MaddieM4

@yaxu@post.lurk.org so that touches on a good point. The marketing for LLMs is structured like the walls in Attack on Titan, or like the Narcissist's Prayer: there are weaker pitches to fall back on when the most sensational ones are ruled out. So the initial sensational policy for LLMs definitely was "a world where you can fire almost your entire workforce and pocket the difference." The companies that have tried to do this have quickly become cautionary tales, either hiring back as many of the fired employees as possible, or failing. So now that that's not a believable story to even most of the pro-LLM people, the new narrative is "it will replace your juniors. Your senior engineers are still needed as guardrails." Well, I say new, but even this is on the way out. We're about halfway to the next one: "you still need juniors as your accountability condoms for when stuff goes wrong." Which is truly the era where everyone gets to manage a petty little kingdom.

@yaxu@post.lurk.org I've written before about how the relationship to LLMs is generally managerial, and it transforms the user's thinking, often in destructive ways. It's occurring to me that orgs that are going "all in" on LLMs are basically trying to grow a new tier from the bottom of the org chart, for less than the cost of hiring as many juniors as they run agents. This brings all the attendant problems of deepening the org chart in *any* company structure regarding communication and coordination, but also dulls the human minds that need to manage all these agents, and creates a code review demand that cannot be fulfilled without letting LLMs do review too, which is letting the fox guard the henhouse in terms of identifying defects before they become outages.

I really won't have time to record a demo before I go to surgery, but I wrote a song last night while scrubbing up in the shower. My wife was like "awww, she's singing in the shower!" And I was like "Yeah! I'm COMPOSING!" Lyrics should fit in my instance's 1024 char limit based on the "950B written" reported by vim. Lots of optimistic feelings. It's good to finally feel like the last two years were short. I've certainly felt their length enough.

@djsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology Exactly. There's a term I've been cooking in my head and trying to decide if it's a big enough idea to be worth a blog post: the frosted-glass box. A black box does not provide the openness and honesty to be trusted, and increases the learning curve if you do need to modify the contents.* A totally clear box, or an unboxed set of contents, is cognitively overwhelming, distracting, and possibly a safety hazard where you modify something important by accident. What you want is a frosted-glass box, where you can get a demystifying vibe of what's inside, you can open it easily when you want to, but you can still see the box itself shielding you from the full complexity of the internals until you're ready to spend attention on it. Corporations hate these. *philosophical stance: just like how a gun is "always loaded," a box will always need to be opened and modified eventually.

@djsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology Also let's not pretend that these real-life electronics were anything less than sick as hell aesthetically.

RE: https://mas.to/@libreleah/117344092080724056 Libreboot being #NeverSlop is great news. With all the foundational infrastructure we've lost ground on in the last couple years, having this part a of a Never Slop software stack locked in is genuinely delightful and a breath of fresh air.

So IMHO, #NeverSlop is the new baseline of trust in that social contract, and software that doesn't live up to it - even if the version today is A-OK - does not live up to the perpetuity of trust expectations I want for my peace of mind, the ones already established as precedent for our ecosystem since I was a teenager trying to figure out how to pronounce "Ubuntu." Software that might slop out *someday* doesn't actually have a place in a system of convenient, high-trust assumptions.

@amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems @mcc@mastodon.social I mean I feel about modern GPUs and their intentionally prohibitive feature span the way I do about web standards: "that's a nice miracle you destroyed the ecosystem with. Undoing the damage is probably a multi-decade job and none of the normal folk will understand why feature reductions are needed. Won't stop me from patiently pushing in the right direction, though."

Ultimately, this is just part of the big picture that FOSS *operators* have always been guided by. "I want software that, for all the rough edges it might have, is made with good intentions by people who are not actively attempting to screw me over (and will not in the future), because there's a lot of software in my life, and I do not want to spend my finite afternoons continually *reacting* to malfeasance, post-malfeasance. This is my proactivity." That's not some new social contract - it was so widely and implicitly accepted that it led to the trust issues in the design of most of our package managers, that you ask for software by its name and let the ecosystem's guardians figure out which fork is correct, that you can assume the package is not malicious without reading every line of it yourself, that you can and should blindly install updates from upstream and these will increase your security instead of decrease it. We have bad actors in that space because it was a beautiful succulent commons to eat.

I'm tired of hearing about scale from non-relational database groupies and people who work at AWS. I wanna hear about scale from those metalworkers who do forge work. Is it really the metallic impurities? What's it made of? Why does it flake off? Is it valuable to collect and recycle? Like these are the actually interesting questions here.

And while I'm just one person, LLMs are very very unpopular. It is an attempt to industrially incept a grim future into our imaginations and realities, and most people want nothing to do with it, it's just hard to avoid right now. I think a lot of people will jive with my goals here. Now contrast this with the open source maintainer motivation to have a userbase. Yes, a userbase is annoying - an unpaid burden of care where a lot of your dependents show up to your issue tracker with their most entitled asshole shirt on. It is known, it has been known. And yet that impact is validating. People react to your name with reverence. "Oh, you're the Foo developer! Holy shit, I can't believe I met you in person!" You get invited to conferences. People care what you have to say. There can be serious downsides to this slice of human nature, but it's not my goal to go to war with it, like Caligula vs The Sea. Rather, it's leverage for an ultimatum. You want an audience? That will increasingly require zero-LLM policy.

