Marty Fouts

@flyingsaceur@ioc.exchange NetBSD on a Danger Sidekick LX in a cabin in Montana.

@exocomics@mastodon.world That little girl is on to you.

@dec23k@mastodon.ie @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social I have a copy of a book of composite photographs from the 60s by Jerry Uelsmann that I like to show people who don’t know what can be done in a darkroom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Uelsmann But you would think people would at least know about Stalin having multiple people removed from photographs in 40s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union

@iamnotU@mastodon.social @emilymbender@dair-community.social People have been doing this since the first welding robot was installed at GM in 1959.

@sugar It is the Way

@thirstybear@agilodon.social One problem with this analogy is that the people talking about the arson ring often suggest banning fire rather than stopping arsonists from misusing it and the only way to get them to focus on the arsonists starts with reminding them that fire can be useful.

@neuronakaya Scientists are people. Some are notoriously secretive (Tesla,) while others can’t seem to shut up (Kaku.) Some work where they aren’t allowed to share (pharmaceuticals,) and some must “publish or perish. (Academia) Most likely to overshare: science educators and popularizers. Least likely: researchers on the edge of esoteric disciplines.

@KathyReid I know that the most popular answer is “when AOL came online but to some of us it started much earlier, when the requirement that you were doing DARPA related research was relaxed to allow anyone on who was affiliated with a university that had access. Nobody realized it at the time but it started with students from certain universities who were the earliest to attempt to monetize being online.

@RickiTarr@beige.party I blame Schliemann.

@dec23k@mastodon.ie @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social I had the good fortune to take a class in B&W printing from John Sexton who had worked for Ansel Adams. I got to see Adams’ darkroom and the negatives from some of his best known photographs. Adams was incredible in the darkroom and famously compared the negative to a musical score and the print to an orchestra performance.

@SeanAloysiusOBrien@tenforward.social Time to add AI and consciousness to the list of things RD goes on about without understanding; somewhere between atheism and population biology.

@benlockwood AI: around since 1956; integrated in many consumer products since the 1990s. LLM opponents: around since 2022; conflating LLMs with AI since 2025.

@bsdphk Ada was entirely the result of DOD procurement, intended to solve a DOD problem. Dijkstra, rightly, criticized the design process and the final language and his writing on the subject should be required reading. Ada suffered from the same problem PL/1 did and was almost immediately fragmented into the infamous “profile” subsets that resulted in it failing to meet DOD requirements. It was not a good language to start from, revisionist views notwithstanding.

@bsdphk Dijkstra is rolling in his grave and I can’t stop giggling. I have to admit that I never thought I would see anyone attempt to salvage Ada’s reputation after the way it imploded at the DOD. Thanks for sharing.

@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io I grew up not far from the Firehole river. While it never gets that hot, several of its tributaries are fed from geysers and do. And boy can you smell the sulfur. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehole_River

@vmstan@vmst.io Eliza!

@nCrazed@fd00.space @Sempf@infosec.exchange @cR0w@infosec.exchange There’s a Myth Busters about this.

@saagar@federated.saagarjha.com Prolog has entered the chat.

@aka_pugs@mastodon.social I spent a couple of days at Manchester beach last week but, as usual, didn’t make time to go out to Point Arena. Now I wish I had.

@mayintoronto I answered 3-5, meaning 3, but I knew 2 of them IRL before there was a fediverse; and the third from IRC, where they talked me into trying Mastodon in its early days. There’s another group of maybe 5-6 that I interact with regularly on Fedi, but wouldn’t think though of me as “friend” but I don’t know a good term for someone you chat with regularly but don’t really know.

@StefanThinks open from August 1 to November 2, every year.

@mb21 @bsdphk They were mostly in the ACM Language Design Special Interest Group publication. I don’t think they are available online, unfortunately.

@benfry I assume you are using the modern definition of AI that equates it to large language models and I completely agree that it is impossible to understand why anyone would do that. But AI is much more than just LLMs, or it was until a couple of years ago; and it’s been doing good data analysis since the 90s. It’s especially good at finding unexpected relationships and hidden trends.

@mawhrin@circumstances.run @thirstybear@agilodon.social oh aren’t you a special snowflake. Have a nice day.

@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place Knuth wrong about the well documented perils of premature optimization? Un huh. I think, perhaps, from your last sentence you don’t understand the nuances of Knuth’s point, which was mostly an expansion on Tony Hoare, anyway. Knuth never argued to wait until the end to optimize, by the way. And long experience tells me that concentrating one level down rarely works as well as concentrating on good abstraction before writing code.

@ceejbot on a scale of 1 to kin, how bad?

@cwebber@social.coop Go Multics or go home.

@Dr_Bombay Only if we realize that Take 5 was written because Joe Morello (a very underrated drummer) challenged Brubeck to write something in 5/4 time. 😉

@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place Your first few replies to me in the thread were assertions that I didn’t understand you. You said something that suggests you don’t understand Knuth’s argument about optimization when you talked above panic optimization. How is pointing out that that’s not something Knuth argued “shitty” but claiming I didn’t understand you not? I don’t question your depth of experience, only argue that it no longer applies as broadly as it did when you started.

