So, the owner of the building we live in has hired a property management company to take over the building. I really hope this isn't a precursor to a renoviction.
(Following thread was prompted by people pointing out that the Bluesky dev team seems heavily into vibe-coding now and originally posted on said vibe-coded Bluesky platform that is now constantly failing.)
Over the past year, every single time one of the apps or services I use suddenly became less reliable and more buggy, I never have to look far for the "Claude is amazing and now writes most of my code" post for the devs involved.
Best part? It's always somebody with years of experience. Exactly the demographic that is supposedly able to use this shit safely, but my impression is they're just as bad as the novices
This is happening IMO because of one of the fundamental issues with software dev (and this predates "AI" and was one of the themes of my first book):
Most software projects fail and most of what gets shipped doesn't work. The way the industry is set up means there is little downside to shipping broken software
Few devs have a reference point for genuinely working software. Usability labs were disbanded over 20 years ago. Very few companies do actual user research, so their designs are based on fiction. Bugs are the norm
Alienation is also the norm for devs, both socially and organisationally. Whether it works for the end user doesn't cross their mind. Whether the design fulfils business needs is not their problem. Bugs are a future problem. Ship insecure software and patch it as user data gets stolen
Devs are so disconnected from the output of their work that many of the norms of the industry are outright illegal: there's a good chance that if you follow popular practices for a React project, for example, you'll end up with a site or product that violates accessibility law in several countries
Few devs would even know where to begin to look to answer the question "does my software work for the people forced to use it?"
Because the element of coercion and a complete disregard for consent is now an integral part of how the industry works, but that's a topic for another day.
or the "You must allow our JavaScript programs to run on your browser, otherwise we won't allow you to get to the information that we're legally required to provide you with"
I do wonder how much of the disregard of consent is an artifact of being owned by the Epstein Class and the wannabes making this seem normal and grown up
This reads like an open WorkβFeedback Loop: work ships, but real user effects donβt reliably change decisions or next work. Maybe that is a good starting point to discuss this issue in the organization. Thats at least what my thinking model is for π
I think alot of it stems from the βmove fast and break thingsβ attitude under VC pressure, that now includes breaking their own software. βAgileβ is to blame as well, which tends to prioritise siloed rapid feature development, all too often these are hacks to get it working within the timeframe allotted. This ignores broader impacts in the codebase leading to rapid bit rot.
I still remember, talking to a twitter dev who had an utterly ridiculously foolish take on XYZ issue go viral.
They told me 'Uhhh, I've never had this much attention on me, my tweets never go beyond my social circle. I had to turn off my phone. It kept buzzing.'
... this was a person who worked on the UI. No shit they had no idea how to deal with high volume 'oh, you just 200k likes' kinda shit, they never experienced it themselves.
Honestly I think a big part of it is more than our industry being deeply immature still; I think the most important throughline of the research on LLMs' effects on cognition is a consistent attack on metacognition, which seemingly doesn't abate with experience. The same corrosion happens to juniors and seniors alike, but the seniors have more rationalizations at hand to pretend it doesn't.
Apropos of nothing, the absolute worst implementation of Raft I've ever seen in my Raft course was by a pair of senior devs with a combined 60+ years of experience who decided to pair program together and announced ahead of time to the group that they were going to "win" Raft. They did not.
An undergraduate who'd never coded with sockets before did reasonably okay.
motivated reasoning is one hell of a drug. I've seen a developer far better than me getting completely hypnotized by LLM sycophancy; I tried pointing out that what they proudly posted as "see? Completely bug free after just a few rounds of conversation!" did in fact contain a subtle bug/violation of their prompt. Got ignored and they only went downhill from there. It's a saddening cult really.
Real life experiences in this are interesting to hear. What I note is that I can make/fix my own code with help of AI because what is "shipped" is often not what I want, or broken... and the blast radius of my code errors is limited because no-one uses it but me.
Some of the most defensive people I've ever met were mid-career software developers. They quite obviously tried to protect their fragile egos (and possibly careers) from valid criticism directed not at them but at their software. I have no doubt in my mind that those are exactly the type of guys who were immediately hooked on LLMs.
I feel like having spent most of my career building embedded systems aimed at industry rather than consumers, where customer support issues can mean sending a technician out with a USB stick on a ten-hour road trip, has insulated me from the worst madness.
If your sloppy coding breaks a manufacturing line or distribution network, bugs become expensive fast.
Though having said that, $CURRENT_EMPLOYER is pushing for greater use of LLMs in our workflow...
I see so many people falling into LLM delusion, who I thought would know better, with no seeming pattern in *why* they fall for it.
Yes, the lack of negative incentives is certainly a factor.
My best explanation so far is that LLMs are kind of "acting" like 17 cons (some new, some old) in a trench coat, and different combinations of these trick different people who'd be able to resist most of these on their own.
It's an eerie, lonely feeling to look at those one thought of as good at the exact things needed to see through the flashy deceptions of LLMs not just fall for them, but commit fully and strongly. And, in my experience, then refuse to face factual points that should convince them to let go of the delusion...
This is what we get for challenging the sloperators to actually ship code instead of wittering on interminably about how they are a 100x coder now thanks to the chatty bot!
there is that but looking forward to the stories in 18 months about how the AI can't fix a critical bug and the codebase is now in WingDings so humans can no longer read itπ
Vibe coding is awesome. I built my own business in minutes and Claude has not failed me one. In fact, I am writing this from my Mastodon client Claude wr{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. AuΓerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
Wait, do you have links/sources for bluesky devs being into vibe coding, or evidence bluesky is vibe coded? This is the first I'm hearing of this and I am interested.
@screwlisp is having some site connectivity problems so asked me to remind everyone that we'll be on the anonradio forum at the top of the hour (a bit less than ten minutes hence) for those who like that kind of thing:
He'll also be monitoring LambdaMOO at "telnet lambda.moo.mud.org 8888" for those who do that kind of thing. there are also emacs clients you should get if you're REALLY using telnet.
Topic for today, I'm told, may include the climate, the war, the oil price hikes, some rambles I've recently posted on CLIM, and the book by @cdegroot called The Genius of Lisp, which we'll also revisit again next week.
At the end of @screwlisp's show, in the discussion of @cdegroot's book, @ramin_hal9001 was talking about continuations. I wanted to make a random point that isn't often made about Lisp that I think is important.
I often do binary partitions of languages (like the static/dynamic split, but more exotic), and one of them is whether they are leading or following, let's say. there are some aspects in which scheme is a follower, not a leader, in the sense that it tends to eschew some things that Common Lisp does for a variety of reasons, but one of them is "we don't know how to compile this well". There is a preference for a formal semantics that is very tight and that everything is well-understood. It is perhaps fortunate that Scheme came along after garbage collection was well-worked and did not seem to fear that it would be a problem, but I would say that Lisp had already basically dealt led on garbage collection.
The basic issue is this: Should a language incorporate things that maybe are not really well-understood but just because people need to do them and on an assumption that they might as well standardize the 'gesture' (to use the CLIM terminology) or 'notation' (to use the more familiar) for saying you want to do that thing.
Scheme did not like Lisp macros, for example, and only adopted macros when hygienic macros were worked out. Lisp, on the other hand, started with the idea that macros were just necessary and worried about the details of making them sound later.
Scheme people (and I'm generalizing to make a point here, with apologies for casting an entire group with a broad brush that is probably unfair) think Common Lisp macros more unhygienic than they actually are because they don't give enough credit to things like he package system, which Scheme does not have, and which protects CL users a lot more than they give credit for in avoiding collisions. They also don't fairly understand the degree to which Lisp2 protects from the most common scenarios that would happen all the time in Scheme if there were a symbol-based macro system. So CL isn't really as much at risk these days, but it was a bigger issue before packages, and the point is that Lisp decided it would figure out how to tighten later, but that it was too important to leave out, where Scheme held back design until it knew.
But, and this is where I wanted to get to, Scheme led on continuations. That's a hard problem and while it's possible, it's still difficult. I don't quite remember if the original language feature had fully worked through all the tail call situations in the way that ultimately it did. But it was brave to say that full continuations could be made adequately efficient.