@arthsmn@organica.social @kde@floss.social I wrote the play by play thread that went viral. And a few days later, the KDE developers started a vote on a pro-LLM policy. And when one of the people pushing for that permissive policy was outed as someone with Nazi politics, they banned the person who brought the evidence, locked the thread, and started a new private one so that they could make that policy decision without any KDE users in the room. EDIT: Updates! Mostly good! Although it looks like this will be a bit redundant between threads due to the asynchronous nature of the internet 😂 https://raphus.social/@MaddieM4/117320340004129375

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems @spacehobo@teh.entar.net @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems Which also ends up feeding into a permacomputing critique of "cattle, not pets" thinking. Over the long haul, disparate and aging hardware should still be put to use! And that requires thinking in terms of pets, not cattle.

Thank god we got away from the dark unenlightened ages of pop-ups and Yahoo! toolbars. I love living in better times, and regularly getting ads from my phone's primary package manager to spend my Play Points or install whatever app paid Google money expecting to get the ROI out of me.

@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @mcc@mastodon.social @decay@gts.todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems That's a good particular example. A part of computing freedom that I think is pretty important is "being able to make music with computers, ideally in realtime." I have that on my list of vital user stories for my someday project microkernel OS. The arts are the kind of thing that make computers worth doing. A lot of realtime music plugin stuff depends of Fourier transforms and SIMD in general.

I really need to stop being an enabler when my wife gets cravings. But then I wouldn't have had my last three consecutive meals be Taco Bell for lunch, delivery pizza and an incredibly strong mixed drink for dinner, and cookies for breakfast! 🤩 💃 I do honestly not feel very great right now

I should be looking at the beautiful scenery on this walk. I check my phone every few minutes in case I missed a notification under the Do Not Disturb that keeps music flowing into my headphones. Closer to addiction than I'm comfortable. I am turning over the old trauma of reading about Justine Sacco, who made a dark humor joke about structural racism being fucked up, phrased it poorly on her way onto the plane, wasn't there to explain as Twitter tore her apart, found out her career was over when she landed 11 hours later. Some things lodge in your brain forever. Are you there to defend yourself? I am responding to Old Twitter apologists in my mentions telling me that microblogging isn't a structurally evil content format, and that long posts would ruin Mastodon. I am a bit sharp and bitter in my response. I check my notifications a minute later. I check my notifications a minute later. I check my notifications a minute later. I check my notifications a minute later.

@r@glauca.space @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @mcc@mastodon.social @decay@gts.todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems You just gave me flashbacks to being extremely bitter and feeling helpless in precalc, because I actually knew calculus! I learned it for game engine stuff, because I wanted to make games! Failing precalc while knowing calculus feels so so bad and makes you wonder how you could be this kind of broken.

@mcc@mastodon.social this has been the story of the last two years of my life. I feel this so much.

@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @r@glauca.space @mcc@mastodon.social @decay@gts.todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems thank you, really. I did get there on my own in the end, but I wish so badly I could tell that to teenage Maddie. Among other sage advice that would have saved me a lot of heartache.

I've gotten really adapted to the climate, which is to say, good at heat dissipation. So now when I take a hot bath or even do the dishes, it feels like the water cools off really fast despite being initially uncomfortably hot, faster than if the water just sat there. It took me awhile to realize my body is literally playing the role of a heat pipe via my blood flow. I think I read something about how trees do this too, and don't just cool/stabilize temperatures in the area with shade. Because they have those fluid channels going into the roots for nutrition. It's also kind of like those home cooling systems that use buried pipes full of salt water, you know, trading thermal energy with the deep soil.

@atax1a@infosec.exchange What a fucking loser! Get scolded, idiot.

ArduinoIDE really is just such total garbage. I must have fought for two hours to get a simple demo up on a TTGO board for my wife. Absolutely unreasonable, and in the end, I got it with PlatformIO. Now PIO has its own learning curve that I was interacting with while already at peak frustration, and the VS Code part of things makes me sad, but it does have this lovely property that if you fuck around with it awhile, it actually works eventually. ArdIDE on the other hand, I've never had a not-crap experience with it, but it does somehow feel like it's achieved worseness in the private equity years, or whatever kind of soul-selling it was, I don't keep up on that.

@hyc@mastodon.social @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @r@glauca.space @mcc@mastodon.social @decay@gts.todayiwilllaunchmyinfantsonintoorbit.com @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems It's such a common error. If anything you should be LEADING with the why. My pet conspiracy theory why they don't, is that most curricula are designed by committee and lean toward including everything that sounds like it might be useful. This lack of discretion means that most of the material IS pointless for the students, and "well you might need it some way" is cover for "we can't explain why because there IS no good answer behind the curtain." And in situations where there IS a good answer, there's so much bad faith precedent that the students can't tell the difference. This is why I think project-centered education would be revolutionary. It leads you to discover things in contextualized, justified, concrete ways.

