Fractal Olivia

@davidgerard@circumstances.run i hesitate to trouble you with this but what i worry the most is the use of ai in drafting and writing legislation. i don't know if you have anything you wish to say, but i assume you might have an unusual ability to correlate diverse pieces of information on this.

@Edmonds_Scanner@universeodon.com i can see parts of myself in options 3, 5 and 6! but personally, i'd prefer to be just a cute little fern in some forest 150 million years ago.

RE: https://bots.robots.rodeo/@scream/117300115324299371 this is the kind of honest conversation i approve of:

@aredridel@kolektiva.social oh no! i so wished that wasn't the case.

@steppe_lord@darksavantcrusaders.org @davidgerard@circumstances.run @NotTheLBCGuy@mstdn.social hm, this hurts me. i don't like it.

@_elena@mastodon.social i wonder how sancrosanct that logo is? it might perhaps work better if the sides of the pentagon were rounded?

@catsalad@infosec.exchange also text, where different letters are of different shapes or colours, is difficult to read. for some reason, my brain recognizes easily only one colour and shape of letters at a time.

RE: https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@HennaVirkkunen/117008348161347403 this really saddens me. so unwise.

@JeremyMallin@autistics.life as a first order approximation, i would recommend assuming that nothing is fixed.

@gsuberland@chaos.social that's quite not so. see e.g. Hatton's Safer C.

@gsuberland@chaos.social you're right. ultimately, some people care and some don't.

@davidgerard@circumstances.run I also trust billy. However, I must warn that with the wider 80 cm model the shelves tend to sag under the weight of my books and so would rather recommend the narrower 40 cm model.

RE: https://fediscience.org/@m_correa_m/117008634177947668 @davidgerard@circumstances.run also, a comment on shutting down alphafold: https://infosec.exchange/@m_correa_m@fediscience.org/117008634271278107

@davidgerard@circumstances.run @mpospese@mountains.social I did finish reading it and now I really do not like the internet and am going to log off and spend the rest of the day with friendly books which don't try to fry my brain.

@davidgerard@circumstances.run hm, this didn't go quite as i hoped.

@davidgerard@circumstances.run @pndc@social.treehouse.systems look, please don't ban me outright: people in this space must learn a lot of things the hard way, and sometimes something like bash is simply not present.

@corbden@defcon.social i believe tom bombadil is a necessary counterbalance to the darkness of the one ring. someone who is so far above it that the ring barely registers to him. in any case, when i read the books again, i find him delightful.

@corbden@defcon.social tom bombadil is a brilliant character exactly where the narrative needs him. i'll die on this hill. send toot.

@valoisa@eliitin-some.fi @feuer@social.feuerx.net niin, vastakkaiseen suuntaan muistelen, että jossakin kohtaa vuosien ajan icloudilta saattoi jäädä tiedostojen uppaus pilveen kesken, ja käytännön ratkaisu oli listiä tietty prosessi (olikohan se bird?) kerran, pari tai muutaman, kunnes uppaus tokeni.

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io simultaneously C64 basic and the basic that came with the DOS of the other computer in my family. I soon borrowed all programming related books from library and spent time reading everything I could, mostly not understanding, of course. The moment my family finally got internet access, this gave access to countless compilers and interpreters and lecture notes and articles and such. Good times!

@catsalad@infosec.exchange i have great difficulty reading any kind of oscillating text. nor indeed any kind of text with images that are not still. never mind videos, which are incredibly worse. when i'm tired even still text starts to be way too animated to actually fully see what the actual letters are.

@aredridel@kolektiva.social are we cursed, then?

@draken@masto.nyc @netkitty@meow.social indeed! I sometimes wish I could just get in a cardboard box and not worry about a thing.

@nixCraft@mastodon.social I have always only used these two: alias l='ls -aCFG' alias ll='ls -aCFGl'

@tillybridges@mastodon.social Begin Transmission is a rare masterpiece.

@tillybridges@mastodon.social wait, what? Why would you get your fingers sticky when peeling an orange? What on Earth are you doing with oranges?!

@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz @antoinechambertloir@mathstodon.xyz @Colman@mastodon.ie @zanzi@mathstodon.xyz @peterwoit@mathstodon.xyz @mc@mathstodon.xyz I am sorry to be a stick in the mud here but chess is not a metaphor for mathematics, it literally is a mathematical object in itself. saying that chess is a bad metaphor for mathematics is much like saying that the monster group is a bad metaphor for mathematics. rather, and more positively, I would suggest that chess is a rather small fragment of mathematics, making it perhaps possible to get modest insight into how mathematics works by studying it.

@pablobm@metalhead.club @davidgerard@circumstances.run after reading some threads on this, though this is rather interesting, the ai connection might not necessarily be so clean here. the author referenced in the toot you linked has added a remark "EDIT: I jumped too fast on the easy story, and overplayed the role of AI here. Had I known how it would blow up, I would have been more careful... Things are still not entirely clear, but I've tried to make the post less wrong."

@pndc@social.treehouse.systems @davidgerard@circumstances.run i fear you have too optimistic view what people actually have access to.

@pndc@social.treehouse.systems @davidgerard@circumstances.run but that is just the point: i work in finance myself, and excel is the only tool i have apart from sas. this must be the lived reality of pretty much everybody working in large corporations.

@RosethornRanger@spore.social i only need a cane, but have i learned to hate ableists? yes, i have.

@kirtai@tech.lgbt @gwynnion@mastodon.social I believe that @kirtai@tech.lgbt puts her finger on a key issue. of course there is an aspect of nostalgia and appreciation for history, but retrocomputing is exciting and fun! in a computer like, say, the C64, one can understand almost everything if one indeed wishes to do so. the entire instruction set of the microprocessor? easy! audio and video programming? can do! SID and VIC are absolutely something that a normal human being can understand. (confession: I read about SID and VIC long ago but at the time I did not, in fact, understand them. but I believe the point stands nonetheless.) are there limitations? sure, but making something fascinating with limited resources makes success all the more sweeter. in the 90's many of us lost touch with what the computer is actually doing because the complexity became too much to handle. today, when I press a key on my work laptop, there is an extremely unpleasant delay before I see the resulting letter on the screen. (doubly so when I must work with machines remotely.) and the delay results from the simple keypress signal having to go through a ridiculously convoluted set of countless layers of abstractions. sure, in principle, I could still write, say, javascript code, like basic code in the olden times, and run it on my browser, but the connection to the machine is still irrevocably lost. there is beauty and joy in simplicity.