And the Lisp community in general, and here I will include Scheme in that, though on other days I think these communities sufficiently different that I would not, have collectively been much more brave and leading than many languages, which only grudgingly allow functionality that they know how to compile.
In the early days of Lisp, the choice to do dynamic memory management was very brave. It took a long time to make GC's efficient, and generational GC was what finally I think made people believe this could be done well in large address spaces. (In small address spaces, it was possible because touching all the memory to do a GC did not introduce thrashing if data was "paged out". And in modern hardware, memory is cheap, so the size is not always a per se issue.
But there was an intermediate time in which lots of memory was addressable but not fully realized as RAM, only virtualized, and GC was a mess in that space.
The Lisp Machines had 3 different unrelated but co-resident and mutually usable garbage collection strategies that could be separately enabled, 2 of them using hardware support (typed pointers) and one of them requiring that computation cease for a while because the virtual machine would be temporarily inconsistent for the last-ditch thing that particular GC could do to save the day when otherwise things were going to fail badly.
For a while, dynamic memory management would not be used in real time applications, but ultimately the bet Lisp had made on it proved that it could be done, and it drove the doing of it in a way that holding back would not have.
My (possibly faulty) understanding is that the Java GC was made to work by at least some displaced Lisp GC experts, for example. But certainly the choice to make Java be garbage collected probably derives from the Lispers on its design team feeling it was by then a solved problem.
This aspect of languages' designs, whether they lead or follow, whether they are brave or timid, is not often talked about. But i wanted to give the idea some air. It's cool to have languages that can use existing tech well, but cooler I personally think to see designers consciously driving the creation of such tech.
Don't forget about gensym's real-time lisp, which was common lisp except for consing. It had its own memory manager (written in lisp) which was more like C's malloc/free (only I think with more complex objects than just blocks of memory but I don't really remember), but we got to use macros and all sorts of other stuff. (Exactly what is lost to two decades of doing other stuff.)
@nosrednayduj First, thanks for raising that example. It's interesting and contains info I hadn't heard.
In a way, it underscores my point: that for a while, it was an open question whether we could implement GC, but a bet was made that we could.
You could view that as saying they only implemented part of Lisp, and that the malloc stuff was a stepping out of paradigm, an admission the bet was failing for them in that moment. Or you could view it as a success, saying that even though some limping was required of Lisps while we refined the points, it was done.
As I recall, there was some discussion of adding a GC function. At the time, the LispM people probably said "which GC would it invoke" and the Gensym people probably said "we don't have one". That was the kind of complexity that the ANSI process turned up and it's probably why there is no GC function. (There was one in Maclisp that invoked the Mark/Sweep GC, but the situation had become more complicated.)
Also, as an aside, a personal observation about the process: With GC, as with other things like buffered streams, one of the hardest things to get agreement on was something where one party wanted a feature and another said "we don't have that, I'd have to make it a no-op". Making it a no-op was not a lot of implementation work. Just seeing and discarding an arg. But it complicated the story that was told, and vendors didn't like it, so they pushed back even though of all the implementations they had the easiest path (if you didn't count "explaining" as part of the path).
Also an essay I wrote that summarizes a key point from it, though not really related to the topic of the show. I mention it just because that point will also be interesting maybe to this audience on the issue of capitalism if not on the specific economic issue we were talking about tonight: netsettlement.blogspot.com/201β¦
@nosrednayduj Also Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine, very politically relevant this week, traces a lot of political ills to Milton Friedman and his ideas.
your notes on continuations are interesting. I do a lot of Kotlin programming these days, and one of thr features it adds on top of Java is continuations (they call is suspend functions). However, unlike Scheme, you can only call suspend functions from other sustend functions, leading to two different worlds, the continuation-supported one and the regular one.
I measured a 30% performance hit when changing code use suspend functions instead of regular functions. Nevertheless, this has not stopped people from using them for everything.
@loke ooh, that is interesting, thanks! I did not know that Kotlin also had that feature (in a limited way).
Yes, the performance hit probably comes from copying the stack or restoring the stack. For small stacks this is trivial, but often times continuations are useful when computing recursive functions over very large data structures, and you usually have very large stacks for these kinds of computations.
Delimited continuations (DCs) can help with that problem, apparently. And the API for DCs also happens to make them more composable with each other, since you can kind-of unfreeze a computation inside of another frozen computation.
That might be why Kotlin has those restrictions on continuations.
yes, Scheme led on continuations before it was a well-established idea, and I think there is some regret about that because of the difficulties involved to which you had alluded, especially in compiling efficient code. Nowadays the common wisdom is that delimited continuations, which I believe are implemented by copying only part of the stack, are better in every way. I have no strong opinions on the issue, I just thought it was interesting how Scheme solved problems of optimizing tail recursion and βcreating actorsβ i.e. capturing closures, and both of these things involve stack manipulation which naturally leads into the idea of continuations.
As a Haskeller I definitely appreciate the study of programming language theory, and how much of Haskell is built on the work of Lisp. The Haskell teamβs many innovations include asking questions like, βwhat if everything was lazy by default?β Or, βwhat if we abolish mutating variables and force the programmer to pop the old value and push the new value on the stack every time?β Or βwhat if tail recursion was the only way to loop?β As it turns out, this gives an optimizing compiler the freedom to very aggressively optimize code, and can result in very efficient binaries. Often times, both programmers and language implementors can do a lot more when you are constrained to use fewer features.
But which features to use and which to remove requires a lot of wisdom and experience. So the Haskell people could have only felt comfortable asking those questions after garbage collection and closures had become a well-established practice, and we can thank the work of the Lisp team for those contributions.
it'd be interesting to make a family tree of programming language implementations by where they got their GC design from. Java started out real bad (well, fine for the sort of embedded systems it was initially targeted at, not so fine for the stuff I tried to do with the 1.0 version) but picked up good (generational) GC from Self and Strongtalk, in other words more directly from Smalltalk than Lisp. But, well, a lot of history shared between Lisp and Smalltalk makes them more joined at the hip than most people realize π.
Generational GC changes the way you program and it's not *just* that it's efficient.
We used MIT-Scheme (which, by the early 90s was showing its age). We did all manner of weird optimizing to use memory efficiently. Lots of set! to re-use structure where possible. Or (map! f list) -- same as (map...) but with set-car! to modify in-place -- because it made a HUGE difference not recreating all of those cons cells => bumps memory use => next GC round is that much sooner (and then everything STOPS, because Mark & Sweep). Also stupid (fluid-let ...) tricks to save space in closures.
We were writing Scheme as if it were C because that was how you got speed in that particular world.
And then Bruce Duba joined the group (had just come from Indiana).
"Guys, you're doing this ALL WRONG",
"Yeah, we know already. It's ugly, impure, and sucks. But it's faster, unfortunately",
"No, you need a better Scheme; you should try Chez".
...and, to be sure, just that much *was* a significant improvement. Chez was much more actively maintained, had a better repertoire of optimizations, etc...
... but the real eye-opener was what happened when we ripped out all of the set! and fluid-let code. That's when we got the multiple-orders-of-magnitude speed improvement.
See, setq/set! is a total disaster for generational GC. It bashes old-space cells to point to new-space; the premise of generational GC being that this mostly shouldn't happen. The super-often new-generation-only pass is now doing a whole lot of old-space traversal because of all of those cells added to the root set by the set! calls, ... which then loses most of the benefit of generational GC.
(fluid-let and dynamic-wind also became way LESS cheap, mainly due to missing multiple optimization opportunities)
In short, with generational GC, straightforward side-effect-free code wins. It took a while for me to recalibrate my intuitions re what sorts of things were fast/cheap vs not.
Even if GC saves you the horror of referencing freed storage, or freeing stuff twice, you still have to worry about memory leaks and moreover, dropping references as fast as you can matters
With copying GC, leaks are useless shit that has to be copied -- yes it eventually ends up in an old generation but until then it's getting copied -- and copying is where generational GC is doing work, and it's stuff unnecessarily surviving to the medium term that hurts you the most (generational GC *relies* on stuff becoming garbage as quickly as possible)
And so, tracking down leaks and finding places to put in weak pointers started mattering more...
