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mastodon - Link to source

Give people a complete program for the usecase you've envisioned and they'll complain about edge cases and missing features.

Give people powerful primitives and a way to arbitrarily combine them, and they will build the program they need themselves, programs which you've never dreamed of.

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#snakes
#snakes

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Turns out I've been pruning my #BorgBackup archives wrong. There's a second step involved that actually deletes the "removed" data rather than just (presumably) removing the refrences to that data from the index. While I knew about this second step, I assumed that it was like how it works when you delete a file: the data technically remains intact, but gets overwritten by subsequent writes. Apparently I was wrong about this. I've been pruning—but not compacting—my daily backups monthly for years.

Long story short: I just spent an entire day compacting my backups. My backup storage just went from 71% full to 38%.

#borgbackup
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mastodon - Link to source

Folks tying their businesses to the APIs of Anthropic, OpenAI, etc., are this generation’s Twitter client developers.

(Maybe look into recent history to see what Twitter eventually did and what happened to them. Rule of thumb: an API key is a key to a door you don’t own whose lock can be changed at any time.)

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sharkey - Link to source
:boost_appreciated: mutual aid request

Sensitive content

#mutualaid #transcrowdfund #MutualAidRequest #transmutualaid #queercrowdfund #queermutualaid
This entry was edited (Tuesday, August 11, 2026, 12:17 AM)

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

I have an unnamed family member who insists climate change is a hoax. A few days ago, we got an emergency alert about a tornado. I've lived through tornado watches in the past, but this was the first actual tornado I've ever encountered. He insists that this was fake news because he never saw it.

There was a funnel cloud sighting (with photos) on the major road that runs closest to his home.

I just didn't have it in me to argue.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

In the late 90s, I remember everyone freaking out about Y2K. I knew how to write software, and I thought I understood the problem (and from a purely technical standpoint, I did). I wrote the whole thing off as people making a mountain of a molehill because surely no competent modern programmer would make a mistake like that, right? This opinion seemed validated when the year 2000 came and went without any apparent major incident.

Thing is, I was young, inexperienced, and naïve. I didn't understand a few things:

  1. How often hastily-written good-enough-for-now code finds its way into production systems in order to meet a deadline (also, how long legacy code tends to stick around (I'm looking at you, COBOL)).
  2. How much work went on behind the scenes scrambling to fix the problem before it happened.

Now, with LLMs, we have a way to generate such code at scale, and I can't help but wonder about the price we're going to pay for it down the line, all in the name of shipping code on an arbitrary deadline.

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Imagine Star Trek replicators but they work at the speed of modern 3d printers so Picard says "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot" and comes back 12 hours later to find half a cup, random glass fibres everywhere, and tea dripping on the floor.

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in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Jonathan Lamothe

So I was able to commit to codeberg last night (technically this morning) at about 2AM. This made me strongly consider setting up a cron job that checks for un-pushed updates every hour or so and just automatically tries to push them if they haven't been.

This, unfortunately, would require me to leave an unencrypted copy of my private key on disk, which I'd rather not do. I know that openssl does this to facilitate TLS on my web site, but still...

Maybe I can create a special key just for codeberg and revoke it when this issue is resolved?

@Codeberg
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friendica - Link to source

Every highschool graduate should have the technical skills to fake a screenshot of any person saying anything on any social media platform. In under 2 minutes of work. Without opening a program that isn't a browser.

This level of skill is important for understanding the infoscape. and also for like, this level of skill is important for navigating the modern world.

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glitchsoc - Link to source
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Forgive me, but this is actually a good joke -

Pay attention to the punctuation!

#Math #Maths #Mathematics

#Mathematics #math #maths

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mastodon - Link to source
New autocorrect game called “My Ai went rogue and…”
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Spiderman, but kittens instead of webs
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sharkey - Link to source

シナモン 40C3

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"Your fren and neighbour spidercat has restrained the bad guy with his catnet, called the cops (who aren't ACAB in this universe, for dramatic purrrrpose) and left"
This entry was edited (Saturday, August 8, 2026, 11:37 AM)
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mastodon - Link to source

Hot take: allergen notices of the form "everything in our kitchen has come into contact with milk, nuts, eggs, ..." should be illegal. Hell, could make a pretty good case that they already are under ADA.

Just completely useless for determining what's safe for me to eat.

