Yet another code monkey. I program robots and yell at clouds. He/him.
Temperature back on the mid thirties again tomorrow. It’s funny coming back from a holiday away down south, and then coming back home to 14 degree higher temperatures and nowhere nice to have a swim.
Flyover country is not improving under global warming.
Just had a very vivid dream about trying to discourage some hot but stupid fae from stockpiling gunpowder weapons for a planned uprising against modern humans, then woke up and realised that we haven’t enabled write-ahead logging on some of our sqlite-using tools.
Who needs llms? I can go on wild hallucinatory tangents all by myself and still produce the occasional nugget of useful technical information. I can be available for consultancy for less than $400 billion a year, too. HMU.
The weather has changed a little. First rain in a few weeks, even here which is usually quite damp.
Hopefully some of the tail-end of the weather system makes it as far south as Bordeaux. We were intending to go there in a couple of weeks time, and there’s quite a lot of fire there right now… it’ll be very sad if all that old pine forest burns down.
Oh, it’s nice to be back where I grew up. I have strong feelings about what landscapes should look like formed in my childhood… rolling hills, streams in valleys, small fields, lots of trees. The local geology should be obvious… you shouldn’t have to go far to find bits of bedrock, which you should be able to climb on.
It’s a stark contrast to where I live now, in flatland flyover country with huge fields separated by scrubby thorn hedges, drainage ditches instead of streams and deep clay and gravel like a punishing dwarf fortress map.
Just had my first “verify with a mobile device” recapcha 🙁 possibly it was still being a/b tested on the site because a couple of refreshes just asked me to select the photos with bicycles instead, but I feel like I’m not going to be able to avoid it for long.
I wonder how much of the web is gated behind this stuff, and how practical it is to simply not go to those places anymore.
A curse upon accommodation that is only bookable by airbnb. I seem to have to use them every couple of years and every time it is slightly more unpleasant.
This time they demand a facial photo, refuse to let me complete the booking until I’ve uploaded one, and do a basic facial recognition check to make sure the photo is of a a human face.
So this week, I shall have an uncanny resemblance to the ceo of airbnb.
Hurrrgh, one of my ancient chromecasts is acting up, and I need to try and reanimate it, and now google demands to harvest my precise location to connect to wifi or bluetooth, because those protocols don’t work without your gps location these days 🙄
Feeling weirdly unwell. The weather outside is glorious, but I’m just continually tired and hungry and whenever I lie down and close my eyes I fall asleep early quickly and have unsettling dreams about people I know dying.
I’m assuming it is either a mild viral infection of some kind, or maybe I’ve been possessed by the seed of some eldritch abomination and there’s gonna be some kind of body horror sequelae and then rains of blood and the end of humanity.
Or I’ll be better in a day or two. Either way I’m looking forward to it.
Today I am sad that web search is shit, and that the damage that relentless ai training data scrapers have done means that no-one will want to have their stuff scraped and indexed in future. Thanks google.
Subtooting time. You do not need to reinvent things that already exist. When you make a new thing, you can use adapted versions of old things to get you started. Improving an existing design is not “reinvention”, unless you’re writing marketing copy.
Aeroplane wheels and bicycle wheel did not evolve completely independently. They both share ancestral designs… you can even see this in the history of powered flight! Casters are not brand new kinds of wheels. They add an additional kind of flexibility to another wheel design!
I’m not sure why this should be contentious.
I wonder if this means I’ll be able to afford new ram this year.
@Aissen@social.treehouse.systems
This is potentially interesting, but techcrunch focussing over the proposed“ai” features is grating.
“The team has yet to train offline LLMs that would help users with configs.”
How about some adequate fucking documentation. People can read it, and then work out how their configurations should go. What is this baby-bird bullshit that requires vendors to predigest all their stuff and vomit it back into your face before anyone can do anything?
At some point, investors in large companies have to consider that the c-suite and board of directors might need to be quarantined and isolated from the internet for their own good, and for the future of the company. An outbreak of llm could be fatal.
@xgranade@wandering.shop
Ngate author maybe not dead?
I wonder if the whole “rewrite bun in rust” thing is at least partially driven by rust being more amenable to llm tooling, it being more likely to error out on dubious constructions and there being a larger volume of training material.
I don’t imagine there’s much performance benefit, but maybe I’m wrong. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that mythos works noticeably better on rust than zig, though.
Yay, oral hygienist says I’ve been doing a good job. Barely even hurt this time, didn’t need a safe word when the ultrasonic pick came out or anything.
The rest of me may be kinda falling to bits right now, but my teeth are great 😬
Eh, I don’t actually hate the fact that obsidian is offloading its plug-in review to an llm that much… reviewing code is hard and draining and often thankless and it’s still easy to miss stuff, especially when it is deliberately nefarious. I doubt this will make things any worse, and maybe it will improve matters.
It’s just that if there was any kind of sandboxing, like… at all, manually reviewing the plugins would be a less serious business. Ask some pointed questions about why your syntax highlighter needs full filesystem access, sort of thing.
Instead we get a tool that’s also an ethical void and economic catastrophe, and a new opportunity to sharpen your prompt-injection skills 🫤
RE: @andrewnez@mastodon.social
AI: democratising reality distortion fields.
Company funding round was somewhat smaller than hoped, so some people are being made redundant. I’ve escaped the axe, and officially we’re not yet supposed to be starting redundant details but there are a lot of unhappy faces.
I’m not sure how much of my team will be left, but I might suddenly need to learn a lot about docker and python 😬
Oh microsoft. Why, when I’m trying build this esproj under ubuntu, are you creating a folder called obj\Debug. Are you really hard coding backslash path separators in 2026.
Signal desktop to be useable without needing a smartphone: yay!
Signal will still require some kind of phone number to sign up: booooo.
Whilst I mostly rely on paid-for services to host my email and websites, I do run a little server at home that runs some of my less important email, and also houses a forgejo instance. Couldn't actually remember what its hardware was so I thought I'd check... it an aged proliant gen8 microserver with a single 100GB SSD, a dual-core celeron running at 2.3 Ghz, and 4 GB of DDR3 ram.
I also have a raspberry pi 5 which I use for random experiments, and is currently idle, but it has twice the ram, twice the cores (at nearly the same speed), and twice the storage, and I think it draws less than a third of the power and fits in a tenth of the space, too. Probably also cost me less when I bought it.
Now, if only I could rely on itty-bitty arm boxes to reliably continue to work, month after month, for years at a time. They've not been very good in that regard, at least not for me 😐
Remembering reading neuromancer for the first time, and being entertained by the thought that in the far distant cyberpunk future someone might need to fence “three megabytes of hot ram”, as if that might be a useful and valuable thing you might shift on the black market.
Now hoping that gibson doesn’t get the last laugh 🫤
One of my coworkers is increasingly sounding like a chatbot in PRs. I can't tell if I'm just being unreasonably sensitive, or if he's basically proxying all my comments to a chatbot and pasting the answers straight back at me, and in either case I'm freshly grumpy at llm vendors for corroding human relationships even further.
I feel slightly awkward about just coming straight out with a "have you just unhitched your brain and outsourced your work to an llm?" but I feel this might be a conversation to be had in the coming weeks.
Why the fuck are dell shipping omarchy.
Almost all the laptops we have at work are dell, because they’re good at selling stuff that doesn’t fall to bits after a few years (unlike the various smaller manufacturers we’ve tried) and they generally have reasonably priced options that do the stuff we need.
So many other laptop vendors have given up, or are just unambiguously poor quality. Where are we supposed to go now fucking nazis are openly intruding into our boring corporate grey boxes.
Another project involving a vibe-coded rust-rewrite of a project that’s already pretty good. Postgres, this time. There’s a graph-goes-up-and-right of a kind I’ve never seen before: llm tokens spent vs test suite pass percentage.
But… why wouldn’t you do this with something that isn’t already well supported project involving some extremely complex underlying technology that’s both cryptic and performance sensitive?
Presumably the projects that would most benefit from rewrite-it-in-rust don’t have a high quality and comprehensive test suite, and you can’t just vibe up a good test suite, because the technology just isn’t good enough?
It’s weird the things that people will defend.
A trillion dollar industry does not need you to white-knight for it, bro. Even if some of the things people are saying about it are technically wrong, or worse: hypocritical.
Aligning yourself with a deeply dishonest and destructive bunch of people who are very obviously making the world worse can be a bad look, y’know. Even if some of the arguments against them are not well formed.
