Replying to
@lydiaconwell@todon.nl Yes. There is nothing more substantive behind it.
Remote
Bob Mottram ✅
@bob@epicyon.libreserver.org
Software engineer developing federated and decentralized systems for a more habitable, resilient and human-scale internet, respecting people and the planet. Founder of the #LibreServer and #Epicyon projects. Anarcho-flâneur. Deadpan photographer. 
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31 Posts
Joined August 16, 2021
Website:
Gemini:
gemini://libreserver.org
Languages:
en
Matrix:
@bob:conduit.libreserver.org
PGP:
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Pronouns:
He/Him
Enigma:
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Email:
bob@libreserver.org
LXMF:
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Ricochet:
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Replying to
@floppyplopper@todon.nl A lot of families will have suffered financial losses at the hands of Starmer, and so this message shows how out of touch he is.
Replying to
@passenger In the past I did industrial R&D and occasionally visited universities. University staff were some of the most classist people I've ever met.
Replying to
@jonny LLMs don't understand anything about anything, so they may generate a program with tests but it will be "what a program with tests statistically looks like" and the tests themselves will be nonsense.
Replying to
@aral The way that the AI bros are trying to tackle this problem is with spec driven development. Where you have a complete and comprehensive spec and the AI then "merely" generates complying source code. So they would never maintain anything, just modify the spec and re-generate. This corresponds to the pre-1970s belief that coding is just typing and requires minimal skill.
I am prepared to believe that this might work for very trivial sorts of software, such as hobby microcontrollers where you have some data sheets and make some LEDs blink or a solenoid activate. But for bigger software - which is practically all software - spec driven development never works.
In the distant past some large companies tried to do spec driven development, and created doorstop-sized books of highly detailed plans after years of careful systems analysis. None of it worked. I know from first hand experience, because that was an aspect of my early commercial software work.
Replying to on dice.camp
@DM_Zeppelin@dice.camp It's not just about money its also about control. For example, the government always being able to know the home address of someone criticising them or organising a protest on a social network.
I think the way to avoid this is to get away from corporate web platforms. If that's not a solution then I will likely go darknet-only or just give up on the internet entirely. There are no circumstances under which I'll be sending a social media platform a copy of my passport, or whatever official papers.
Replying to
@jackscottau@aus.social This is similar to how I started doing commercial programming, except that vibe coding was called wizard programming.
Replying to
@jimbob@aus.social This is like in the olden days when some people could use wizards to generate code, but were stumped if they wanted something that wizards couldn't generate.
The British Museum has always been a dubious enterprise. If Greece wants their statues back then I don't see any valid reason why they couldn't be given back (they have a lot of other stuff which probably ought to be given back). Fundamentally they are Greek objects of historical/national significance. You can argue about legal process from the early 1800s or wotnot, but that's just a weak attempt to dodge the issue.
The problem of upfront specifications is that the world is more complex than you are, and it may change between the point of specification authorship and the point of software delivery. Even if the archetypal “panel of experts” creates the specification there will be gaps, things which just don't work, or aspects of the specification which are contradictory in practice. The perfect, toy world of your imagination is never the same thing as the actual messy and changing real world beyond your cognitorium.
No well-defined upfront specification survives contact with reality.
In the early part of my commercial software adventures there was one occasion where a manager forgot to update the well-defined specification. The well-defined specification had apparently taken a large organization multiple years to produce. And so I spent however many months writing to to the wrong specification.
But it's not just about having the correct version of the specification. There were plenty of other occasions where I had the correct specification, but when the software was tested in a realistic scenario the specification was found to be unworkable. For any non-trivial problem, believing that you can make a perfect upfront specification by putting in a lot of effort never really works out.
When governments are doing military conscription it's because they want more souls to throw into the fire.
I think I understand the appeal of retrocomputing. By today's standards, those machines were simple, and by reading a few manuals you could fully know how they worked. The electronics was large, and so component fixing may also be feasible.
If we are heading into a worse future, it's the small, simple and maintainable kinds of computer which would remain usable.
Replying to
@simon_brooke Yes exactly. And I remember in the distant past managers trying to make it work. But in the end no amount of fraught meetings and "just convert this into that" could make the spec work. In the end the details always matter, and the specs were created by middle-managers who didn't actually understand what their employees were doing, or even understand much about how the company operated.
Back in the olden days as a junior developer when they plonked a doorstep-sized spec book on my desk, I had some respect for the people who made that document. It must have required formidable effort, and apparently had taken about five years to create. Someone's Magnum Opus. There were all sorts of details and process diagrams. But there were so many assumptions which just turned out to be false that none of it worked.
Replying to
@fdlamotte Both MeshCore and Reticulum are glimmers of hope in an otherwise depressing era of internet stagnation. Even if the government goes full on fascist or there is a major war with damage to data centres, these mesh network systems still stand some chance of continuing to operate.
Replying to
@davidrevoy @Anna You could perhaps do one for #Epicyon. Anything wolf or prehistoric dog related.
https://gitlab.com/bashrc2/epicyon
Replying to
@Tattooed_Mummy@beige.party It's tastefully understated for him. He could have had the walls gold plated and be living in a golden box.
Replying to
@AlisonW@fedimon.uk Ah, that's worse than I thought then.
Being a diehard, there is no way that I'm going to be running a proprietary app on my phone. This probably sounds weird to most people, but that's just the way it is.
Replying to
@aral@mastodon.ar.al If Trump starts WW3 then he announced it well in advance and no other world leader objected even slightly. Complete silence from officials.
If nuclear weapons are used then Putin is going to be far less inhibited about doing the same in Ukraine and Europe.
Replying to
@aral@mastodon.ar.al It will only continue for years if the construction of massive data centres continues, which seems unlikely given the lack of return on investment.
Replying to
@cwebber@social.coop Someone was saying recently that at their work they're expected to review 20K lines of slop code per day. Realistically, nobody no matter how experienced will be able to do that. So bullshit will get waived through and it will all collapse after a while. FOSS projects following this type of method won't last very long.
Replying to
@openrightsgroup@social.openrightsgroup.org I am obviously not going to be flashing any credentials at an "online checkpoint", and so a social media ban for teenagers will also be a social media ban for me, despite being considerably older.
However, I doubt that they will practically be able to ban more decentralised protocols, such as ActivityPub, where there are no single chokepoints.
Replying to
@ExtinctionR@social.rebellion.global Also repair clothes if possible. I've sewn things back together on more than a few occasions.
Replying to
@xgranade@wandering.shop The formulas of the past no longer work, so it's time for a new ethical software movement to emerge.