← Feed

Posts

• Post #2272483

  RE: https://mastodon.world/@BrianJopek/116535953051712892 The South lost the Civil War for good and proper reasons.

• Post #2136641

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@shoq/116473178344417223 The actual source of the Orwell-attributed quote is disputed. That aside, It's a legitimate point, one that should be put to every "journalist" who was present, and not let off until they provide something resembling a real answer. Once it was announced that slob would be attending, everyone else should have called in sick (to their stomach). Who would have suspected the mainstream media would descend so quickly pa...

• Post #2136640

  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@SecureOwl/116479436083198399 Ho-lee crap. Read the whole thread. Have some Scotch near to hand; you'll need it.

• Post #2136639

  1/N: Okay, I'm going to need some help with this from some #Neovim and #LSP fans/experts. The Typescript LSP server behaves differently between the CoC and Mason plugin frameworks. I have the colorscheme set up such that hovered symbols highlight in green for read refs, and red for write refs. This work in Coc, but not in Mason. Indeed, with verbose logging, the LSP seems to be returning different data for the symbol's "kind" -- a string under Coc, but an in...

• Post #2136638

  Trump Derangement Syndrome: n. 1. A severe mental disorder whose sufferer believes Donald Trump is one or more of the following: - A successful businessman - Honest, truthful, and forthright - Innocent of fraud - Innocent of rape - Has never lost a lawsuit - The true winner of the 2020 election - Well-educated - Knowledgeable - An observant Christian - President by divine right - Infallible Sufferers are frequently a danger to themselves, others, and the integrity of democratic institutions.

• Post #2136637

  @Graham_LRR : Something I was wondering about this morning. In some typefaces, the width of numerals is variable, "1" often the narrowest. Thus, if you're animating a counter with such a typeface, the full width of the number will jump around as it changes. In other, otherwise proportional typefaces, the numerals are all the same width such that, no matter which digits are displayed, the width of the full number will not vary. Is there a special term for typefaces t...

• Post #2136636

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116521307476692073 Confirmed this was present on my desktop and laptop systems, both running Debian Sid, with the "release" version of Chrome installed. I run nightly backups, so I checked the backup logs. The file first showed up on my desktop on 27 April (the file's current date), and on 2 May on my laptop. Chrome is my backup browser for sites that won't behave in Firefox + nuMatrix. If turning off all of Chrome&#3...

• Post #1337385

  RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116421159289416290 Y'know... I've been ruminating for a while that "AI" was always a scam. Previous scams were aimed at bilking the middle class. But the middle class has been almost completely hollowed out. So now they're defrauding the investor class. The first attempt was with cryptocurrency and NFTs, but it was too quickly obvious they were bore no tangible connection to reality. "AI" has fooled f...

• Post #1094071

  RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@dougmerritt/116349163827428010 Dissent. The author's thesis makes a fundamental assumption: Code is now cheap. This assumption is false. When machine code was supplanted by assembly code, code did not suddenly become cheap. When assembly code gave way to compiled languages (COBOL, FORTRAN, Algol, Pascal, C, etc.), code again did not become cheap. If we assume LLMs are the next step in programming (and I don't), then we've simply moved anot...

• Post #1094070

  RE: https://mastodon.online/@tomshardware/116365921116274137 If I were a manager at AAPL, I would have a rather sharp conversation with the engineer who checked this in, because it's such an obvious failure point: "Did you do the arithmetic? And if so, what made you think 49 days was long enough!?"

• Post #1094069

  Obervation During Inebriation: Remember how Comcast whined and bitched that their peer points were being flooded with Netflix traffic (they weren't), and was making bank off of "their" subscribers? Remember how Comcast deliberately throttled Netflix until they agreed to the pay the ransom? ...Interesting that we haven't heard a peep out of ComXCastFinity, or indeed any of the CDNs, about the massive abusive traffic coming from the LLM companies.

• Post #1094068

  (*weary sigh*) Neovim has a popular addon called Mason, with which you can install other addons very easily. Except... There were some addons it was failing to install: "Go look at this logfile for more info." (Narrator: There was no more info.) After half a day of poking around and dropping printf()-equivalents inside Mason, I found the culprit: `npm init` in a bare directory errors out, sans clues -- not what it's supposed to do.

• Post #971704

  Just now hearing about the annoyances the Artemis crew are experiencing w/r/t getting Outlook to work. All the news stories have been reporting it as, "If you're an office worker, the Artemis crew's woes will be familiar to you..." If I were the EiC, my headlines would read more along the lines of, "WHAT DROOLING MORON PUT MS OFFICE/WINDOWS ABOARD A SPACECRAFT?" Yeah, I know it's "just" their "personal devi...

• Post #808413

  The view count on these music videos is criminally low. See if you can do something about that. (If ever you were a fan of Warner Bros. cartoons, these should be a very easy watch.) https://youtu.be/MII6UU9TNbI https://youtu.be/VMmD_N6u384

• Post #808412

  OpenAI, Anthropic, Gr0k, Gemini, DeepSeek, Quen... I think I finally figured out what they all are. ...They're GIR. ...From "Invader Zim." Because when anyone asks why they're so stupid, the purveyors always reply, "It's not stupid. It's advaaaaanced!" https://youtu.be/I93yg0ABFko

• Post #771253

  1/2: First-World Kvetching: Now that Debian Sid is carrying modestly up-to-date packages for Hyprland, I'm looking to make my desktop prettier. To that end, I took a brief look at Quickshell, the basis for a fair bit of the prettiest examples out there. And then I looked at some of the "dotfiles" that are out there. Holy Crap... This screams "hodgepodge" far more than "coherent design." And while you *could* craft a package pul...

• Post #771252

  Stupid Random Thought from Someone Who Doesn't Know Anything About LLMs or Signal Processing: Can the neural network of an LLM be thought of as a multi-dimensional resonant cavity? If so, is it possible through prompting to inject a resonant signal into the cavity, swamping out all finer detail and effectively destroying the model?

• Post #771251

  Found on Discord: "USA is 50 third world countries in a trenchcoat, pretending to be a developed nation."

• Post #771250

  Well, that was surprisingly easy(-ish). Just installed Forgejo into a BSD jail running on my NAS. The package was very thoughtfully put together, called out the configuration bits I needed to fill in, and I had a Git server running on my LAN within a couple hours. After a few minutes additional work, it was speaking TLS, and had 2FA enabled.

• Post #771249

  The Slob has ordered the Department of The Interior to stop talking to the San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate: The "logic" is that the press is free to ask what it wants and print what it wants, but the government is under no obligation to respond. I will be amused to see how fast that idea evaporates when the Democratic administration very properly shit-cans OANN, Breitbart, and Fox News. https://www.sfgate.com/national-parks/article/interior-blacklist-sfgate-national-parks-220...

• Post #771248

  Okay, that's cool... The latest release of the @Vivaldi browser has a new feature called Auto-Hide, where pretty much the entire browser UI disappears, showing nothing but page content. Move the pointer near the edges of the window, and the UI elements for that edge slide back in, and then disappear when you move away again. Quite nice when visiting browser-based games.

• Post #771247

  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/116280575943263005 It would be nice if this resulted in an increased uptake of OpenWRT. I put it on a couple of cheap TP-Link units (before I switched to UniFi), and it worked fairly well. I wouldn't recommend your Average Joe attempt to install it, but technically astute people should have no difficulty. Unfortunately, what will probably happen is all the ILEC and cable Internet providers will send scare-o-grams to their captive audience saying...

• Post #590058

  I've written up on Slashdot the current state of the `chardet` LLM code laundering incident. If you feel it accurately reports the situation, please consider up-voting: https://slashdot.org/submission/17345340/python-chardet-package-replaced-with-llm-generated-clone-re-licensed

• Post #590057

  Well, isn't that interesting... I have a screening interview later today, to be conducted over Zoom. Now, it *can* work through a Web browser, but the desktop app is usually less hassle, so I installed it... No dark mode. No color themes. An asinine "AI" pane eating up 20% of window space. And apparently the only way I can have dark mode, color themes, and get rid of the AI pane (but only for up to 120 days)... Is to create an account. Deleted. Ask Razer why.