Did you see the garbage collection handbook's note on performance depending on having about five times as much memory as was technically needed? @dougmerritt @kentpitman @cdegroot @ramin_hal9001
but I can't see how more than 2 would ever be necessary for a copying GC. Once you have enough space to copy everything *to* (on the off-chance that absolutely everything actually *needs* to be copied), you're basically done...
... and if you're following the usual pattern where 90% of what you create becomes garbage almost immediately, you can get by with far less.
@wrog > but I can't see how more than 2 would ever be necessary for a copying GC
It's not "necessary", it's "to make GC performance a negligeable percentage of overall CPU".
It was about a theoretical worst case as I recall, certainly not about one particular algorithm.
And IIRC it was actually a factor of 7 -- 5 is merely a good mnemonic which may be close enough. (e.g. perhaps 5-fold keeps overhead down to 10-20% rather than 7's 1%, although I'm making it up to give the flavor -- I haven't read the book for 10-20 years)
But see the book (may as well use the second edition) if and when you care; it's excellent. Mandatory I would say, for anyone who wants to really really understand all aspects of garbage collection, including performance issues.
@wrog 'setq' and friends have been criticized forever, but avoiding mutation is easier said than done. Parsing arbitrarily large sexpr's requires mutation behind the scenes -- which ideally is where it should stay.
Any language we use that helps avoid mutation is a good thing. 100% avoidance is a matter of opinion -- some people claim it was proven to be fully avoidable decades ago, others say the jury is still out on the 100% part.
I don't know enough to have an opinion on whether 100% has been completely proven, but it's attractive.
I respect you, and your contributions to Lisp and the community. So I dislike nitpicking you. But:
> Common Lisp macros more unhygienic than they actually are
This is a biased phrasing. There are hygenic macro systems, and unhygenic macro systems. One cannot assign a degree of "hygenic-ness" without simultaneously defining what metric you are introducing.
We all can agree that one can produce great code in Common Lisp. It's not like Scheme is *necessary* for that.
But de gustibus non est disputandum. There are objective qualities of various macro systems -- and then there's people's preferences about those qualities.
Bottom line: it seems you are saying that Lisp macros aren't so bad if their use is constrained to safe uses, and I would agree with *that*.
> I don't quite remember if the original language feature had fully worked through all the tail call situations in the way that ultimately it did.
My memory is that the Scheme interface for continuations was completely worked out when Scheme was born, but implementation issues were not -- beyond existence proof that is.
> But it was brave to say that full continuations could be made adequately efficient.
Yes it was!
> the Lisp community in general, and here I will include Scheme in that
Planner, for instance, went in a quite different direction. Micro-Planner (and its SHRDLU) inspired Prolog. Robert Kowalski said that "Prolog is what Planner should have been" (it included unification but excluded pattern-directed invocation for example), see Kowalski, R. (1988). βLogic Programming.β Communications of the ACM, 31(9) -- although the precise phrasing I think is from interviews.
Anyway, Prolog was not a Lisp, but sure, definitely Scheme is. The history of Lisp spinoffs created quite a bit of CS history.
I did professional development in Scheme (at Autodesk, before that division was axed π -- it's certainly a workable language in the real world.
> 2 of them using hardware support (typed pointers)
I learned about typed pointers from Keith Sklower, from my brief involvement in the earliest days (1978?) of Berkeley's Franz Lisp (implemented in order to support the computer algebra Macsyma port to Vaxima), and it blew my mind. Horizons extended hugely.
A few years later everyone seemed to just take the idea in stride. Yet no one seems to comment on the impact on typed pointers made by big-endian versus little-endian architectures; everyone seems to regard it as a matter of taste. It's not always; it impacts low level implementations.
>My (possibly faulty) understanding is that the Java GC was made to work by at least some displaced Lisp GC experts
I used to regularly talk to the technical lead for that group at Sun for unimportant reasons, and I have every reason to think that the entire team was absolutely brilliant.
I don't recall whether some of them were displaced Lisp GC experts, but I do recall that I had plenty of criticisms about Java the language, but tended to find few, if any, about Java the implementation. And they kept improving it.
Your understanding is mostly faulty. The original GC was written by me, and I'm no Lisp GC expert. I was (and still am) an admirer of Lisp. I wrote the code for my whole PhD thesis in Lisp. My admiration for garbage collection started earlier, when I was a big user of Simula in the 70s. But the motivation for GC in Java was different: the motivation was all about reliability and security. A leading cause of security vulnerabilities as always been buggy code. And one of the leading root causes of many long standing, hard to diagnose and fix, bugs has been flakey storage management. Garbage collection goes a long way to increasing system reliability, and hence security. I had always wanted to make GC more mainstream.
When you described garbage collection to senior management back in the day, their reflexive judgement was: "bullshit! Lazy engineers just don't want to clean up their mess". But when they see measureable improvements in system robustness, and corresponding decreases in failures, they Notice.
Kent: https://nhplace.com/ https://climatejustice.social/@kentpitman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_M._Pitman https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/ Cees de Groot('s book, The Genius of Lisp) : ht...
A follow-on to my "Nazi Sucker-punch Problem" post, to address the most common argument I get, which boils down to:
""" Moderated registration won't stop Nazis, because they'll just pretend to be human to fool moderators, but it will stop normal people, who won't spend the effort to answer the application question or want to wait for approval. """
Okay, I'm going to try to use points that I hope are pretty acceptable to anyone arguing in good faith, and I'm going to expand the definition of Nazis to "attackers" and lump in bigots, trolls, scammers, spammers, etc. who use similar tactics.
Attackers: we can group attackers into two main types: dedicated and opportunistic. Dedicated attackers have a target picked and a personal motiveβthey hunt. Opportunistic attackers have an inclination and will attack if a target presents itselfβthey're scavengers. In my years of experience as an admin on multiple Fedi servers, most attackers are opportunistic.
Victims: when someone is attacked, they (and people like them) will be less likely to return to the place they were attacked.
In general: without a motive to expend more effort, humans will typically make decisions that offer the best perceived effort-to-reward ratio in the short-term (the same is true of risk-to-reward).
Why does any of this matter?
Because it all comes down to a fairly simple equation for the attackers: effort > reward. If this is true, then the opportunistic attackers will go elsewhere. If it isn't true, then their victims will go elsewhere.
How can we tip that scale out of the attackers' favor?
By making sure moderation efforts scale faster against attackers' behaviors than against normal users' behaviors.
- A normal user only has to register once, while an attacker has to re-register every time they get suspended.
- A normal user proves their normality with each action they take, while every action an attacker takes risks exposing them to moderation.
- A new user / attacker likely spends a minute or two signing up, while a moderator can review most applications in a matter of seconds. Yes, attackers can automate signups to reduce that effort (and some do, and we have tools to address some of that, but again, most attackers aren't dedicated).
- Reviewing an application is lower effort than trying to fix the damage from an attack. As someone who gets targeted regularly by attackers from open-registration servers, I'd personally rather skim and reject a page-long AI-generated application, than spend another therapy session exploring the trauma of being sent execution videos.
I believe this points to moderated registration being the lowest effort remedy for the problem of the Nazi Sucker-punch. So before we "engineer a new solution" that doesn't yet exist, we should exhaust the tools that are already available on the platform today. Yes, we could implement rate limits, or shadow bans, or trust networks, or quarantine servers, but we don't have those today, and even if we did, there's no evidence that those would be a better solution for Fedi than moderated signups.
Will it stop *all* the attackers? No. But it will stop most opportunistic attackers.
Will it deter *some* potential new users? Yes. But communities are defined by who stays, not by how many come through the door.
Why reactive moderation isn't going to cut it, aka, "The Sucker-punch Problem".
Imagine you invite your friendβlet's call him Markβto a club with you. It's open-door, which is cool, because you like when a lot of folx show up.
I used to get my hair cut at a place that was just far enough way, and with enough traffic jams on the way each time, that I stopped going. It's not "far", by any means, but it was just on the cusp of being annoying. Once it became juuuust too much, I went somewhere closer.
I think people underestimate how low the bar can be to prevent bad actors. Even the guy scripting his nonsense will hit an application form and immediately leave to find an open instance, most of the time.
An assault on βalt-rightβ figure Richard Spencer sparked the βpunch a Naziβ meme. Violence is bad, but so is racism β so where do we stand ethically?
