I was gonna ride the light rail to Redmond this morning, but it got #derailed. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-light-rail-train-derailment-leads-to-suspended-service-alternate-routes/
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@mmcknett@hachyderm.io
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Software & Aviation ; C++, Python, JS, Rust, and C182s ; he/him Follow Requests appreciated and accepted if you have posts or connections that make me feel safe. 🙂
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Joined November 12, 2022
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Replying to
@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social
@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social reminds me of when I found out the starship Discovery runs on Windows NT
Replying to
@ralen@social.ralen.top
@ralen@social.ralen.top @nixCraft@mastodon.social it must do that.
Anything reading the DOM without rendering fonts (scrapers, copy-paste into a text tool, language models digesting raw HTML) only ever gets the encoded version.
This is also where screen readers get the words. 😞
The #mastodon feature I wish I had was following someone else’s post so I can see what other people have to say about it later. Someone posted an interesting question about Rust, but I know I’ll forget to check on it later to see how people answer.
Replying to
@plutarch@gotosocial.plutar.ch
@plutarch@gotosocial.plutar.ch @Em0nM4stodon@infosec.exchange this explains EVERYTHING
Replying to
@Nonilex@masto.ai
@Nonilex@masto.ai what an interesting connection to make—“robbing” US companies is “robbing” taxpayers. Those companies he named notoriously take quite large tax breaks, many paying effectively no taxes.
Replying to
@khleedril@cyberplace.social
@khleedril@cyberplace.social @wosrediinanatour@mastodon.social @TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place though since C# assembles to .NET virtual machine bytecode, there is a second layer of “assembly” to think about with that one. And of course, the instructions are only half of it—how your language and runtime (and OS) manage your stack & heap memory hasn’t even entered the conversation.
Replying to
@azonenberg@ioc.exchange
@azonenberg@ioc.exchange oh, does that mean it would simultaneously execute the zero-check AND divide by zero and then end up in the exception handler? I only ever learned about R2000/3000 compatible MIPS, and a quick web search makes it look like R10000 was the first superscalar design.
Replying to
@azonenberg@ioc.exchange
@azonenberg@ioc.exchange @JoshJers@mastodon.gamedev.place @eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place @bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place reminding myself what branch delay slots were was a real memory dredging. 😅 Is it expected to generate some number of nops after each conditional branch if you specify that flag? Or is it basically always architecture+manufacturer specific what’s expected?
Replying to
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org @eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place I would believe that. Early in my career one of my colleagues found a genuine compiler bug, and it’s the only instance I ever heard about. I have never needed to write assembly professionally, but have on occasion had to inspect assembly or even disassembled output for debugging purposes.
Realistically, you can make a career without having to know what machine code is going into the machine, but the idea that *nobody* can really know or understand what’s going in—that sounds unnecessarily dangerous.
Replying to
@simonbp@social.linux.pizza
@simonbp @SecureOwl the agents are working at the gate, and the blockchain is what holds together the two rubber things that keep the wheels from moving while the aircraft is parked.
Replying to
@jneen@unstable.systems
@jneen oh, see, that’s fine, we’ll just ask codex to define good code, and then we’ll have it write that. All of the solutions to AI’s shortcomings involve applying even more AI, of course!
Replying to
@alexshendi@rollenspiel.social
@alexshendi @benroyce Oh, yeah, that’s saying the greek Δίδυμοι is transliterated Dídymoi. I was imagining gravely-voiced Greek sailors mumbling to Romans who heard “didymoi” as “gemini” and figured maybe that made some sense. 😅
Replying to
@benroyce@mastodon.social
@benroyce “new beginnings,” you’re just trying to bring Janus back into it now 😉
Replying to
@benroyce@mastodon.social
@benroyce Turns out I’m an Aries, and I have no idea what that means 😅
Replying to
@benroyce@mastodon.social
@benroyce @alexshendi @selzero Well anyway, while looking all that up I found Google’s blog post explaining the name origin, and selzero’s original point is completely founded: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/google-gemini-ai-name-meaning/
[…] a key characteristic of the Gemini zodiac sign is a dual-natured personality […]
So Gemini means two-faced after all! 🤣🤣🤣
Replying to
@benroyce@mastodon.social
@benroyce @alexshendi “gemini” is? I’m not sure! I thought it was plausible that Geminus is a transliteration of Didymos, only I couldn’t find evidence. Also, the fact that Δίδυμος is transliterated elsewhere as Didymos (such as for the apostle Thomas) makes that connection seem less likely. But I’m just playing at being a linguist here. 😅
Replying to
@alexshendi@rollenspiel.social
@alexshendi @benroyce @selzero I’m having trouble finding sources indicating that Δίδυμοι became Gemini. How’d you find that?
