@frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 3w ago

Not wanting to pour cold water on the UK hopes that the vagueness of Canada’s “associate membership” offer will result in an à la carte UK membership..

Canada is looking for an export market for oil, gas and rare earths, and a military alliance outside NATO.

The UK is looking for unfettered access to financial, agricultural and fishing markets while refusing their rules and offering nothing in return.

What the EU wants from the UK is political and military alignment, which are not on offer.

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@nicklockwood Yeah.. but at least you’ll know that somewhere in the code slop your MIT licensed code will have contributed a few weights in that GPU you can no longer afford 😜

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@marcoarment@mastodon.social @stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social The Siren Song of declarative programming is always that it makes things *look* so easy and clean. This is always achieved by putting the actual implementation in a black box. “You don’t need to know how the black box works!” they say.. until you do. Apple compounded that with leaving out all the hard, messy parts “that nobody needs.”

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@bnjbvr@tutut.delire.party @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place It’s undeniably accurate, but doing things that have no value to signal busyness to bosses that don’t understand, in order to give ammunition to CEOs to convince markets that they should speculate on shares in your company rather than that other equally dysfunctional one over there is what “corporate capitalism” is all about.

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 16mo ago

Replying to

@tuomas_h@mastodon.social there are several false beliefs at work:

blurred content under the UI chrome counts as “content”

This is somewhat true for photos (the only use case being designed for apparently) and totally false for text.

a Mac is essentially an iPad with a keyboard

The macOS 26 UI is now derived from the iPad. The biggest problem for the iPad with its full screen paradigm and “big iPhone” UI has always been “what do we do with all the leftover space”? Answer: add a sidebar and whitespace.

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@archo @ikuturso @chaucerburnt @sinbad You might find Baddeley’s working memory model interesting. They added the episodic buffer 25 years ago, but it shows just how surprisingly unimpressive our cognition is.. especially regarding “context window”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baddeley%27s_model_of_working_memory

en.wikipedia.org

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@sinbad @ikuturso @chaucerburnt Again.. I’m not claiming that LLMs think.. just that many of the ways that we try to differentiate ourselves from them just show how little we understand what “intelligence” and “thinking” really is. The Turing Test proves as much. The nature of intelligence is not “solved” as far as I am concerned.

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ikuturso @chaucerburnt @sinbad Koch’s book suggests that “consciousness” is simply an evolved post-hoc process that rationalizes what the body and the unconscious mind have already done.. to provide a vend-able illusion of self that helps market ourselves socially aka “Reliable hunter, strong but loyal”. Libet shows that decisions are taken before they become conscious.. and we have no access to that process. So we confabulate why we did something based on the “output” just like Claude Code.

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@chaucerburnt @sinbad The most interesting thing about this, at least for me, is that a human being probably can’t explain why they did it that way either unless they were very deliberate about it. The more we understand about the failure modes of LLMs, the more we humans look like we don’t meet our own criteria for “intelligence” either.

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@siracusa@mastodon.social it’s got no wheels!!

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 10mo ago

Replying to

@fahrni@curmudgeon.cafe looks a lot like Claude Code 😃. Seriously I used that back in the day and no software interface has ever been snappier.

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to on beige.party

@maxleibman@beige.party @nicklockwood@mastodon.social there’s a reason the pro iPhones come in orange now 😔

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 46mo ago

Replying to

@MonaApp@mastodon.social Glad to hear that you're bringing your app to Mastodon.. but shouldn't you ask people to follow you here? rather than on Twitter? Your entire customer base here are literally trying to flee Twitter 😲

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@sinbad you’re right, it’s not really programming anymore. It’s not as hand crafted. Of course it depends on whether you enjoy programming or making your vision come true. If I understand it correctly you’re proud of doing everything yourself and LLMs are diluting that.. so you choose not to use them. For me, the programming part has become tedious a long time ago. I have an idea and I want to realize it. LLMs give me more agency in that regard by making larger projects viable.

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@sinbad

There are other downsides as well:

it’s hard to get into “flow” if you’re just supervising.
it’s easy to create slop
it’s more fatiguing because the execution part is automated but delayed
it’s much easier to burn yourself out
it’s much easier to delude yourself as to quality and actual achievement

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 8mo ago

@claesdevreese @siracusa Yes, and to celebrate this the US Treasury Secretary delivers an incendiary speech about how we have fallen into the Chinese trap with all our solar and wind farms.. and we should buy clean, pure and ethical US fossil fuels.. or else. 🤷‍♂️

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@sinbad @chaucerburnt I’m not saying LLMs are human.. I’m merely pointing out that our beliefs about how our minds work have little in common with how they actually work. This is especially the case when we assert to be super rational.. not like a stochastic parrot LLM at all! .. when we are in fact much better at stochastic parroting guided by unconscious biases than at logical thought.. our hardware (and much of our software) isn’t built for the later.

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@chaucerburnt @sinbad You’d think that but research on split brain patients (both hemispheres have been surgically severed) by Gazzaniga strongly suggests that ALL human explanations work that way. Look up “split brain rationalization”. Christof Koch is a leading researcher into the neural basis of consciousness and the deeper you get into his research (try Then I myself am the World), the more obvious the similarities to LLMs become. For more fun look up “Libet experiment”.

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@archo @ikuturso @chaucerburnt @sinbad I’m not a researcher into consciousness, but I find it a fascinating subject. I did cognitive psychology in the 1990s.. and there’s been a lot of advances since then. Connectivist ideas in AI have always interested me, and large LLMs behave in very interesting ways that mirror neuroscience findings.. unsurprisingly since they imitate its low level structure. The big question is how low level structure gives rise to high level intelligence.

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ikuturso @chaucerburnt @sinbad Just like Claude Code, we can externalize our decision making process to some extent. Tell ourselves what we are doing or write it down before we do it. Then we can go back and try to find out what went wrong.. but we rarely do that and the way that we choose isn’t even accessible to us. There’s some fascinating examples for instance with sleep walkers making breakfast while the prefrontal cortex is switched off.

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 13mo ago

Replying to

@vandal ..hmm.. not sure about the macOS updates never being rejected, but I hear you.

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 13mo ago

Replying to

@vandal I only ever did something like two dozen iOS uploads, but I never had a problem and it was always much faster than for the Mac App Store.. then again I've probably done a few hundred Mac uploads..

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Frank Reiff @frankreiff@mastodon.social

· 3w ago

I’m one of those gadget lovers who get a lot of motivation from buying themselves the best gear for the job as a reward. I know it’s childish and it definitely originates in not being able to afford the stuff other kids could when I was young and lusted after a ZX Spectrum, or Commodore 64. Still.

The M5 Ultra was on my list but it’s just too bloody expensive.. but waiting for the M7 Ultra in 2028 (perhaps) is a little depressing. It’s the iMac Pro all over again. Wait? Or Jump?

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