To the concern that it might deter some new users, I would add "yes, but if the alternative is lots more evil arseholes, it's a minor downside - especially as it is really only a downside for lazy new users".
We already have moderated follows at the user level; having moderated signups at the server level seems like a no-brainer.
@kimlockhartga I hated (absolutely hated) the "Sticks and stones" stuff at school, knowing full well the damage that words can do. The pen might be mightier than the sword, but the damage from a comment can last just as long, if not longer, and it cuts deep.
I dunno man. You ever stab a kid with a Bic pen in the hand for grabbing you and shoving you down into a chair? Because I did once. And the bullies never fucked with me again.
@tompearce49 What that terrible and completely wrong saying was trying to tell us was that our feelings didn't matter. That we should suck it up and not miss work, because it's not like we broke a leg or something. So much about school is preparation to be a reliably productive worker, not a reliably good person. Those perfect attendance awards? To prepare you to never call out sick from work.
@kimlockhartga ^ that is what makes this accurate: "Reviewing an application is lower effort than trying to fix the damage from an attack."
Moderators have to review hundreds of applications to prevent a single attack. But because the damage of accumulated attacks is both long-lasting and affects audiences beyond a single direct target, reviewing remains a lower effort investment
Preventing attacks is also ethically worthwhile, adding ethos to logos and pathos! Never let meritocracy trolls reduce us to only using logos and rational arguments as persuasive tools
Perfection is not the enemy of the good. Any attempts to keep out the attackers are better than no attempts to keep out the attackers.
There's such a thing as defense-in-depth. You don't need your registration process to stop every attacker to get in the door. You have moderation tools. You have blacklists. You have defederation. You have TBS. Every attacker-stopper you add makes your instance safer.
it's very worth repeating, but wow it's frustrating going over this again and again. Nothing about what you're saying has changed in the past 30-odd years since sites with easy signup became a thing, but then every new platform does the same thing of having wide open signups from the start and is "totally shocked" when that leads to the same problems that have been happening for decades.
Moderated registration won't stop Nazis, because they'll just pretend to be human to fool moderators, but it will stop normal people, who won't spend the effort to answer the application question or want to wait for approval.
on its face this is just an awful argument, like ???
99.9% of nazis won't even bother doing that... so it weeds out the vast majority of them
and that's what you have other moderation practices for!!
Suddenly wondering about a system, which I've seen effectively used on forums, where a new user's posts are held back, and they are effectively silenced until a moderator reads their posts and approves them to interact, perhaps with some sort of time-limit in case moderation doesn't get to it in a timely manner. This would not only mean they don't need to give a reason when signing up, but that they could partially engage without having to wait, and potentially that moderation would be seeing their posts right away.
It might take a new layer of systems to implement, but do you think that would be a good idea?
@Raccoon Honestly, that sounds like a neat idea. Closed registration is incredibly stressful to me, for example, because you have to consider just so many factors: did you write enough? did you write too much? are your writing skills on par? do you sound sane enough to be accepted? WHAT do you even write in the first place? what reason for wanting to join do you give beyond the basic "i need an account to interact with the site" which will likely not be enough and get me rejected? what if I end up wanting to change instances and therefore would've wasted moderator's time on making them read that? The reasons for closed reg brought up in OP are valid and are probably more immediate than having anxiety, but my issues still exist and I'd like them to be kept in mind.
@ItsFunkyCaptain you just wrote *way* more in an unsolicited response to a stranger than you'd ever need to write to be accepted into our moderated-registration community at LGBTQIA.space.
In fact, the vast majority of people who *do* get rejected, get rejected because they *obviously* didn't read the server rules.
Specifically:
2. The main language on this instance is English.
11. We need to confirm youβre not an AI, so please write a few sentences explaining why you want to join this server. Without that, we canβt approve your account. (max 400 characters)
And their application looks like: "ich bin schwul", or "community", or "i'm lgb".
Whereas something as simple as "I'm a lesbian looking for a place that isn't toxic like Twitter." would easily be accepted.
See, the example you provided could be useful during the registration process, because to me that looks way too little and I would feel pressured to get as close to the 400 word mark as possible. *I don't know the standards of the person reading my text*, so that of course leads to overthinking.
Agreed. Opportunistic attackers are more sensitive to effort (it means more risk for them). Filtering them out makes dealing with targeted attackers easier.
I'm a guy, and once, for about 45 seconds, I was mistaken for a woman, and the difference in the attitude towards me was insane, and that clarified things for me in an incredibly direct way.
So, I'm guessing you're saying that mostly in exasperation, and I'm most definitely not saying it's your job/responsibility to do so, but my thought is that yes, that might actually be a useful thing to do.
@kimlockhartga I usually donΒ΄t see stuff like that bc a) as you say, IΒ΄m not the target and b) bc the work all you mods and adms put in every day.
My wife just liked and commented an anti-nazi post on facebook the other day and the messages she got ranged from kill yourself to actual threats. Is it just me or is this actually getting worse by the day?
Anyway, IΒ΄m sorry for everyone who has to deal with this shit and immensely grateful for everyone moderating it.
it occurs to me that moderated registration has another benefit: reducing moderation load.
yes; reducing.
if your mod team is at capacity, the last thing you need is the doors wide open for any number of new users. if you're having trouble keeping up with new account requests, good! let them lie fallow, because you clearly don't need more users to moderate right now!
What about hellbanning AKA segregating the ab-user into their own mirror chamber where they can see and "interact" as normal, but only fellow hellbanned can actually interact?
True but the fash will play along and be nicey nicey. Bouncer says yes. Wash rinse repeat, ala nazi bar.
Whereas if theyre identified as fash, their account isnt deleted.
Its just reduced engagement to other fash. Most dont catch it. They get bored cause nobody interacts, and they go away for real, without spamming account after accuont.
@crankylinuxuser did you read the post where I covered this argument above?
Also, there's a cost to having a shadowban mechanic (and we already have account and server limiting). When you have a shadowban mechanic, users have no way of knowing whether or not they're in "The Good Place", which leads to anxiety and users feeling sure of themselves when posting. If you don't know when you've been punished, then the most insecure/depressed/anxious among us will assume they have been. Meanwhile, the trolls will make "The Bad Place" bleed over via out of network posting (i.e. sites picking up screenshots of shadowbanned filth-posts and dragging good Fedi's reputation down), as well as extra server/storage costs to maintain a safe space for trolls.
A follow-on to my "Nazi Sucker-punch Problem" post, to address the most common argument I get, which boils down to:
""" Moderated registration won't stop Nazis, because they'll just pretend to be human to fool moderators, but it will stop normal people, who won't spend the effort to answer the application question or want to wait for approval. """
Okay, I'm going to try to use points that I hope are pretty acceptable to anyone arguing in good faith, and I'm going to expand the definition of Nazis to "attackers" and lump in bigots, trolls, scammers, spammers, etc. who use similar tactics.
Attackers: we can group attackers into two main types: dedicated and opportunistic. Dedicated attackers have a target picked and a personal motiveβthey hunt. Opportunistic attackers have an inclination and will attack if a target presents itselfβthey're scavengers. In my years of experience as an admin on multiple Fedi servers, most attackers are opportunistic.
Victims: when someone is attacked, they (and people like them) will be less likely to return to the place they were attacked.
In general: without a motive to expend more effort, humans will typically make decisions that offer the best perceived effort-to-reward ratio in the short-term (the same is true of risk-to-reward).
Why does any of this matter?
Because it all comes down to a fairly simple equation for the attackers: effort > reward. If this is true, then the opportunistic attackers will go elsewhere. If it isn't true, then their victims will go elsewhere.
How can we tip that scale out of the attackers' favor?
By making sure moderation efforts scale faster against attackers' behaviors than against normal users' behaviors.
- A normal user only has to register once, while an attacker has to re-register every time they get suspended.
- A normal user proves their normality with each action they take, while every action an attacker takes risks exposing them to moderation.
- A new user / attacker likely spends a minute or two signing up, while a moderator can review most applications in a matter of seconds. Yes, attackers can automate signups to reduce that effort (and some do, and we have tools to address some of that, but again, most attackers aren't dedicated).
