that [checks notes] it "accidentally does cybercrime." did i get that right

• Post #3970206

  like any other markov chain text generator, the output is always going to be hit or miss, but more often than not my little solar powered alba generator is hitting the mark imo

• Post #3842209

  "This is *NOT* some kind of 'social warrior' project, never has been, and never will be," Linus said, thereby clearly demonstrating what kind of "social warrior" he is

• Post #3821032

  "rejecting AI is like rejecting the automobile" yeah i know lol

• Post #3763817

  today's millennial brain rot is mentally hearing the line "since thy duties be / To warm the world, that’s done in warming us" from Donne's "The Sun Rising" in the voice of Locutus of Borg

• Post #3744815

  i am constantly baffled by the lack of curiosity demonstrated by retro hardware enthusiasts who use llms to make their stuff. it's like... i thought we were here to understand how computers work from a historical and material perspective, in order to build a future for computation that empowers communities over corporate interests, and to redeem the knowledge bottled up in retro hardware design to enrich the commons. but no i guess you're here for the frisson of "lookie old thing do...

• Post #3730063

  very much recommend this beautifully written, acerbic, wide-ranging and informative piece about Arabic typography in the web browser https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/ "Arabic letters are strongly right-to-left. Latin letters are strongly left-to-right.... Spaces and punctuation are neutral and take their direction from whoever is standing next to them, like guests at a wedding who know nobody."

• Post #3694692

  implemented a function to step through instructions (instead of clock cycles), along with a little disassembler, which i can run right inside jupyter notebook

• Post #3679239

  anyway even if 100% of computer programmers *were* using AI, that wouldn't mean that AI is good or effective or worthwhile. could just mean that 100% of computer programmers are reckless shitheads

• Post #3639677

  really wish there was a publisher of computer programming books out there that specifically promised (a) they don't publish manuscripts whose production involved generative AI/LLMs; (b) they don't use generative AI/LLMs anywhere in the editing process; and (c) they don't publish books *about* generative AI/LLMs, unless it's about how awful those technologies are (and even then, only sparingly, bc frankly there are more interesting things to read and write about)

• Post #2873745

  python gotcha i just lost most of an hour to: dataclass objects will happily let you assign values to attributes that you didn't specify using type annotations in the class definition, unless you specify slots=True in the arguments to the class definition's @dataclass decorator. (for some reason i assumed that doing a typo on a dataclass object's attribute name would raise an exception, but actually no)

• Post #2610346

  huh it's almost like technical and ethical concerns can't be cleanly separated, owing to the fact that technology always exists in social and material contexts. who'd a thunk it

• Post #2475570

  as someone with a blossoming interest in compilers, i was very excited to learn about QBE, a "hobby-scale and pleasant to hack on" compiler backend/intermediate representation https://c9x.me/compile/ (i had been thinking "what if i had my hobby compiler emit llvm ir" but then i visited the llvm ir language reference page and scores of wailing banshees emerged)

• Post #2452161

  researchers, scholars, activists for hundreds of years: absent radical political change, automation will entrench inequality, not relieve it 😡 every tech ceo: absent radical political change, automation will entrench inequality, not relieve it 🥳

• Post #2393970

  hi everyone! this sunday (may 18th) at 4pm eastern, we're doing an ONLINE release show for my new book of poetry, Two of Pentacles. here's the place to sign up (free!) https://www.eventbrite.com/e/two-of-pentacles-zoom-release-show-tickets-1342086941169 (the two other readers—Holly Melgard and John Cayley—are both AMAZING btw) more info about the book here: https://shop.nothing-to-say.org/products/two-of-pentacles

• Post #2304453

  what if instead of investing $500 billion in GPUs and data centers, we'd invested $500 billion in like... HyperCard

• Post #2301067

  my favorite kind of AI/LLM criticism media is when the person begins with a huge hedge like "I'm not an AI hater. *of course* AI is a useful technology and it will doubtlessly have transformative effects on the way we work" and then they spend the next 8k words/45 minutes showing how AI isn't actually useful and won't actually transform the way we work. it's like... it's okay to just say that AI sucks

• Post #2264308

  so... froggo jammed a real actual game boy color into a smart watch form factor. this might actually be the most impressive retro gaming hardware mod of all time? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTUg_NePXy8

• Post #2173610

  ok there's an "open source" business scheme i've seen out there that works like (a) product itself has an MIT-like license (b) useful add-ons have a GPL license (c) want to use the GPL add-ons without having to follow GPL? pay the business money and they'll license them separately (d) public repo has a contributor agreement in which contributors essentially surrender all copyright to the business running the project i get that you gotta make a buck but this is pretty expl...

• Post #2072929

  i like writing assembly because it helps you realize that even when you do something really simple on a computer, like check if two numbers are equal, beneath the surface there's this old grandpa who's like "well hold on there, let me just load this little feller into the accumulator"

• Post #1958949

  the contract faculty union at NYU, of which I am a member, reached a tentative agreement with the university earlier this week (after a two-day strike). i have to say i'm pretty happy with the outcome of the agreement https://nyucontractfacultyunion.org/cfu-uaw-tentative-agreement-highlights/ in conclusion, do a union, you'll be glad you did

• Post #1759588

  at first for some reason i read "out the fish" in this headline as some sort of colloquial multiword adjective, like "out of sight," and thought that 404 media was immodestly congratulating themselves on their top-notch shindigs

• Post #1693575

  here i've been saying "i code without using llms" when i should have been saying "i code with maximum token efficiency"

• Post #1584050

  i think i'm experiencing a mid-life crisis (strong desire to learn how to implement a type checker)

• Post #1584048

  Anna Anthropy has a new zine out about '90s shareware, and it is excellent https://w.itch.io/shareware-made-me-trans

• Post #1544833

  the feeling you get when the web page has frames... you know you've found the good shit

• Post #1494099

  the nyc street tree census data is really fun and easy to work with! my favorite nyc street tree is the pin oak, and i made a little map of all of them (at least, as of 2015) (zoomed in here on brooklyn)