This entry was edited (Friday, August 7, 2026, 9:56 PM)

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

I have noticed that a lot of verified accounts on gaza-verified.org—particularly those on mastodon dot social—have been muted or otherwise hidden hidden by their servers. As much as I would like to help, my resources are extremely constrained of late. Since I want to help, but am not in a position to contribute financially, I figured the least I could do was to try to provide some additional visibility.

If you have the means, and are so inclined, I would like to remind everyone that they can always find a random profile on gaza-verified.org/people/ and donate directly to someone who could really use the help.

Contrary to my usual policy, I'm not CWing this post, but I will use ample hashtags that anyone who choses to can opt to filter. Boosts welcome.

#gaza #GazaVerified #MutualAid

#Gaza #mutualaid #gazaverified

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

So my project where I'm trying to reverse engineer the charm stat in @SDF.ORG's Legion of the Rare Dragoon game has had some progress and some setbacks. I'm keeping a record of my in-game "purchases" along with my charm stat at the time to see how my charm affects my discount rate. I'm then building a table to try to project an estimated discount rate at various different charm levels.

Where I've succeeded: being able to automatically compute an equation that perfectly fits the collected data.

Where I've failed: The resulting discount table looks reasonable up until it gets to charm levels larger than the ones I've already recorded. Then it gets real whacky real quick.

I'm hoping that as I gather more data points, I'll end up with better predictions.

#emacs #lisp

Edit: Here's the calculated table: codeberg.org/jlamothe/lord-cha…

#emacs #lisp @SDF.ORG

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A determination that what approaches in the US is, in fact, an anti-trans genocide

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This entry was edited (Thursday, August 6, 2026, 6:19 AM)

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
subpost about "AI"

I've said this before, but it bears repeating.

I hear a lot of people expressing their dislike for all things "AI" and in general, I agree with them, but...

The problem I have is that "AI" is an ill-defined term. It's used as a hand-wavey buzzword to mean a whole bunch of different things. Mostly these days, it's pretty synonymous with LLMs and similar technologies, but it's actually a broader term than that. It's much like how the cryptocurrency industry appropriated the word "crypto", but I digress...

I've been dabbling with digital art lately. The idea of using "AI" to generate my art is extremely distasteful to me. That said, I do digital art because it affords me tools that I wouldn't have available to me otherwise. For instance, I, as a human, could not replicate the various filters I've applied, or the liquefy tool. That said, those tools don't need to destroy the planet and plunder the commons to be created. That's an important distinction to me.

The thing is, those tools could be argued to be a form of "AI" given the squishiness of the term to begin with. Also, I don't feel right about calling my art something like "100% human created", because a computer has (under my explicit direction) enhanced the work I've done.

There's a lot of nuance here that's difficult to express in a single post. At what point does the use of a tool overshadow the human involvement in an endeavour? To be honest, I don't exactly know.

I guess my issue, as is frequently the case, is that I get hung up on the precise meaning of words, and I lack a precise definition.

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mastodon - Link to source

While watching When the Wind Blows, bombs go off.

Old couple: We both have headaches! Well a spot of tea will clear that right up.

Me: You fools! That's a symptom of radiation poisoning!

While living my life, cities burn and fill the air with smoke and unknown chemicals.

Me: That's odd. I don't usually get headaches across multiple days. I just need to drink more water...

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mastodon - Link to source

The minimum wage should be tied in percentage to the maximum rent allowed for a one-bedroom apartment.

Someone working full-time should be able to cover all their minimal living expenses with their wage. It's a catastrophic society failure that this isn't the case anymore in many places around the world.

This entry was edited (Tuesday, August 4, 2026, 5:19 PM)
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mastodon - Link to source
You would think that all of these people pushing for social media bans for kids would be interested in whether or not these bans actually work...but no, I guarantee we will keep on seeing age-gating bills. theconversation.com/more-than-…

More than 80% of kids still using social media despite ban, new eSafety report finds

The report provides more evidence Australia’s world-leading social media ban isn’t going to plan.
The Conversation

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
So I'm working on an #OrgMode document that's probably about 2/3 #emacs #lisp code. I'm planning on releasing it shortly, but I'm not sure what to do about the licensing. Normally I use the #AGPL for my code, but since this isn't strictly code, I'm wondering if some version of the #CreativeCommons license might be a better fit. Do they have a #copyleft variant?
#creativecommons #copyleft #emacs #orgmode #lisp #agpl
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As seen from my local bookstore #books #photography #sji
#books #photography #sji
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mastodon - Link to source

I'm amazed how often people think that @pidgin used to connect to some public API in #AIM, #YIM, #ICQ, #MSN, etc...