- Reviewing an application is lower effort than trying to fix the damage from an attack. As someone who gets targeted regularly by attackers from open-registration servers, I'd personally rather skim and reject a page-long AI-generated application, than spend another therapy session exploring the trauma of being sent execution videos.
I believe this points to moderated registration being the lowest effort remedy for the problem of the Nazi Sucker-punch. So before we "engineer a new solution" that doesn't yet exist, we should exhaust the tools that are already available on the platform today. Yes, we could implement rate limits, or shadow bans, or trust networks, or quarantine servers, but we don't have those today, and even if we did, there's no evidence that those would be a better solution for Fedi than moderated signups.
Will it stop *all* the attackers? No. But it will stop most opportunistic attackers.
Will it deter *some* potential new users? Yes. But communities are defined by who stays, not by how many come through the door.
Why reactive moderation isn't going to cut it, aka, "The Sucker-punch Problem".
Imagine you invite your friendβlet's call him Markβto a club with you. It's open-door, which is cool, because you like when a lot of folx show up.
So, there was a post on the fedi about a project Johnny Harris was working on. Some people in that thread seemed to think that he was untrustworthy, even going so far as to posit that he might be a CIA asset. I had no idea why they believed this, but it was echoed by more than one person.
I am familiar with Johnny's work. He always seems to do a good job of citing his sources (at least to my casual inspection). I asked about this distrust but received no response. Perhaps they thought I was sealioning?
So, I'm asking here: Is there an actual valid reason to distrust him that I'm simply not aware of, or is just stemming from the fact that he likes to shine light on things that some would rather not have light shined on?
Searched 'Klein bottle'. Another useless knowledge item to clutter my diminishing brain. Best part about the search is that a company named Acme makes glass Klein bottles.
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. AuΓerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
"He killed the noble Mudjokivis. Of the skin he made him mittens, Made them with the fur side inside, Made them with the skin side outside. He, to get the warm side inside, Put the inside skin side outside; He to get the cold side outside Put the warm side fur side inside. Thatβs why he put the fur side inside, Why he put the skin side outside, Why he turned them inside outside."
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. AuΓerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
Sorry, but if the jeans have cuffs, I stopped doing that in the 50's... no clothed Klein bottles should ever be stuck in fashion hell unless there's a remake of Grease.
Surely both are wrong? No part of the bottle would show the inside of the pants, both the big bulb and the small tube would be the outside of the pants. Or the inside.
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. AuΓerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
A warning for Adobe #InDesign users. I recently updated my copy, and after preparing a document, the recipient of that document sent me the alt text that popped up on one of their figures. Apparently, by default, InDesign uses AI to generate (often hilariously wrong) alt text for images.
My nephew was folding laundry, and turning the occasional shirt right-side-out. I showed him a "trick" where I turned it right-side-out by pulling the whole thing through a sleeve instea...
A warning for Adobe #InDesign users. I recently updated my copy, and after preparing a document, the recipient of that document sent me the alt text that popped up on one of their figures. Apparently, by default, InDesign uses AI to generate (often hilariously wrong) alt text for images.
A warning for Adobe #InDesign users. I recently updated my copy, and after preparing a document, the recipient of that document sent me the alt text that popped up on one of their figures. Apparently, by default, InDesign uses AI to generate (often hilariously wrong) alt text for images.
@Digital Mark Ξ» βοΈ πΉ π½ Well, there's an entrance exam for a job I need to study for so that I can continue to pay for internet (and by extension, access to thr VR). π
Apparently the one I did earlier was only the prequalification exam.
I have to leave my apartment and interact with other humans today, something I attempt to avoid at all costs. I must fill a travel mug with pu'er and bring it with me in an attempt to make this a tolerable experience.
I don't think programmers and sysadmins get how much there is to learn and how intimidating it is for normal people to host their own software.
For one most of us don't have a computer that is running 24/7, which means we need to rent a server which we have no idea how to go about doing.
And then there's an entire arcane art to running software that can speak to the internet without your server being taken over and used to send spam to half the planet
Yep. Speaking as someone who only started scratching the networking side pretty recently, it's just as hard as learning to code, and that includes the underlying logic.
Once you *know* it seems obvious, but if you don't? Whoooooooof.
@Canageek That part is not necessarily entirely true, though the rest of your post is entirely valid, and definitely something that we need to find a solution to.
The flip side is it turns out for certain things. this is way easier than you'd expect, because there's companies whose entire business model is making it. so you just enter a credit card number and they make everything else work for you.
Like I wanted to spin up a private TeamSpeak server and I just enter how many users I want to be on at the same time, pick a name and select what domain name I want from a drop-down list and enter my credit card number and it charges me $3 a month and everything just works
So if you are the sort of person who has a lot of experience hosting things, and wants people to use centralized services left, maybe make a business selling that type of on-demand hosting but for zulip or Matrix or Stout or whatever!
thanks this is uplifting. I have been coding and setting up all sorts of servers for decades. One forgets that it is something one had to learn just because it was out of curiosity and for the love of it.
There probably are quite a few people trying to make a business in that niche though. I suspect they are hard to find with margins too small to afford much ad-spend.
So for me it would be a question of how to find customers.
@hc I think a community maintained index would be excellent for that sort of thing, or something similar to what TeamSpeak has where they've got a map of all the TeamSpeak hosting companies and you can just click on the city and find who as a server in that city.
TeamSpeak's map is very out of date, but I was still able to find and pay for a hosting provider with it
@Canageek I think the service that comes the closest to this is yunohost, though I've had a look at them and I don't know that they're quite to the level you describe.
Also, even if someone does pull this off, they need to have competitors and the ability to easily transfer from one to another, otherwise the enshittification process is almost guaranteed to set in eventually.
I'd love to set something like this up myself, but while I have the time and expertise, I don't have the necessary capital.
@me Yeah, it'd be really nice if you could just export a script that would set up a new server the exact same way as the previous one, so you could just move hosts whenever you need it
@Canageek There are tools for doing that sort of thing... but there's no standard way of doing it. Vagrant and Nix come to mind.
But I don't think anyone's currently actually doing this. Nobody wants to make it easy for their users to leave their service, which is understandable, I guess, but...
@me weirdly TeamSpeak does this, they've made it incredibly easy to move from one hosting provider to another and maintain all your settings.
I don't necessarily like the way they've done this, which is all of your settings sync TeamSpeak's servers, not your hosting providers, apparently it works quite well
@me A very silly question is how hard would it be to just take a disk image and then upload it to a different hosting provider? It's probably the most inefficient way of doing that...
@Canageek It could work, though sometimes these providers need things to be set up in specific ways to work on their infrastructure, so things might break. For instance, my current VPS provider has my static IP address hard-coded in the config files.
@me Also, this is really common in game server hosting, when I was buying a teamspeak host all you had to do was fill out what name you wanted it to have and your credit card details and poof. you had a fully set up TeamSpeak server, and they had similar services for dozens of game servers like Minecraft and Call of Duty. Even some open source options like Mumble.
Honestly, I've been working in tech for a dozen years, just starting to get into self-hosting, and it's just iceberg after iceberg of byzantine applications and docs. It's so intimidating and exhausting. It's a layer of the internet that even lots of tech folks never interact with.
@arcanesugar Conversely, thanks to years of trial and error, I can handle the networking side, Byzantine though it may be, but I can't program for shit.
my favorite thing about tech people is how much they expect normal people to know/do. It is staggering how out of touch most of them are. The command line is very scary for most people!!!
I quite agree with what you say. I'm a retired developer and I've written and run various internet services professionally - and I'm aware of gaps in my networking knowledge. I've set up self hosted services in the past based on my own software (using things like nginx and various databases as components) but I'd hesitate to do it now because of the increased prevalence of scrapers and deliberate attackers. I would really hesitate to recommend self hosting for normal people.
with no one around to mentor me and growing up with depression didnβt manage to snowball my programming knowledge into anything useful until I was almost 30, bullshit hobby
@glent This seems very specific to where you are, ISPs don't seem to provide IPv6 where I like, and electric failures are common enough that potential drive damage or corruption feels possible too.
my main objection is the amount of my precious time is taken by administering said server. Unless you pay up the yazoo to have someone else do it for you it is a time suck. Basically, I can maybe afford four followers or bankrupt myself.