@miladj@mastodonapp.uk yes! Funny enough, most Samsung phones literally have a feature to act like a desktop if you plug it into a monitor. Because computers are computers! I haven't tried it because I don't have a USB-C to HDMI adapter. I've heard that how usable it is depends on your phone model, but it's gotten better over time. Desktop involves a lot of multitasking, which is obviously possible on ARM (look at M-series MacBooks), but Android and its apps aren't really designed with multitasking in mind.

Looks like the Note 20 has some early stages of support, but isn't ready to use. I would be interested to contribute, but can't be without a working smartphone. The frustrating thing is I own a whole box of old used phones that would be perfect for low risk experiments! They're a 21hr drive north of me. 🤦‍♀️ Additionally, I technically have the Note 20 Ultra. I'm not really sure if that's close enough for Note 20 support to be applicable. https://wiki.nura.eco/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Note_20_(samsung-c1s)

@arichtman@eigenmagic.net recently, rewatching Human Giant, I saw a sketch I forgot about. The three main comedians are playing Frisbee in the park. An old man in a suit and top hat approaches two of them and offers them "a million dollars, if you let me have sex with your friend over there." They sell him into slavery and roll around on a bed of money. Jump cut to poor Paul Scheer in a pig mask, taking it from behind and getting whipped with a riding crop, begging "I want to go home!" and the rich man correcting him: "you ARE home!" That feels not so different from the app developers paying Google to inject ads into my phone using an app I can't deactivate.

See, the pro move here would have been to actually cut out the airplane windows instead of carve them down halfway, so you could look out onto the playground. But I'm not a playground designer, I just have common sense and a vague memory of being a kid once, what do I know? And don't at me about kids getting their hands stuck, there's plenty of places here where they can do that anyway.

Perspective doesn't change reality. But it controls so much of the way we experience the world and make our decisions, that subjectively, it often might as well.

Admittedly, there's fewer non-location-identifying sights next to the 4-lane road on the way back home, but there's some cool stuff. This area where the dead remains of trees entangle with the tall chain-link fence? I know from experience it has a big problem with water runoff from the golf course, hence the sidewalk damage, so even though it's basically just damp right now, it can be very unpleasant to walk through while the sprinklers are running, or during a rainstorm. FYI.

Back in the early 2010s, before I moved back to CA, I lived with my parents and mowed the lawn regularly - I actually had to keep up on it pretty aggressively, because otherwise, the clippings would be so overwhelming they'd kill the live grass underneath. Getting close to obstacles meant that the tracks of the tires were too consistent, and would carve persistent tracks in the grass beneath, which wouldn't show up elsewhere in the lawn thanks to random variance making the process more forgiving.

I hadn't thought about that in years, but seeing these crop circles in some grass that's

1. Near trees, and
2. Mowed short every single morning

was kind of neat to recognize, and made total sense after a second's thought.

It's a shame I hardly ever go through this area, and I think I want to do so more regularly. It really reminds me of growing up in Northern California.

Okay I gotta get on the trail and properly disconnect. Normally I wouldn't even explicitly say that, because the default assumption on this kind of platform is asynchronous communication, right? But it's the kind of morning where a lot of stuff is happening, and I feel like I'm in a role like a daughter with divorced parents, all like "you tell YOUR MOTHERRR that...", just a human message passing bus. I feel like I need to set an away status for this shit, like no I need to GO because if I don't my medical stuff is gonna flare up like a fireworks stand in a forest fire. I am in airplane mode until I say otherwise. Good lordy.

@arichtman@eigenmagic.net Google Play Services?

@arichtman@eigenmagic.net I hear that. Graphene is a bit "drama and dubious threat modeling" for me, but I do think I'm gonna be a Sailfish or eOS girl with my next phone. We'll see how that all plays out. I'm about as enthusiastic about buying new hardware as I am about going to the dentist for a root canal, and I'm sure I could afford neither.

@arichtman@eigenmagic.net ahhh okay. Yes, I was indeed talking about Murena, so that maybe helps narrow things down. E is a very overloaded letter on the internet. Murena, Elementary, the Farquaad Markiplier meme...

@atax1a@infosec.exchange @rl_dane@polymaths.social don't bring me into this. I'm drunk. Why are a person I actually care about and a David Gerard acolyte arguing in my mentions? Arghhhhgh

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social so true. He's never been a complicated man. If you wanna analyze someone in this whole mess, how about the people who follow him despite who he is? Or the Democrats ceding endless victories? I mean basically anyone else than the borderline-sentient MacGuffin of Narcissism everyone is fighting about.

@r@glauca.space @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @amarioguy@social.treehouse.systems @mcc@mastodon.social I have not seen that one, and I'm curious