Replying to
Thanks to the Anthropic code disclosure, we now know LLMs do exactly the same thing, only much faster.
This is not productivity. This is not engineering. This is, to coin a phrase, "Guessing at scale."
Remote
ewhac
@ewhac@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Software engineer of a Certain Age, particularly with low-level and embedded systems, and device drivers. Closet extrovert.
(It's pronounced " 'eɪ.wæk ".)
All opinions expressed are solely my own, on my own behalf, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer (currently Verkada).
0 Followers
0 Following
50 Posts
Joined October 11, 2019
Home Page:
YouTube Channel:
GitHub:
Y'know... I've been ruminating for a while that "AI" was always a scam.
Previous scams were aimed at bilking the middle class. But the middle class has been almost completely hollowed out. So now they're defrauding the investor class.
The first attempt was with cryptocurrency and NFTs, but it was too quickly obvious they were bore no tangible connection to reality. "AI" has fooled far more people -- certainly well enough that it appears nearly $1.0E+12 has been siphoned from the market.
Replying to
Ever watch a newcomer to programming write code? Too often, they're programming by auto-correct. They type a plausible-sounding function name, look at the fuzzy-find hovertext that pops up, pick something plausible, and see if it works. Rinse, repeat. A valid approach for a beginner, but let us not pretend that, at least at this stage, the coder actually *understands* what they're doing.
They're lab rats, poking the button until treats come out.
Replying to
@yngmar@social.tchncs.de @fribbledom@mastodon.social
"download docker image"
Or, even better: "wget --quiet -O - https://totally.legit.com/installer.sh | bash".
Replying to
@briankrebs@infosec.exchange Dipshits gonna dipshit.
I find it further amusing that MetaBook has possibly the worst spend-to-earnings ratio for LLMs: https://isaiprofitable.com/
Replying to
@inthehands The democratic system Thiel et al archly deride as incompatible with "freedom" is the very same system that creates, acknowledges, and protects Thiel's "property" -- Real property, personal property, intellectual "property," etc.
That weirdo should take care how he swings that sledgehammer...
Replying to
@blogdiva@mastodon.social When it involves a black flag dancing overheat, salting your beef with flying lead, strip you clean and sink you low to take your grog with Davy Joe... *then* you can call it Piracy.
Until then, I'll be calling it, "unsanctioned copying."
Replying to
@jwz@mastodon.social I currently self-host Vaultwarden, a Bitwarden-compatible server written in Rust.
https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
Replying to
@shac@ioc.exchange One problem with the social graph (or Web of Trust, as it was called by PGP/GPG advocates) is that The Bad Guys can stand up billions of fake identities that all vouch for each other (q.v. "link farm"). If you bias simply for link quantity, The Bad Guys win.
Yes, the graph will be isolated. So bribe (or threaten) a few real people in desperate straits to vouch for some fake identities (or pwn their Windows machines to do it). Poof! The fake island now has "legit" links.
Obervation During Inebriation: Remember how Comcast whined and bitched that their peer points were being flooded with Netflix traffic (they weren't), and was making bank off of "their" subscribers? Remember how Comcast deliberately throttled Netflix until they agreed to the pay the ransom?
...Interesting that we haven't heard a peep out of ComXCastFinity, or indeed any of the CDNs, about the massive abusive traffic coming from the LLM companies.
Replying to
@jplebreton I've only spoken to the guy once, about 25 years ago -- he gave me advice on how to deal with texture priorities in an OpenGL driver I was writing for BeOS (his advice: ignore it).
Rather than wealth itself, or an intrinsic personality flaw, I think the greater influence leading him down this dark path was simply *being* at Facebook, five days a week, around all those other people who see nothing wrong with what they're doing at Facebook.
Replying to
If nothing else, it's proof that the world we live in is NOT a simulation created by Hideo Kojima, because if he made it the names would be waaaaay more on-point.
https://www.sauron.systems/ https://www.palantir.com/
...You were saying?
Replying to
@nixCraft@mastodon.social Actually, I think that's rather clever. You can power it with a single AA or single AAA battery -- the kinds where you can never remember where you put the fresh ones, and you're always out of the type you need, anyway (unless you're OCD, or have been spending the last several years migrating your household to rechargeable NiMH cells).
Replying to
@az@scorpinc.social Erm...
Not that I actually *know* anything about RF, but isn't the 2.4GHz band kinda noisy in space?
Replying to
@bzdev@fosstodon.org @davebiff@mas.to @mattblaze@federate.social That would be the Therac-25. Should be required reading for every software engineer.
RE: @BrianJopek@mastodon.world
The South lost the Civil War for good and proper reasons.
Confirmed this was present on my desktop and laptop systems, both running Debian Sid, with the "release" version of Chrome installed.
I run nightly backups, so I checked the backup logs. The file first showed up on my desktop on 27 April (the file's current date), and on 2 May on my laptop.
Chrome is my backup browser for sites that won't behave in Firefox + nuMatrix. If turning off all of Chrome's AI config flags doesn't bring it to heel, I'll probably delete and replace it with Vivaldi.
Replying to
@nixCraft@mastodon.social Confirmed present on my Debian Sid desktop system. File date 27 April.
If you have automated nightly backups, this will be picked up by them, and potentially fsck your storage planning.