@mildpeach I talked with a friend and she said for a small group (less them 25 people or so?) it should only cost around $5/month for text and voice chat, some file sharing, and some web hosting
As a sysadmin and someone who self hosts a lot, you'll get really tired of being your own sysadmin and want things to just work. It's not all it's cracked up to be.
That's why there are companies out there trying to solve it, like Umbrel.
you can get help online... but not always easily. Search engines don't work well anymore, you may not know what you're looking for anyway, the old threads that look like they have the answer might have been for an earlier version, etc etc
For those who don't know, my mother had a major #stroke a little over a month ago. We're very fortunate to live in a country (Canada) where we have free #healthcare, but as her discharge from the #hospital looms closer, we're having to raise funds to make #accessibility modifications to my parents' home so that she can return. Boosts are welcome (and appreciated).
I started my young adult life without a car. There is bus service in the city I lived in, but carrying groceries on the bus usually meant 2 bags of groceries at most, so a lot of canned and dried foods.
Now I have a car and can buy 5 bags for 2 weeks, and fresh produce is 80% of my shopping trip and is not only healthier, but cheaper.
Buying a 5lb bag of potatoes and 3 lb bag of onions is a cost savings, but one you have to have a little privilege for.
@Extra_Special_Carbon I might have had some of the milder food allergies, like gluten, but at that age and minimum wage I just had chronic inflammation, obesity, swelling, and I spent my whole life not knowing I wasn't absorbing Magnesium and Iron because of it.
Caring about my health was a luxury I couldn't afford, and other people judging me thinking I was lazy was a thing I couldn't help.
When I was young and broke, we'd go to a handful of various joints that had large proportions for ~$3 a pop - China Kitchen, El Ranchero, CiCi's Pizza, Anthony's 3.50 (Yes, it was in the name.), maybe Tbell. And, of course, Ramen was 12c a pack. I'm in the south, so I got by on grits a good bit. It was a wretched diet, nutrition-wise.
@MaierAmsden @Extra_Special_Carbon I was in a similar way. Putting a can of tuna in raman was fancy and a way to get some protein in when I could afford it.
The number of times I tried to substitute something, like mayo, for expensive milk and butter in generic mac and cheese. Yeach.
The barely meat $1 bag of hot dogs - 1 hot dog, removed and cut up, to "spice up" a pot of mac n cheese.
So much macaroni, which I am probably allergic to, and so much cheese powder.
@MaierAmsden @Extra_Special_Carbon yeah, 5 years in and a few raises, plus getting a car which caused my employer to jump my pay by $1/hour (suddenly they knew I could drive to some better job) and I could afford to hit those super cheap Chinese buffets.
So much sweet and sour "meat".
Eating healthy was a thing I had to be able to afford more than a decade later.
I felt so much better eating potatoes that I recently confirmed I have been gluten intolerant for decades, and am now learning how to eat all over again.
@gkrnours That's how the system was designed that the ruch must become richer and the poor must become poorer. It's so surprising how the 300 richest people in the world own over 40% of the global wealth when we have millions of people who can't even afford to buy two meals a day. What brings about such kind of inequality?
@Urban_Hermit It's ridiculous to me that we have the ability to feed everyone and we won't because a bunch of people that aren't rich are so worried about the few who are.
If capitalism requires hungry kids, I don't need it.
@wendynather Means Testing is always *always* a bad approach. It comes from the same reflex "what if someone undeserving benefits from this" that led to our whole "money=virtue" problem in the first place, and it is the ruination of many good ideas.
Repeat this until you see it behind your own eyelids: The *most efficient* way to help everyone who deserves it, is to help *everyone*.
How do we pay for it? I'd start with a 100% wealth cap tax. Once you have a pre-determined amount of *net* welath (including real estate, stocks, and other non-liquid assets), say $250 mil (more than that just seems like video game points), all income gets taxed at 100%. Sure, you're allowed to have more than the wealth cap, you're just not allowed to make any more. Drop below the cap, and income gets taxed at normal progressive tax rates again.
100% agree with this. More people would buy organic and reduce reliance on chemical pesticides and fertilizers, improving soil health and ag worker health and consumer health and the list just goes on
don't forget that bureaucracy costs money, giving everyone the same basic income without having lots of paperwork and means testing means, investigations, tribunals ect means less wasted money
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Hopefully someday the rich will realize that at some point the increasing wealth gap creates an unstable society, endangering their position. Just ask Marie Antoinette.
At least here in the US I am not going to hold my breath waiting for that.
pol, taxes, fox wants socialism probably, but it isn't that smart
Sensitive content
yep, the same rich people keep yelling about overpopulation, yet have 21 kids somehow to spread their wealth between, somehow dodging inheritance taxes. if there was overpopulation that would just be a symptom of us not actively trying to just feed everyone.
If the tax curve actually was exponential to some degree (there's probably a better curve here, idk maths that well) we could likely easily feed, house and insure every single lifeform on this planet to at least a basic degree that is comfortable to live under for everyone. Anyone who wants more can work for it, anyone who wants to be excessively rich can deal with diminishing returns.
I've been pulling for universal snap for a few years now by pointing out that it solves both usual complaints: "that person is buying soda with snap. Why are they wasting my tax dollars on junk?" And "that person is buying fresh veg and seafood with snap. Why should they be eating better than me on my tax dollars?"
That is a great idea. Problem being that this has been brought up for decades if not centuries. It is a myth that you can implement progressive change in a regressive system. The only really progressive changes like the 8 hr workday and five day workweek and womens voting rights and abortion have been brought because the soviets made it law (most of those they did first, they also had the first female minister on the planet).
If you tax anyone, they won't have as much money. This isn't the argument Him thinks it is.
The usual trope, "But then the rich won't create more jobs." Wake the hell up they're cutting jobs as you read this, AND they just got a huge tax break.
The rich build their mega yachts, compounds, and bunkers, not because they can but because they are afraid what might happen if they don't.
Are there any #Lisp programmers out there who use a #ScreenReader? Given how messy Lisp can be to read without proper indentation (which I imagne wouldn't translate well on a screen reader) I can't see it is being an easy language to work in without being able to see it.
I've been thinking about a way to make an editor that lets you explore a Lisp program by walking through the forms in the program in a manner similar to the way one might navigate in a MUD. Is this a crazy idea, or one with some merit?
I can imagine making a screen reader for lisp would be doable. Instead of close parenthesis it could say close defun, and instead of open parenthesis it could say open, then the function name. The rest of the language would be decently adapted.
It might still be hard to understand complex expressions though.
Not to discourage new ways to solve old problems, I just want to point out that your lisp journey will be much easier if you use an editor designed for the task, which includes learning a set of editor operations that function at the "form"/s-exp level.
In emacs these operations include traversal functions like `forward-sexp`, and the very useful `indent-sexp` function. They're part of basic emacs behavior, you don't even need to do change emacs configuration to enable them, and they're useful on data other than lisp source code.
Once you can easily navigate up, down, and around forms, checking to see where a form starts and ends is easy without any sensitivity to how it's indented.
What ifβand this is perhaps crazyβinstead of giving me "AI" features, you gave me a usable, well documented API, so I could add my own automation features?
lambda returns a function, so the symbol-function syntax is redundant now. It wasn't always that way in CL's history. Anyway, no need to use #' with lambda now.
Seemingly plain (lambda () ...) is a macro that expands to (function (lambda () ...)). #'(lambda () ...) uses a reader macro to expand to the same (function (lambda () ...)).
Function is a special operator that returns a function. It takes either a function name or a lambda expression. The second case is what is happening here.
I've been taking a bunch of tests to qualify for a transcription job. They're not easy and I need a perfect score to pass. I finally failed one of the tests but managed to pass it on the retry.
They're really picky about their style guide. Fortunately, it basically amounts to syntax rules and I've been dealing with compilers that are equally picky about syntax for decades.
It also helps that all throughout my schooling my mother worked at the local university proofreading research scientists' papers and she insisted on proofreafing all my essays too.
I never thought I'd end up being happy about that.