In reality we helped you break the #TOS constantly by using an unauthorized client that only worked thanks to the tireless efforts of reverse engineers.

#Pidgin #OpenSource

#opensource #aim #tos #icq #pidgin #MSN #yim @Pidgin Instant Messenger

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Terf’s are really, really afraid we might see and read this major report. It documents UK based anti-trans critical organizations and their funding.

They were able to force the worlds biggest human rights organizations to pull their report down within hours from it’s release, that’s how much they don’t want the world to know.

Here it is. (Share it! Download it! Share it again!)

(Edit. Here’s the 2026 link) archive.org/details/report-a-g…

#transrights #humanrights

Report A Growing Threat The Anti Rights Movement In The UK July 2026 : Amnesty International : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Amnesty International put out a major report documenting the influence of UK based anti trans gender critical organizations and their funding. Within hours,...
Internet Archive
#humanRights #transrights
This entry was edited (Saturday, August 1, 2026, 8:58 PM)

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Just spent a day and a half hunting down a bug that was making me question my sanity. As it turns out, #emacs #lisp's / function silently drops the decimal in its result if both of its inputs are integers... so (/ 1 2) evaluates to 0, not 0.5. Granted, this is also the way that C does it, but in my defense, #CommonLisp does not do this.
#emacs #lisp #commonlisp
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

mastodon - Link to source

Vassil Nikolov | Васил Николов

As a first approximation, I suggest thinking of Emacs Lisp as closer to MacLisp than to Common Lisp.

A precise description of "closer" would be fairly long.
For example, Emacs Lisp acquired things like bignums and lexical bindings fairly late.

Again as an approximation, the descendancies are:
MacLisp → Emacs Lisp
MacLisp and others → Common Lisp
(Those others include, in alphabetical order, Interlisp, Scheme, Zeta Lisp, etc., but not Emacs Lisp.)

And then an important aspect of these approximations is the `cl' package, also a late addition that evolved quite a bit.

Transferring knowledge about C to Emacs Lisp is rather tricky, even though the implementation of a part of Emacs (including the Emacs Lisp virtual machine) is written in C.

#CommonLisp
#Elisp
#Emacs
#EmacsLisp

@me

#emacs #commonlisp #elisp #EmacsLisp @Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

diaspora - Link to source

Greg A. Woods

yup of course, but that's integer math, not floating point math

GNU Clisp and SBCL don't show decimals for integer division, but return fractions instead!

* (/ 1 2)
1/2

But of course if you use floating point representation for the parameters then the result is a floating point number as expected:
[1]> (/ 1.0 2.0)
0.5

Elisp, with floating point parameters, also works as expected:
(/ 1.0 2.0)
0.5

In C, with IEEE 754 double values, then 1.0/2.0 = 0.50, exactly, no rounding or epsilon comparison needed.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Spent several hours today trying to figure out why my #elisp code was misbehaving. Turns out, I made a mistake while trying to be clever. Instead of doing:

(when (and cond1 cond2)
  stuff
  ...)

I did:
(and cond1 cond2
  stuff
  ...)

...which would only work if every instruction in stuff returned a non-nil value.

I should stop trying to be clever.

#emacs

Edit: when, not while

#emacs #elisp

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Jonathan Lamothe

For the morbidly curious, this is the (now corrected) code:
(defun jrl-collect-data (table input output)
  "Collect table data into lists of outputs per input"
  (let (res record in-val out-val collection)
    (while table
      (setq record (car table)
            in-val (assoc input record)
            out-val (assoc output record))
      (when (and in-val out-val)
        (pop in-val)
        (pop out-val)
        (setq collection (assoc in-val res))
        (if collection
            (push out-val (cdr collection))
          (push (list in-val out-val) res)))
      (pop table))
    res))

I should probably throw some comments in here, but essentially the assoc in the when block always returns nil on the first iteration of the loop, and if it can't progress past that point, it'll always return nil on subsequent loops and nothing will ever happen. As a result, any list I might feed into this function is always going to result in a nil output.

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