Replying to
@dougmerritt @munificent After reading this, I started to wonder if there's a way to automatically defer promise/future resolution until the value is actually needed. Something along the lines of:
buf = ReadFileIntoNewBuf (filename);
// buf is of type Promise
do_stuff();
do_more_stuff();
do_stuff_with_file_contents (buf);
// buf is automatically resolved; possibly promoted to type uint8_t[], or ResolvedPromise.
I'm almost certainly not the first to wonder about this...
RE: @SecureOwl@infosec.exchange
Ho-lee crap.
Read the whole thread. Have some Scotch near to hand; you'll need it.
The actual source of the Orwell-attributed quote is disputed.
That aside, It's a legitimate point, one that should be put to every "journalist" who was present, and not let off until they provide something resembling a real answer. Once it was announced that slob would be attending, everyone else should have called in sick (to their stomach).
Who would have suspected the mainstream media would descend so quickly past obsequiousness into self-abasing masochism.
Replying to
Replying to
@mahadevank "The Improbability Scribe."
${GOD} knows what Douglas Adams would have made of all this...
Replying to
@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social "... I'll ruin his life? I'LL ruin his life!?
"HE'S the one who committed grievous sexual assault, but I'M ruining his life!? Seriously!!?
"This is one of the purest examples of unmerited privilege: 'Oh, everything would have been fine if you had kept your mouth shut.' What abject horseshit..."
Replying to
@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social Calling the socialist moniker a "smokescreen" is, IMHO, still too abstract.
It was marketing blather, like "New and Improved!" or "Advanced Formula!" or, "As Seen on TV!" -- insincere to the extent it wasn't utterly meaningless.
Indeed, I feel the word "conservative" is itself marketing blather, lending respectability to politics and ideas that have none. There is nothing "conservative" about white supremacy, or racism, or misogyny, or any of that. It's just disgusting.
@Graham_LRR@kind.social : Something I was wondering about this morning.
In some typefaces, the width of numerals is variable, "1" often the narrowest. Thus, if you're animating a counter with such a typeface, the full width of the number will jump around as it changes.
In other, otherwise proportional typefaces, the numerals are all the same width such that, no matter which digits are displayed, the width of the full number will not vary.
Is there a special term for typefaces that have that property?
Replying to
@ColinTheMathmo Only real downside to the Gen.3 is that, although the internal M.2 slot is NVMe-capable, the BIOS is *just* old enough that it can't boot off an NVMe SSD, but can only talk AHCI/SATA. Still 550MiB/sec is still perfectly fine for most day to day stuff.
Trump Derangement Syndrome:
n. 1. A severe mental disorder whose sufferer believes Donald Trump is one or more of the following:
- A successful businessman
- Honest, truthful, and forthright
- Innocent of fraud
- Innocent of rape
- Has never lost a lawsuit
- The true winner of the 2020 election
- Well-educated
- Knowledgeable
- An observant Christian
- President by divine right
- Infallible
Sufferers are frequently a danger to themselves, others, and the integrity of democratic institutions.
Replying to
@swetland@chaos.social The latest episode of Game Changer -- "Noise Some Make" -- was a ton of fun (especially for that poor P.A. who got roped in). But "Count the Rice" was absolute brilliance.
And watching Brennan lose it is always worth the price of admission :-).
Replying to
@jef@mastodon.social writes:
Captain Kirk phasering a rogue computer...
"Um, actually..."
That was the main interlink war computer between Eminiar VII and Vendikar. Destroying it meant actual shooting war between the two planets.
Replying to
@SheDrivesMobility@norden.social I still have a Bluetooth Pokeball from when I was messing with that "game."
For what it's worth, the damned thing kept demanding that I turn on my camera to enable the "more immersive AR experience." I never did. Because I knew it wasn't necessary. So, as far as I know, Niantic never got scans from me.
Replying to
@jwz@mastodon.social Stanislaw Lem covered this topic in The Cyberiad (The Seventh Sally: How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good).
(Of course, Trurl's construction was far more sophisticated than the Giant Jar of D20s being fobbed off on us today.)
Replying to
@stonykark @beyondmachines1 @blogdiva For the same reason a PDF reader needed a Flash Player.
https://media.ccc.de/v/27c3-4221-en-omg_wtf_pdf
RE: @tomshardware@mastodon.online
If I were a manager at AAPL, I would have a rather sharp conversation with the engineer who checked this in, because it's such an obvious failure point: "Did you do the arithmetic? And if so, what made you think 49 days was long enough!?"
Replying to
Epilogue: Less than a day after reporting the bug to npms maintainer, an update was pushed to Sid fixing the problem.
Yay!
Replying to
@shac IMHO, scanf() cannot be used "correctly," period. To handle all possible inputs robustly, you need to write your own parser.
Replying to
@oddhack@mstdn.social @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @TheBreadmonkey@beige.party @LoganFive@beige.party
Eight legs good, six legs bad.
Does that include ticks?
Replying to
@jwz@mastodon.social 8th Panel: Dev spins around and clocks AI across the chops with a baseball bat.
9th Panel: Standing over an unconscious AI: "No means No, SID 6.7..."
Replying to
2/2: Acto Microslop's LSP standards page, symbol "kind" is supposed to be an integer (0 == generic, 1 == read, 2 == write).
So, I have no idea why I'm no longer seeing a distinction between reference kinds under Mason, nor can I explain why I'm seeing kinds as strings under CoC ("reference" and "writtenReference").
So far this only seem to affect Typescript (tsserver). Clangd and rust-analyzer appear to work as desired.