Now I'm annoyed. Apart from that one hiccup, I aced the transcription parts (which are supposed to be the "hard" part) only to fail the last short section of the exam. Now I have to wait two days before I can try again.
So the cooldown period for me to re-take the exam is over. They want me to redo The. Whole. Damn. Thing.
Fine, whatever. It'll take me a few days to get through it all, but I don't expect to fail again.
Given how their style guide is now permanently burned into my brain, there's a tiny vindictive part of me that toyed with the idea of spinning up a competing service. That's probably more throuble than it's worth, though.
I see now why they're always hiring. I wonder how many people get to the prequalification exam and then just decide it's not worth it.
After a closer review of the style guide, I have come to realize that the question I was repeatedly getting wrong was one that wasn't even on my radar as a candidate. I misremembered a stupid trivial detail from the guide.* I was rabbit holing on the wrong two questions, one of which I still maintain can be argued to have two correct answers, but I now know which one they're looking for.
Not looking forward to sinking another ~5 hours on this thing.
* That would have had virtually zero impact on my ability to successfully do this job.
Now I have to wait for them to determine whether or not they think I cheated. I didn't, but if they think I did, that's what matters. I can't see there being a reasonable appeals process for that.
@π¨π¦ CleoQc ππ¦π§Άππ It's a legal transcription job. They do regular transcription too, but they have AI doing much of it, so they're not looking for new people there.
They're smart enough to realize that AI isn't currently sophisticated enough to properly follow the various style guides required by their legal clients. I guess they realize that if the quality of the work drops, they'll lose the contracts.
That said, I'm sure all the work I do is going to be used to try to train an AI to replace me, but that's probably true of any job at this point.
Just booked an appointment with my doctor to renew my #ADHD meds again. Now it's time to play my favourite game: is he going to fight me on this prescription again?
You may not think me very impressive, but I'll have you know that I'm a successful restauranteur in an obscure text-based multi-user virtual reality. #LambdaMOO
Got my hands on a #shortwave radio, but the fact that I live in a giant concrete box doesn't seem to be helping my reception. Seeing what I can do about that.
Are there any broadcasts that are worth catching that I'd be able to get in Southern Ontario?
So now that she's eating "real" food again, we took some of the curry we've been making lately to my mother. I was very happy to learn that she enjoyed it. Mind you, we're competing with hospital food, so it's not like the bar is terribly high.
Don't do AI. Look for people selling electronics they don't need anymore and use them to make the machine. Make a god out of discarded parts, and don't let it die. Use it for whatever the hell you feel like. Give it the ability to sense its reality and start programming it not to speak, or interact with anyone, but to show people echoes of the past.
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In 1959, a cement mixer with a full load of cement, wrecked near Winganon, Oklahoma πΊπΈ
By the time a tow truck came to haul it away, all of cement had hardened inside of mixer. Tow truck was not able to remove all wreckage at same time because of weight, and decided to haul only cab/frame and would come back for detached mixer later, which never happened.
Today, 67 years later, it still sits where it fell. Locals have painted it and added "rocket thrusters" to make it look like a space capsule.
@LanceJZ @isaackuo That's a piece of Art, and congratulations to the locals for maintaining it.
(Actually the capsule would have had thrusters: there would be Capsule:Flotation Bag:Heat Shield:Thruster Pack, with the thruster pack held on by straps so it could be jettisoned after deceleration but before hitting atmosphere. On one mission they re-entered with the thruster pack attached because the flotation bag light had come on and they were concerned about the heat shield.)
@Cadbury_Moose @LanceJZ While this is true of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules (including the Apollo service module), a reusable capsule could enter nose first rather than tail first.
Nuclear missile reentry heat shields are blunt cones entering nose first.
That said, Dragon does do tail first reentry, placing the thrusters on the sides rather than the tail. I just think it "looks" wrong.
@isaackuo @Cadbury_Moose @LanceJZ That is only true for modern ballistic missile RVs, initially they were launched blunt end forward, since the materials of that time didn't allow a more accurate short end forward reentry because these cause higher temperatures. (That is also why the Space Shuttle got a rather blunt nose)
Also, there are far more than just one kind of capsule. Imagine this as a biconic lifting body, and it isn't that much fictive to retain its aft thrusters.
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@LanceJZ @Cadbury_Moose This is what people think of when they think of the Apollo "capsule". It has a big main thruster in the tail, and lots of thruster clusters all over the place.
That's the reason why the artists modifying the cement mixer tank felt the need to add thrusters. It didn't look right without them, because the overall shape looks like a capsule plus its service module.
@isaackuo @LanceJZ @Cadbury_Moose besides which, without the thrusters it just looks like a discarded cement mixer with a paint job. π srsly people wanting accuracy, it just needs to look space-capsule-ish for the joke to work, and thrusters does the job!
One reason they think of the Apollo "capsule" as the Command Module and Service Module is that there isn't any footage of the Command Module by itself in space. No one left on the Service Module to shoot the Command Module after separation.
@LanceJZ - you don't seem bothered by the solid concrete construction, which is probably a bigger problem for using it as a spaceship. @Cadbury_Moose @isaackuo @archaeohistories
@davevolek That would likely require someone to pay for it. Given the little bits I've gleaned about local governance in the U.S. I can easily see no one having any spare budget for it.
@davevolek it's a really small town population of about 500 and it's not even in town...probably a lot of other things than that to worry about causing a car accident. Looking at the map, might be a struggle to get a crane out there cheeply.
I come from a rural background. Many people drive 80 kph (50 mph) on these roads. And they hit the ditch more often.
There might be some weight restrictions that prohibit big trucks on this road. The pavement in the photo (or oily gravel) looks a little on the weak side to me.
Anyways, we need more info to know why this thing has remained in the ditch for 67 years.
I have a friend who's been trying to get on Mastodon but tells me that it doesn't seem to play well with screen readers. I know there are plenty of people on the fedi who do use screen readers, but I have no experience with them myself, so I can't really direct him.
Can someone who does use a #ScreenReader point me in the direction of some resources that might be useful? #AskFedi #a11y
My understanding is that some alternate clients, particularly semaphore.social/, play better with screenreaders? That's what my friends here who use screenreaders have told me, at least. I'll boost this so they can chime in as more authoritative sources.
@adhdeanasl In that case, I'd reframe the question as which Mastodon client is most likely to work with a screen reader on a non-Windows desktop platform. I suggest Semaphore (semaphore.social/), a web-based client.
@adhdeanasl Oh, my mistake. It looks like Semaphore is gone, and I've been using a cached local version for an unknown length of time. In that case: enafore.social/
@pawpower @Fragglemuppet @matt @adhdeanasl @WittiePenguin @RareBird15 IOS has the VoiceOver screen reader, already. There are many Mastodon clients that work well with it. I'm using Mona. IceCubes is another good choice. For Linux distros, the Orca screen reader is already included, and works well with firefox, thunderbird, the core utilities, and libreoffice, which is also included. I've used the Tuba Linux Mastodon client, with orca, but it's difficult.
@matt @adhdeanasl @wx1g @RareBird15 @pawpower Yep, I use Windows and NVDA, and don't have a problem. Does Tweesecake work with Linux? It's a Mastodon client that might also be helpful.
@matt @Fragglemuppet @adhdeanasl @RareBird15 @pawpower So far, the only desktop Mastodon app, I know, is Tuba. Best bet is to use your instance web site with firefox. There's an alternative web front end called enafore, which I am using to make this post.
@afewbugs Iβve found Mastodon really easy to use with a screen reader, and apps like Mona make scrolling the timelines and interacting even easier. I donβt know about resources as such, so Iβll boost, but just wanted to put in my 2 pennies too. Edit: Just had a look and, of course, @FediTips has something on it: fedi.tips/how-do-i-use-mastodoβ¦
@freddy Most of us blind people use Mona on iOS and iPadOS and MacOS. On Windows, there's TweeseCake. After registering with a Mastodon instance, and doing a rudimentary setup in the Mastodon settings, one can use the 3rd party client without needing to use the Mastodon web interface.
Can't help you with the software question, but there is a cosy instance run by visually impaired people: dragonscave.space/about β might make a nicer starting point than one of the larger generic ones.
