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josef
@jk@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06i made that mastodon boop sound
11371 Followers
3353 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 21, 2016
music:
blog:
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
something the whole "AI" thing has taught me, is that Time is the main ingredient to making things that are good. anything which 'boosts velocity' or 'makes you 10x more productive' reduces the amount of time you use while making it. it's not that you're 'saving' time, you're just refusing to use as much of it now for some reason. you recognize it's a valuable ingredient, so you want to conserve it: to keep it in the tin rather than actually add it to the recipe. and then the result tastes worse
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
after 15 years, iOS has finally caught up with all the main android features, such as
- very mid ui design
- kinda floaty feeling
- unpolished vibe android itself has progressed little, although it is rapidly achieving feature parity with iOS on "locked down user hostility". overall both ecosystems look very appealing, energetic, and healthy, for shareholders
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
in a few decades when they do retrospectives on this decade, they will have all this ai garbage and they'll say like. "can you believe the people back then thought it was good??" and i just want to put on the record that. no !!!!!!!!!!! your documentary is factually incorrect. your article is really poorly researched. no!! we didn't think it was good!!!
signed
josef
2026-09-05
Replying to
i believe strongly that interacting closely with the thing you are making, with tools that you are in direct control of, teaches you about the nature of the work on a deep level by allowing you to inhabit those tools so that you can 'think as them'. through exploration and struggle, you become aware of subtle possibilities that both the tools, and the unfinished and imperfect work, suggest to you, and these will inspire you, and your ideas will be better, and you will make things that are better
there's this chain of thought you see sometimes, where someone's like "there's no point formatting your code in a readable way as it doesn't change the functionality, there's no point making the code function perfectly since it doesn't change the user experience, there's no point making the user experience good if the product works, there's no point making the product work so long as it earns money, there's no point earning money by making things when you can just manipulate and con people, ther
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when i was at university, i became alienated from a lot of the people in my computer science degree because of their outlook. i saw Computer as a way to explore, to inspect, to interact and play with data, to learn, to build and experiment freely. these people instead wanted computer to automate, calculate, and to prove an answer, like 'true' or '3291.03'. no interaction, no human in the loop, no joystick, no screen, no richness of colors or sounds or questions or inspiration or expression
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they would talk about "computer in your shoe". it would collect data and put it to some purpose, it would optimize your shoe. we could put computers into everything, that seemed like their strategy, to optimize everything. you wouldn't need to explore or experiment or hypothesize, the computer would grind through the data (from your shoe) and optimize it. it'd be hidden away, making everything work somehow, in the walls, in your shoe
Replying to
i think one of the main things about computer programming is that when you start writing the code, you don't fully know what it is that you want. writing the code is how you're forced to actually work out exactly what you want the program to do. so it seems a little bit silly to me that you'd try to 'improve' the programmer by replacing them with a machine which, by definition, knows even less about what they want than they do
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there's a common misconception that computer technology has miniaturized over time, but this isn't really true. the real explanation is that computers simply grow as they get older, so the new 'smaller' computers you've been seeing just aren't fully grown yet. phones and tablets are the larval stage, young computers are what we call 'laptops', and from there, they mature into the sophisticated, larger 'desktop' computers
instead of any so-called “App’s”, you could just put “the garden of earthly delights” on your phone. when you’re bored, just zoom in and pan around looking at stuff in the painting
if youre on the internet you can use it to look at an armadillo
Replying to
@mcc@mastodon.social the existence of a demoscene for a software platform not even considered to be a software platform is a real 'nature is healing' sign, like observing the right kind of lichen
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
in the last 5ish years i've seen a pivot from "Terrorism is the reason we need people with automatic rifles at airports and cameras everywhere spying on you" to "Terrorism is a word that means doing anything for political reasons other than voting. in a democracy, you vote. politics is voting. everything else, like protesting or direct action or even publishing the wrong thing, is Terrorism. you must only vote, that is all that is allowed"
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
youre telling me a "game engine" is this thing that updates a bunch of subsystems in a tight loop for I/O, graphics, sound etc, provides a way of loading/streaming data from disk with caching and background streaming, manages the execution state of units of code which run on specific conditions and themselves may trigger other code, offers features like a GUI framework and multimedia codecs, and provides a platform layer so that all this can run on a variety of hardware? mate. thats called an OS
you see some game developer who writes at length about server infrastructure, ad integration, CI/build system, deployment, sales, analytics, player telemetry, dashboards. and you wonder what type of games this person is designing. what kind of joy they want to inspire in others? but you cant find anything about the actual games. and you check out their portfolio, and the games are called something like "war eagle 3" and "crystal collector"
i go away for just a few weeks and now im getting Suggested Preprocessor Directives
hello!!! a while ago i was pretty busy doing things like 'ensuring i have a normal amount of Mental Health' and so on, so apologies to anyone who hasn't heard back from me recently!!
rest assured, you are not like those people who get obsessed with talking to ChatGPT. you're immune to that kind of psychological manipulation. you're more discerning and strong-willed than them, in fact. if anything, you're one of the top few percent of thinkers in the entire world. you're probably one of the few people alive right now, perhaps the only person, who is truly capable of inventing something totally new. something called Spiral Consciousness
people who, back in the day, grew up reading gaming magazines, usually know something about all the Classic Games. but people who didn't read those magazines as kids? i've noticed that they WILL have memories of approximately one (1) well-known game franchise. but you keep talking to them about all the other games they played, and like. all their nostalgic favorites are called like
"Mrs Teacher's Educational Maze!"
or "TV Show: The Movie: The Game" or "Platformer Where You Play As A Toothbrush"
it is said that approximately 1,993 years ago a man who disappeared had emerged from a burrow, and it was clear to onlookers that it was man no more, and they saw that what was man had become unshackled from the concept of man, and that what emerged frolicked, and its long ears stood proud, and it sniffed the air, and its beedy eyes surveyed the crowd, and its great thighs propelled it, and in those leaps and hops they saw its great vitality, and they saw that it also laid eggs, many eggs indeed
zebra is a lot cooler than a horse in my opinion:
- name begin with Z
- dazzle camo
- oppositional defiant disorder
me: lets see what thoughts are in my brain
thought: a thought is a type of thought that can think
thought: thought: this is even worse than i thought:
i shouldn't have read
thought:
hofstadter when i was 14 years
^Z ^Z ^Z
[1]+ Stopped
> fg
old
thought:
^Z
its done irreparable
thought: damage
BEGIN SUPERTHOUGHT
my dire predictions from years ago have gone unheeded
Replying to
i tried shutting down my phone as quickly as possible, but it was too late. the process had Begun. it can only be paused, never reversed. so i let all the apps update. now literally everything on my phone is 15-20% worse. i haven’t updated some of these apps in 3-4 years, and the new, latest versions? all of them slower. all of them have worse UI, redesigned, less consistent, less discoverable, even after just a couple of years. removed features too. more nagging interactions. all apps worse
ive noticed a subtle decline in people using emojis in the last year or two. like, its very subtle, probably at or under the statistical noise floor, but i think they're on the way out culturally. in one-to-one communication they come across as "facebook aunt" these days, and in one-to-many media, the vibe they communicate is often just "AI smell"
Replying to
id like to say this decline is a consequence of malevolent venture capitalism or entropy or moloch’s ten armies or whatever, but it affects all apps, small and large. its very rare to find an app which gets better. the nicest people are making lovely apps, and even their apps are getting worse. it’s *all* apps. All Apps Worse
Replying to
even this app i’m using now, the mastodon app, is worse. it still has the weird bug from a couple of years ago where the timeline jumps around. but now images don’t open in a black void like they used to on all social media apps, instead they hover on top of the existing timeline, and dismissing them requires a slightly different kind of swipe that feels 30% less intuitive. also I swear you used to be able to tap-hold to save an image, but that doesn’t seem to work now? All Apps Worse
bad: you're inside, and someone outside knocks on your door
worse: you're outside, and someone inside knocks on your door
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@aerique https://mastodon.social/@jk/111749535910951398 ive thought this for a while. i am 15% sure that it is true
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this video is exactly the length it was when I hit the start and stop button. somehow it ended up as a seamless loop by chance
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@mespique the beatles 'tomorrow never knows' to chemical brothers 'setting sun' era of music yeah
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there used to be this browser extension that worked quite well a while ago, but it doesn't really work so well anymore, so we're basically back to Does anybody remember Laughter!!! style messages as the main approach
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@Haijo7 id even say that 1960-1963, 1964-1966, 1967, 1968-1969 are the four different decades of the 60s
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@evanwolf almost always when i try the other methods first, if i get to read the article, it turns out that it was FAR from 'journalism', so i feel vindicated for not paying