Interestingly, I did find a random page that gives Castor’s & Pollux’s Greek names (Καστωρ and Πολυδεύκης), though the Greeks seem to have referred to them as Διόσκουροι (Zeus’s boys). https://greekerthanthegreeks.com/the-ancient-greek-myth-around-the-zodiac-sign-of-gemini/
Replying to
@benroyce@mastodon.social
@benroyce @selzero I thought Janus might have been the interpretation, though my only source for connecting “two-faced” as in duplicitous with the two-faced Roman god (one looking into the past and the other looking into the future) is the movie Goldeneye, so I have treated it with skepticism. 😅 Janus is the god of doorways, physically, and thus metaphorically of transitions/beginnings/endings.
“Gemini” is Latin and, If you believe wiktionary, descends from proto-italic, no mention of Greek. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/geminus — the words geminus and ianus aren’t really related.
I didn’t know there was a canonical astrological association with gemini ♊️ as being duplicitous, since I don’t follow astrology. Seems kind of rude though. 😂
The only inaccurate thing selzero said is what “gemini” means, so I’m not trying to start an argument about the *point* being made.
Replying to
@glyph@mastodon.social
@glyph@mastodon.social I’ve been trying on a personal philosophy around LLM “thinking” that starts with this observation: “AI” is autocorrect that gives you pareidolia. It is text that is so statistically valid that your mind interprets it as communication, and assumes it originated from another mind. I have started thinking of it as a responsive rubber duck, changing its appearance (mechanistically) in response to your input, and ultimately making something make sense *to you*.
Extending from there, I suppose that since computer code is very-tightly-constrained human language, it makes sense that a statistically valid program would both run and approach a person’s prompted intent. (At the same time, that informs why there are limits that wise engineers put around these things—in the end, the only mind interpreting the semantics of the text is your own. Did it write the right text? Only the reader can say; only the reader “knows” anything.) So what I think might be happening is that the math is doing a very effective approximation of the “copy paste from stack overflow and adapt to my use case” workflow that most humans rely on to produce new code. It works well because there is so much code text and natural language text surrounding it. Adapting the structure from prior examples can happen mechanistically, and produce results that when interpreted semantically are correct (or incredibly close to it…or good enough).
I agree with you—we really need to know what’s going on. It’s probably going to tell us a lot about ourselves, too.
Replying to
@elseweather@mastodon.social
@elseweather@mastodon.social I’m really hoping this will be a practical career pivot.🤞🏻 We are probably going to have to position ourselves as consultants to have any credibility though, even once the nontechnical decisionmakers get disillusioned with “AI.”
Replying to
@hazelweakly@hachyderm.io
@hazelweakly@hachyderm.io I once tried to figure out how to make calendar colors portable across these services; this is a nightmare.
Replying to
@cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop
@cstross “semantic ablation” is a concise way to describe that feeling of “I just read all the words but I can’t tell what they are trying to convey” that I have gotten after reading certain generated snippets of text.
Replying to
@wanwizard@mastodon.scot
@wanwizard@mastodon.scot @futurebird@sauropods.win @TimWardCam@c.im I don’t honestly know what app they’re using, but I wouldn’t trust any of it.
If it is Palantir, yikes. Nothing like naming your company after the unreliable Middle Earth spying network that was rendered unusable because Sauron got his hands on one.
Replying to
@futurebird@sauropods.win
@futurebird@sauropods.win @wanwizard@mastodon.scot @TimWardCam@c.im if I understand right, they use an app to scan your face and they trust the app over any ID you present. That guy in Minnesota who got dragged out of his home in his underwear was taken to have his face scanned and fingerprints collected before being released. There was video of somebody rejecting their unlawful order to present ID, and they stopped harassing her after one of the agents took her picture with a phone. So it’s like they have some software and just do whatever it tells them.
Which is scarier, honestly.
Replying to
@futurebird@sauropods.win
@futurebird@sauropods.win I recently learned that being an ICE agent is less dangerous than being a normal person who just goes outside. Being an ICE agent is significantly less risky than being pregnant.
Replying to
@tirifto@jam.xwx.moe
@tirifto@jam.xwx.moe @nixCraft@mastodon.social possibly when they laid off all the testers about a decade ago
Replying to
@Qbitzerre@unbound.social
@Qbitzerre@unbound.social @Xeniax@mastodon.ml Yeah, didn’t they start using GitHub repositories for communicating, knowing it would be impossible for the government to ban GitHub?
Replying to
@JustinDerrick@mstdn.ca
@JustinDerrick@mstdn.ca @jimbob@aus.social I hate that I could drop the name of any of our unserious (industry, national) leaders in place of AI and it would be just as accurate. Our cultural moment really is the final approach of falsehood’s flight and the truth limping after it is lost over the horizon.