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• Post #4285446

  for now until the end of august, I'm running a sale on my programming book "building git" -- get 50% off using code BGAUG2026 https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/

• Post #4199952

  a great summary of the current state of de facto ruby governance from @threedaymonk@sonomu.club; I think that if ruby is going to meaningfully remove the influence of the fascists currently in charge of it, it is imperative that gems.coop and the move to fork rails are successful https://po-ru.com/2026/07/29/it-doesnt-matter-whether-matz-is-nice

• Post #4068181

  finding doctorow's attempt to separate the intrinsic properties of genAI as a technology from its effects as an economic object somewhat baffling. the economic effects are both directly caused by the capex requirements of the tech itself, and are also the reason wealthy investors want to build it. the economics is the point

• Post #4031894

  this story about openai "breaking containment" is such bullshit if you know anything about how computer security is supposed to be done. if a program accesses a remote system it's because you decided to let it do that. LLMs don't have magical powers that can work around "we unplugged the ethernet"

• Post #4031692

  somehow I only recently learned that LLMs need the whole conversation fed back to them on each prompt so their i/o cost scales as O(n^2), something that would be considered completely unacceptable in almost any other production network-accessible software

• Post #3939676

  one thing that irks me about the "complexity -> consciousness" argument is that computer people do not have a well defined idea of what "complexity" is, it is a "I know it when I see it" thing. whereas we do have a very rigorous formal model of what a computer can do

• Post #3938164

  did you think hofstadter's arguments about consciousness arising from self reference were far fetched and poorly argued? you're going to love "the computer has a soul because it got too big"

• Post #3816641

  I have been playing "nier replicant" having previously played "nier: automata" and have come to the conclusion that the design brief for "breath of the wild" was "what if nier replicant was good"

• Post #3816640

  does anyone know why there might be a ludicrous number of helicopters flying over north london all afternoon

• Post #3816639

  an air conditioner is a sandwich

• Post #3816638

  finally had someone call one of my open source projects "legacy technology" do I win a prize

• Post #3816637

  I am pretty inconsistent about this but I do usually put technically redundant parentheses in anything involving ternaries or bitwise arithmetic because I simply cannot remember their precedence and I think it reads better https://studio8502.ca/@mos_8502/116914686499380319

• Post #3816636

  one reason that "AI" is not producing huge shifts in profitability is that, for most businesses, raw production speed of software has not been the bottleneck on generating or increasing revenue for at least as long as I've been working in tech (20 years)

• Post #2358929

  last couple days to get "building git" for 50% off using code BGAPR2026 https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/

• Post #2212655

  thing is, I'm not even opposed to dismantling IP as a concept, and I'm not wild about wielding it to oppose AI, because the same argument is used to shut down the internet archive

• Post #1748419

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@hynek/116476031032569096 this is what I mean when I say genAI has got people deciding to act stupid on purpose. things like "prompt injection" are just things we previously recognised as glaring categories errors, but suddenly we can't recognise very obviously terrible ideas because they're wrapped up in the bullshit machine

• Post #1736374

  RE: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/116476110099547066 again, this is predictable from information theory. the claims being made for genAI's abilities require breaking the laws of thermodynamics

• Post #1736369

  RE: https://universeodon.com/@devsimsek/116472552957401849 yes because if they could it would break the laws of thermodynamics. why has it taken people who notionally have science backgrounds so long not realise the fundamental impossibility of their claims

• Post #1448044

  RE: https://thepit.social/@peter/116376227720432462 this is about where I am, it's like a ton of people decided to forget how anything works and become helpless on purpose

• Post #1445531

  "no, dude, your opinion on genAI is ill informed unless you've used " (highlighting is the author's)

• Post #1444487

  handshake meme between Édith Piaf and Tony Hoare: "I regret nothing"

• Post #1444486

  every pro-genAI argument to me just looks like refusing to take your own work seriously

• Post #1444485

  vim's spell checker is unhappy with "endiannesses" yes hello welcome to binary data processing, we describe bit/byte order using a term from gulliver's travels about the orientation of eggs. I wish I was making this up

• Post #1444484

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/116415821939972420 if bluesky were decentralised it would be decentralised

• Post #1444483

  thought I would check if https://mastodon.social/@Taweret@timeloop.cafe/116432749108676529 is genuine and it's actually even worse

• Post #1444482

  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@SecureOwl/116404712213309413 one organisation doing this would be silly. dozens of organisations doing it to the point it's a common pattern is a nightmare how can so many companies decide to route people's emails to the same random *unregistered* domain instead of deleting their address

• Post #1364893

  RE: https://lingo.lol/@thedansimonson/116156498254821672 this is also why LLMs are not "another layer of abstraction". do you need to read the asm output of your compiler every time it runs? no, and having to do so would substantially reduce the value of said compiler

• Post #1290547

  got a very nice blurb for "building git" from @phillmv (https://okayfail.com/): "When I needed to understand Git internals for my work at GitHub, I turned to this book for a primer. Building Git is a triumph. It is astonishingly complete, and it was tremendously valuable to have an easy-to-read implementation I could follow along." and you can get it for 50% until the end of the month using code BGAPR2026 https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/

• Post #1267847

  you know you've been computering for too long when you can recognise what this is

• Post #1060368

  reminder that until the end of april I'm offering 50% off "building git" using voucher code BGAPR2026 https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/