@RickiTarr But even LLMs can be used constructively. I know a formally trained composer who has written algorithms to generate compositions for decades. He then adjusts the score to be humanly playable. Recently he has started to use Claude to help find bugs in his algorithms and to identify unplayable portions of the score. Even though most of the work is still his, there are people who call the result “AI art”. In the face of the Anti-AI backlash it can take much courage.

@matthieu @tpaau17db @gael When Google bought Android the company didn’t have a viable product and without Google’s deep pockets would not have survived the iPhone. Android was mostly developed at Google, although mostly by the same people who left Danger to start Android.

@thejessiekirk @benlockwood It might matter to you but it doesn’t matter to the point I made: that AI has been around for a long time, and while LLMs are probably a dead end, AI isn’t going away. Hope that helps. Have a nice day.

@707Kat@mastodon.art @thirstybear@agilodon.social Well you have certainly belabored the metaphor more than I thought possible but your example still has people going after the wrong people, your “marshmallow toasters” instead of the arsonists.

@RickiTarr@beige.party The Odyssey is a fantasy but it is related to real history and geography. By adhering to period accuracy where it is relevant Nolan sets a particular mood. Contrast this to the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar, where the Roman soldiers carried modern weapons. However there’s a difference between broad accuracy to help set the mood and nit picking details. I suspect Nolan has a much better grasp on that than any of his critics.

@evacide A zen master would describe that old white man as a full teapot.

@ceejbot Sorry to hear. IMO surviving a train wreck should grant one immunity from having to deal with shit shows.

@matthieu @tpaau17db @gael It would not have stopped but it would not have produced anything better. The only alternative timeline that might have done so would have been if Danger had partnered with a bigger cell provided than T Mobile or had otherwise found the funding necessary. Danger would have released a series of NetBSD based phones and figured out touchscreen UIs if MSFT hadn’t bought and buried them.

@thejessiekirk @benlockwood Anyway, it doesn’t matter who was first. The post I responded to was a clear example of an opponent conflating and you can’t erase 70 years of a term having a broad meaning by pretending it doesn’t anymore

@edgeofeurope @RickiTarr “AI” is used in the phrase “AI art” in the same way that “violin” is used in “violin concerto”. In both cases, a tool used by a human to make art. Sora does not spontaneously emit songs, after all, and Aaron only did what Cohen told it to.

@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place Ironically, some of the slowest ugliest code I have had to debug is in compilers. 😉 But as Knuth pointed out long ago, the fastest way to slow code is premature optimization (but that’s far from the point of this discussion.)

@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place Yes, I got that. I don’t agree. At least not for most programmers, most of the time. understanding the semantics of the language at the level of abstraction of the language and its model has been enough for most programmers and problems for at least 50 years. There are exceptions, of course. But what used to be a requirement for everyone when I started 50 years ago is now the exception rather than the rule.

@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place So do I. Machine vision has been a branch of AI since the 60s. Deep Blue’s Chess program, AlphaGo, and CorridorKey are all examples of machine learning, a branch of AI since the 50s. All of these are labeled AI in the literature. Whatever you label it, the research field isn’t going away, its researchers are going to continue to call it AI, and it will still produce good results like CorridorKey, long after the LLM bubble bursts.

@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place I think that was generally true 25 years ago and I think it’s still true in some cases now, but for most programmers working on most software it just isn’t necessary anymore, and often isn’t even possible to do well. Cheap computers and reasonable abstractions have made it largely unnecessary while complex architectures, sophisticated compilers and large libraries/frameworks have made it largely infeasible for most.

@thejessiekirk @benlockwood I don’t insinuate that they are separate. LLMs are a type of machine learning which is a subset of AI. I have a pinned post that says that. I attribute the origin of the interchangeability to opponents because they were the first to do so and among proponents of AI it is only the grifters who do so.

@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place I read the rest of the thread before I replied. My reference to framework complexity was meant to address that my comment wasn’t just about assembly. Modern systems, at every level from “what the compiler does” to “what the hardware does” are often too complex to justify the cost of understanding the next level down more than superficially, and sufficiently robust to not require that for most uses.

@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place Actual evidence: CorridorKey. If you equate “AI” with the subset consisting of large language models, ignoring 60+years of computer science, then sure, there is a bubble and it’s going to pop because LLMs are an unethical environmental disaster of a dead end. If you look at the entire 60+ years, though it becomes hard to imagine things like machine vision or go players or even green screen removal going away. https://github.com/nikopueringer/CorridorKey

@matthieu @tpaau17db @gael Nokia killed Maemo for internal reasons before Android owned the market. PalmSource failed to deliver PalmLinux for internal reasons that had nothing to do with Android. Canonical and Samsung both failed to produce compelling competitive products. Mobile device OSes are expensive to produce and even other companies with deep pockets failed to produce competitive products.