@zl2tod Looks like some good replies are coming in on this thread already. In my view, Mastodon is the most accessible social media platform around. I would add a couple of things. First, any blind person is very welcome to join us here at CaneAndAble.social, a great community for blind Mastodon users. There are plenty of helpful people here. Second, if the person uses iOS, I produced an audio tutorial on Mona for Mastodon. This went out as part of the Living Blindfully podcast I used to run, which can still be found in any podcast app. Mona has been updated since then, but itβs still very relevant, and many blind people appreciate an audio walkthrough. The URL for the audio is: LivingBlindfully.com/227, and the transcript is at LivingBlindfully.com/lb0227traβ¦
This special episode is devoted to Mona, a Mastodon app for iOS, iPadOS and MacOS. It has exceptional VoiceOver accessibility, and during its development, the developer has consulted extensively with the blind community.
@ePD5qRxX imo there's no way around third party clients at the moment. I'm using iOS/macOS-based devices only right now, and the Mona 6/Mona Classic client from the app store work rather nicely. I've also had good experience with Tusky on Android a couple of years ago and I hear its still great.
Iβm sighted and wonβt comment! But I will tag @MonaApp as so many folks in the thread have mentioned the app. (And Iβll add that itβs great for sighted people too!)
What screen reader and what OS are they using? FediTips shared my guide they might want to use a third party app but also try livingblindfully.com/episode-2β¦
Kia ora Mosen At Largers. A reminder that this podcast is indexed by chapter. If you listen with a podcast client that offers chapter support, you can easily skip between segments.
While I was blind (long story, medical mishap) I found PCs and laptops to be bloody useless. What did work well was a large Android phone or tablet running "Talkback" and an accessibility one-handed keyboard called a Quirkey (which as a dev I knew how to use). Touching the screen gave a good mental map of layout, and the Quirkey removed the need for an on-screen keyboard. I just used Fedilab as I knew the layout already.
@Brailly615 In another comment it has been said that its about Linux, there I unfortunately can't help. I use Webclients, unfortunately they don't get any Updates anymore or I'd have recommended something. I only use them because I haven't found something better yet that I don't need to install. @Clio09 @C3nC3 @me @MonaApp @pachli
@svenja @Brailly615 @Clio09 @C3nC3 @MonaApp If it is about Linux, I can't help either. In Windows there is #Tweesecake. Although it seems that it is not updated anymore, we can work fairly well with it.
``` *** Welcome to IELM *** Type (describe-mode) or press C-h m for help. ELISP> (cl-multiple-value-bind (foo bar baz) (apply #'cl-values (list 1 2 3)) (list baz bar foo)) (3 2 1) ```
Was loading stuff onto my Jellyfin server for my mom to watch in the hospital. She liked Star Trek and I thought Strange New Worlds might be a good idea because it's a more fun show than a lot of the other recent Trek shows.
I started watching the first episode to be sure it was working, and realized I'd forgotten the whole thing about what happens with Captain Pike.
Baldur Bjarnason
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Best part? It's always somebody with years of experience. Exactly the demographic that is supposedly able to use this shit safely, but my impression is they're just as bad as the novices
This is happening IMO because of one of the fundamental issues with software dev (and this predates "AI" and was one of the themes of my first book):
Most software projects fail and most of what gets shipped doesn't work. The way the industry is set up means there is little downside to shipping broken software
Nicole Parsons reshared this.
Baldur Bjarnason
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Few devs have a reference point for genuinely working software. Usability labs were disbanded over 20 years ago. Very few companies do actual user research, so their designs are based on fiction. Bugs are the norm
Alienation is also the norm for devs, both socially and organisationally. Whether it works for the end user doesn't cross their mind. Whether the design fulfils business needs is not their problem. Bugs are a future problem. Ship insecure software and patch it as user data gets stolen
Nicole Parsons reshared this.
Baldur Bjarnason
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Devs are so disconnected from the output of their work that many of the norms of the industry are outright illegal: there's a good chance that if you follow popular practices for a React project, for example, you'll end up with a site or product that violates accessibility law in several countries
Few devs would even know where to begin to look to answer the question "does my software work for the people forced to use it?"
Nicole Parsons reshared this.
Baldur Bjarnason
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Nicole Parsons reshared this.
Kale
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Whoever came up with 'Yes/Not now' needs to be dragged into the streets and shot.
No wonder some folks don't understand consent - our software doesn't allow for it.
Alexandre Oliva
in reply to Kale • • •or the "You must allow our JavaScript programs to run on your browser, otherwise we won't allow you to get to the information that we're legally required to provide you with"
CC: @baldur@toot.cafe
Chip Butty
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Nicole Parsons reshared this.
Thomas - NBA
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Bruno Nicoletti
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Kale
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •I still remember, talking to a twitter dev who had an utterly ridiculously foolish take on XYZ issue go viral.
They told me 'Uhhh, I've never had this much attention on me, my tweets never go beyond my social circle. I had to turn off my phone. It kept buzzing.'
... this was a person who worked on the UI. No shit they had no idea how to deal with high volume 'oh, you just 200k likes' kinda shit, they never experienced it themselves.
LillyLyle/Count Melancholia
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Raymond Neilson
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Honestly I think a big part of it is more than our industry being deeply immature still; I think the most important throughline of the research on LLMs' effects on cognition is a consistent attack on metacognition, which seemingly doesn't abate with experience. The same corrosion happens to juniors and seniors alike, but the seniors have more rationalizations at hand to pretend it doesn't.
(Speaking of, that "cognitive surrender" paper is the latest in that theme: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfβ¦)
Kraftwerk-Das Model Collapse
in reply to Raymond Neilson • • •David Beazley
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Apropos of nothing, the absolute worst implementation of Raft I've ever seen in my Raft course was by a pair of senior devs with a combined 60+ years of experience who decided to pair program together and announced ahead of time to the group that they were going to "win" Raft. They did not.
An undergraduate who'd never coded with sockets before did reasonably okay.
Kraftwerk-Das Model Collapse
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Nicole Parsons
in reply to Kraftwerk-Das Model Collapse • • •@dngrs
Most people ignore that it's a fossil fuel funded cult, intentionally designed to keep a dependency on oil.
wired.com/story/trump-energy-iβ¦
bloomberg.com/news/articles/20β¦
nytimes.com/2025/10/27/technolβ¦
cnbc.com/2025/11/20/us-approveβ¦
Saudi Arabia aspires to be the next Russian Internet Research Agency, selling hack-for-hire election meddling.
npr.org/2020/08/18/903512647/sβ¦
newyorker.com/news/news-desk/wβ¦
With Larry Ellison's help.
independent.co.uk/news/world/aβ¦
sfchronicle.com/tech/article/pβ¦
intelligentcio.com/me/2023/12/β¦
Billionaire Larry Ellison plotted with Trump aides on call about overturning election
John Bowden (The Independent)adingbatponder πΎ
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Lucas
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Orjan
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •I feel like having spent most of my career building embedded systems aimed at industry rather than consumers, where customer support issues can mean sending a technician out with a USB stick on a ten-hour road trip, has insulated me from the worst madness.
If your sloppy coding breaks a manufacturing line or distribution network, bugs become expensive fast.
Though having said that, $CURRENT_EMPLOYER is pushing for greater use of LLMs in our workflow...
Niels Abildgaard
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •This has been on my mind the last few days, too: mas.to/@nielsa/116171030173125β¦
I see so many people falling into LLM delusion, who I thought would know better, with no seeming pattern in *why* they fall for it.
Yes, the lack of negative incentives is certainly a factor.
My best explanation so far is that LLMs are kind of "acting" like 17 cons (some new, some old) in a trench coat, and different combinations of these trick different people who'd be able to resist most of these on their own.
Niels Abildgaard
2026-03-04 13:00:44
Martin Hamilton
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Paul Dot X
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •choomba
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •Elias MΓ₯rtenson
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •I always enjoyed Universe Today, but once you get llm psychosis, everything becomes possible.
youtube.com/watch?v=vkhZHR_hs4β¦
at the 47 minute mark it really goes off the rails.
SpaceX's AI Data Centres Might Actually Be A Good Idea. Here's Why
Fraser Cain (YouTube)spidey
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason • • •