ManMachine
@max@manmachine.me
snac allow a special subset of Markdown, that includes emphasized, strong, monospaced, Line breaks are respected and output as you write them.
Prepending a greater-than symbol in a line makes it a quote:
This is quoted textIt also allows preformatted text using three backquotes in a single line:All angle-prepended lines are grouped in the same blockquote
/* this is preformatted text */struct node {
struct node *prev;
struct node *next;
};
Links can also be written in standard Markdown style.
Some emojis: 😆 ❤️ 🍺 🤷 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Image URLs written in standard Markdown style for images are converted to ActivityPub attachments.
Three minus symbols in a line make a separator:
These acrobatics are better documented in the snac(5) man page.
@grunfink @mastoblaster
Some of this snac post renders nicely in #mastoblaster but not all
@grunfink thank you for maintaining the manpages in addition to snac itself. i love documented software!
One thing we know about the mass tech layoffs attributed to "AI" is that they follow a trend of mass tech layoffs that firms were formerly forced to admit were the result of their businesses contracting sharply after the lockdowns ended, when users didn't need nearly so many cloud services. By blaming the continuing layoffs on "AI," companies whose business continues to contract can tell investors that they are on the bleeding edge, not the contracting tail.
1/
@pluralistic
No company has announced “thanks to AI, we have the same number of employees, but we have launched zillions of new services and are growing our product lines because of all the time our people get to spend innovating.”
I don’t know why that is.
@pluralistic some of the best business leaders and educators have pointed out that layoffs are an act of last resort and you can't cut your way to greatness
Those thoughts echoed through my mind when the Block mass layoffs were announced.
Business idea that I’m working on:
Home appliances that are as analog as possible while being efficient.
My washing machine doesn’t need wi-fi.
My stove doesn’t require a subscription.
My fridge doesn’t need to have a screen shoving ads in my face.
And all of them should be trivially repairable.
I know there are enough people who have guns pointed at their printers in case the printer develops an attitude; I’m certain there are people who would go for this.
@Aphrodite @patterfloof Closest my washing machine gets is diagnosing tones.
You put it into diag mode, load the LG app on a smart phone, the phone listens to the tones and tells you the issue. The machine itself has no other connectivity than audio.
Even so, I don’t want to need a thrice damned app to figure out that the water softener salt levels are low or the drain filter is full.
@Aphrodite @patterfloof Mine can't tell you any of that, as it doesn't have any of those things
The diagnostics are more: "Door lock not responding". Or "Motor unable to rotate drum"
What if I could convince you that taking the same time to explain detailed requirements and carefully validate results with a junior colleague instead of a chatbot would not only give you two people who understood the code instead of zero, but if you do it a few times in a row you eventually get a senior colleague out of the deal for free.
RE: https://scholar.social/@gedankenstuecke/116140098318631474
«Technology culture used to celebrate technical competence. Not as gatekeeping, not as elitism — as genuine, infectious enthusiasm for understanding how systems worked. The BBS scene in the eighties ran on self-taught systems operators who understood their hardware and their network protocols well enough to build infrastructure that had never existed before. The early web had a “view source” ethos: you saw something interesting, you looked at how it was built, you learned from it, you made something of your own. This was the entire pedagogical model of the early web and it worked extraordinarily well.»
«This is not about purity. Nobody is asking you to reject every managed service on principle or run Gentoo on everything. It’s about maintaining enough technical competence that you are a participant in the systems you depend on rather than a permanent subject of them. It’s about being able to make informed choices instead of having choices made for you by systems optimized for someone else’s revenue»
The Slow Death of the Power User — fireborn
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/
be sure to download the epic czech translation too! https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2/raw/branch/master/po/cs.po
i may put it on something else eventually. or put other services on the computer.
Grendel sees with many eyes.
inspired by this fucking thing https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-collections/grant-museum-zoology/highlights/jar-moles
i love it
The modern mind is not able to comprehend how the Roman Empire was able to administer an territory all the way from Egypt to Hadrian's Wall without making use of Jira Sprint Planning.
Clearly, they were able to conquer all that territory because they didn't have to use Jira at all.
Wouldn't be nice to use all that time currently spent on Jira to make something productive?
@existentialcomics "It seems that Rome was run by the Roman Agile system… Caesar Product Owner, and the Senat Sprint Review in the forum 😄"
@existentialcomics Ticket IVCMLXXIII is blocked. We won't be able to do anything about the Visigoths.
@existentialcomics to be fair if I could use the threat of crucifixion against engineers I wouldn’t need sprint planning either.
I have an old mac mini intel box that I can wipe and do whatevs with.
What can I do with it that is in line with #permacomputing / #neighborhoodfirst / #solarpunk
My skillset for coding/dev is firmly in the “your worst cowboy QA engineer nightmare” but I am willing to learn to do things better.
Current aspirations would be to set up one of those digital prepper systems that could provide weather, agriculture, knowledge system/archive.
Thoughts? pointers? and even “learn to set up a linux server at tutorial N” etc is welcome.
@gahlord Learning to run email and a Fediverse instance (in that order) would get you into a position to provide signifcant value to a decentralized community. (And throughout that learning, make sure you also build good backup/restore skills.)
Hi @mason @gahlord
💯
find a few people and do whatever benefits them.
Maybe https://comam.es/what-is-snac by @grunfink , https://prosody.im, an 'about' website and maybe a podcast feed (I prefer https://www.lighttpd.net as a webserver) and surely email if possible. @peertube may be over the top.
Tbh even if AI wasn't harmful for the environment, and not built on stolen data and actually worked well... I still wouldn't want to chat with a computer as if it's a person.
@Tijn all the useful uses of LLMs (there’s some, but not very many) I’ve seen so far do not use the chatbot interface
Check my latest album out on Bandcamp, it's in Pre-release there's like 6 tracks you can check out on it right now!
https://limneticvillains.bandcamp.com/album/delusion-illusion
@max Thanks so much. Listen whenever, I might even finish it and release it before the release date haha!
#activitypub #fediverse
do you ever roast a whole chicken
| yes: | 61 |
| no: | 55 |
| i don't eat chicken: | 17 |
| other / show results: | 8 |
Closed
@eniko used to, very occasionally. Never even tried it (despite cooking since childhood) for most of my life, and was shocked by how easy it was for all the fuss people made
@eniko (voted 'yes' fwiw)
@sinvega i've never bothered before but i'm considering it because chicken is weirdly expensive here but a whole chicken is cheap
@eniko Assuming your oven is big enough and you have a good dish for it* plus a good sized knife, and you don't mind getting your fingers in there to get all the meat out for maximum value, I'd give it a go. It's really not as much hassle as it sounds
*(I dunno the name, but used a deep ceramic baking thing, with some unpeeled veg at the bottom that cooks into the juices, which can be strained into gravy)
I used to but I pretty much stopped when I realized that our locally grocery store makes better rotisserie chicken than I ever will
@eniko I'm more likely to buy a whole roasted chicken than roast it myself, but generally I stick to filets and such.
@eniko for quite a few of my teenage years I worked in a roast chicken shop, so yes I'd sometimes roast up to 20 at a time :)
It's not a skill I use all that often, but being able to cut a roast chicken into meal sized portions in about 10 seconds using shears and tongs is pretty handy sometimes, and it's a heck of a lot less fiddly than carving.
@eniko I did once 'cause I wanted to impress someone. It could've gone better.
@eniko I voted for “other” because although I have never personally roasted a whole chicken, we do have “girarrosto” shops here that basically sell just that
Have I told you lately how much I love my Dirtywave M8? 😍
Today's stream is all about the sweep! Filter sweeps and beyond, in theory and practice. Come hear me expound on the how and why of one of my favorite sound types. Starts in minutes (12:30 PST/Pacific/Los Angeles time)!
also were there some birds outside your window?
@max haha, could have been! appreciate knowing that chat was busted. I was genuinely surprised no ne had anything to say 😂
@max 😅 I feel much better LOL
None of the "code generation" stuff is new by the way.
The tech industry has tried to speed up coding and increase software output for the last 3 to 4 decades, by various means; e.g. Rapid Application Development, Expert Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, thousands of different frameworks all the way to trying to off-shore development and exploit third-world labor.
The problem with this is: there is no software scarcity. Pretending that "we can't make software fast enough" is a red herring to hide the fact that making (good) software is 90% painstaking research, design, planning, marketing and talking to and supporting customers.
And 10% writing the actual code—the C-suite is doing ye olde "trying to find a technical solution to a social problem".
The gist of this is that _even if code-generating LLMs work perfectly_, it doesn't have that much of an impact on how good the software works for people; which in turn means it won't matter for profits.
@thomasfuchs The problem is not software but software as a subscription. That artificially creates the need for more software.
@thomasfuchs As if "how good the software works for people" has anything to do with profits.
The prospect of saving 9% of that 10% software work is worth millions in profit for managers.
@thomasfuchs
Oh, it's even worse than that: modifying, correcting issues, maintaining in general is perhaps 95% of the time.
So overall, the LLM can save you 5% on 10% . If it works. Which it doesn't.
@thomasfuchs Yes. What we really need is some kind of formal proof/verification engine that you can drop code into and interact with in order to more easily find bugs "by inspection." What we do not need is a magic 8 ball.
@thomasfuchs Whenever I see AI boosters go on (and on) about how fast they write code I think about how the most productive I’ve ever seen a developer be is when they painstakingly convinced their PM that the requested software was unnecessary and nobody wanted it.
@thomasfuchs and it's all bullshit.
No. All of it. It's all fucking bullshit.
It's all "lines of code is the only metric." All of it, top to bottom. Because the same idiots have been refusing to listen to the same advice for decades. Lines of code can be "measured!" Quality can't, time wasted can't, unnecessary work can't, so just pretend those don't exist.
Lines of code has never been and will never fucking be anything resembling a valid metric.
@thomasfuchs Even though I've not been in the industry for more than 35 years, I can well remember how people generally liked what I did because I gave the users what they wanted (whilst making management think that I had delivered what they wanted). One job I was in, I actually spent a lot of time sorting out the previous occupant's 'afternoon work' - he used to get into work early and work solidly till lunchtime, then have a liquid lunch, then be present in body for the afternoon. 1/2
Or not even trying to solve the right problem because no amount of old code, however refactored, will ensure you ask the right question.
Finding the right question is part of being alive, and caring.
@thomasfuchs the irony is, the more plentiful that software becomes, the more the human role becomes exactly what you're describing. Even more than it already was...research, design, planning, talking to people. Before I'd fight uphill battles "selling" research and design to my old team. AI now makes it impossible to ignore
@jg This is a good argument—as a silver lining it may force programmers into systems thinking and learn about systems design instead of just blindly hacking on low-level stuff.
Otoh without knowing low-level stuff inside-out you can’t do higher level thinking properly.
I wonder how many programmers actually have the discipline to do this properly.
@thomasfuchs The devs Ive worked with who think in systems never had to be forced. I think it's more about identity than discipline. Some people see themselves as "i write code" and some see themselves as "I solve problems". The first group will struggle with systems thinking regardless of skill level. The second group has been waiting for it.
@thomasfuchs I'm not disagreeing, but I don't think I got the intended meaning of "there is no software scarcity". I thought there was a lot of demand, which is why managers always jump on *anything* that promises more+cheaper, and often end up being essentially legally scammed one way or another. What did you mean by it?
@landelare Software isn’t a scarce resource (it’s very cheap to hire programmers for a long time)
@thomasfuchs This is a fantastic point. I've worked on teams that have been death marched to ship features only to find - wah wah - nobody cares about what we've built because no one understood what users actually wanted in the first place.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, what hurts software companies isn't the code that ships slow, it's the code they're sure they need to ship when that just ain't so.
@thomasfuchs Yep. My career for the last several years has been based on “low code/no code.” Microsoft’s “citizen developers” push was a big deal right before LLMs took over.
@thomasfuchs this is one of the things that pissed me off about the Paul Ford op-ed. Like, he wants software dev to be so easy that it takes no effort. But even if that were to be possible, the amount of shit that would be produced would be exponentially worse.
All these people think that making all the difficult things easy will automatically elevate everything, but that’s not really the main and foremost thing happening with AI and they’re turning a blind eye on so much bad stuff.
@thomasfuchs You left out the Autocoder. https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/1410/C28-0309-1_1410_autocoder.pdf
@thomasfuchs And even today I was hearing some colleagues talk: ”In the future, there will be no software development because applications will be prompts!”
I didn’t even bother. Sure, some prompts will be spread, some of them will even be entertaining. Someone might even make money selling prompts.
But that will be the ”brainrot of software”. Serious applications will still require design, knowledge and experience of interconnecting systems.
@thomasfuchs What is new is that it suddenly started working.
@jacobgorm I bet you that e.g. Visual Basic in the 1990s was a much bigger improvement on time spent coding apps than any AI agents are today.
My point isn't that it "works" (or doesn't); my point is that it is largely irrelevant because writing code isn't the bottleneck when making software.
@thomasfuchs I generally agree with you, but I don't think I ever expected to see OOP framed as a tool for the suits to get us to work faster.
@thomasfuchs thank you for posting this!
you expressed my feelings about the current push for coding assistants with better words and clarity than i could.
one more problematic thing is that this technology mimics human interaction so well that even many smart people i know genuinely believe it is more than just technology. they believe "AI" actually can come up with original solutions and be creative in solving complex problems... or, when confronted with the reality of it being just an algorithm, even think less of human creativity itself.
@grepe Yeah, though those specific people are probably already prone to believe in magical thinking (more prone to everything spanning from being religious to pseudo-science to racism; not saying they believe in any of this, just that they're more susceptible to it).
@thomasfuchs actually - no. i understand where that assumption comes from but it is very wrong. in my case one of them is a professor on renowned university doing academic research. and, surprisingly, being prone to believing pseudoscience, being religious or racist is not connected in my experience... this is anecdotal but i've known medical doctors who were into homeopathy (former flat mate), religious astrophysicists (colleague), racist atheists (class mates) and very rational and inclusive priests (jesuit)...
@grepe intelligence and wisdom in a specific field does not automatically extend to other fields ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People with thorough systems and rational thinking are relatively rare.
This might be an evolutionary thing as much as cultural/educational.
this is spot on. I've watched companies spend millions on 'AI solutions' that are just fancy wrappers around APIs anyone can call. The real value is in the data moat and workflow integration, not the model itself
@thomasfuchs The HPBs have been trying to take the progammers out of programming for decades. Programmers are not cheap for a reason, it takes skill and experience to do it well. Businesses often hate paying for programmers becuase they aren't easily/quickly replacible.
@thomasfuchs also see “No silver bullet” by Fred Brooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet#Brooks1986, https://www.cs.unc.edu/techreports/86-020.pdf
@thomasfuchs @dymaxion The other 90% is configuration where to be fair LLMs are useful quite regularly.
@thomasfuchs "all you have to do is meticulously and accurately describe 100% of your requirements and restrictions"
Sure, seems great Jan.
@thomasfuchs Where are all the one-person companies selling amazing new products? Why don't the LLM companies use their own product to put everyone else out of business? It's because they would rather sell the shovels than try to mine themselves of course.
@skotchygut the only difference with the gold rush is that they’re giving away shovels for free that are paid for by the investors they’re defrauding
@thomasfuchs @FunkyBob
Yep I learned a RAD app for Oracle running on Sun Solaris servers 30+ years ago.
It strikes me that capitalists don’t want to make good software. Like all products: if it’s good, why would you need to buy it again?
They want software that is just good enough.
Exactly. What bothers me isn't code generation. That's a good idea if done correctly (with precise tools).
What bothers me is the technofascist makeover of our world.
@thomasfuchs I don't think this is the entire story. Tools and techniques like RAD/OOP/Expert Systems/4GL can definitely save time when used correctly. Abstracting or automating boring parts leaves more time and headspace for the complicated parts -- which are typically the business rules and the non-functionals.
The way LLMs generate code is the exact opposite: they make it harder to focus on the hard parts by trying to generate "everything".
@elricofmelnibone maybe these tools save time or improve quality, maybe they don't, it probably depends on circumstances.
but my point is: it doesn't matter if you can speed up 10% of the total effort to make software by 5%; that's a rounding error.
@elricofmelnibone what actually happens is that the important parts of software development are starved of attention because "we can write software so easily now"
Mat B [He/Him/That Idiot/Dad, why are you like this?] » 🌐
@TwoClownsEating@beige.party
Your regular reminder that at his wedding to Iman, Bowie had a group photo taken with Bono, Ono and Eno.
I refuse to believe this was an accident.
I once consulted for a fortune 100 and 10% of the time was writing software (it was finished). 90% was meetings. And then they scrapped the project and spent 10x on an off the shelf solution.
So no I don’t think most companies will now build everything themselves.
on linux: what arguments do you use with netstat or ss? (and what situation do you run it in?)
the only thing I can think of is `netstat -tulpn` to show all processes that are listening on a port and the PID (so I can kill the offending process) but I feel like there must be one or two more useful ones
(I say "linux" because linux netstat is a bit different)
@b0rk the command most programmed into my fingers is 'netstat -nte | less -S'.
Often I run it because I suspect network trouble; hence -n to stop netstat from trying to look up all the DNS names, since it might well not work. If I see a lot of connections in SYN_SENT, or a lot of things with a backed-up Send-Q, then that confirms the theory of network trouble. But maybe I see that that's only happening for connections to one site, in which case it's not _my_ trouble.
Another reason is because the system is running slowly and I'm wondering what's going on. If netstat shows a bajillion incoming connections to the SMTP or HTTPS port, or a bajillion _outgoing_ connections to some particular machine, then that gives me a clue what might be going on.
-e to show the inode number so that I can compare it to socket links in /proc/NNNN/fd. I probably ought to use -p instead, cutting out one step, but -e has been programmed into my fingers since before I learned about -p. (Same reason I'm still using netstat instead of ss.)
Oh, and one other reason to run netstat is "dammit, has that TIME_WAIT connection gone away yet so that I can re-run the network software I'm testing?"
"Oh, you want me to avoid technology created by immoral people?? I guess you have to give up THE INTERNET hurr hurr!!"
Nobody cares that you use a technology invented by bigots who died half a century ago, my brother in TELNET. Just maybe don't lend rhetorical support to the technology that's funding and empowering the people who are currently commiting atrocities.
Radio Shack's "Easy Home Video Editor" from the mid-1990s. A Videonics product in disguise? @themaritimegirl
@max @vwestlife reminds me of Blade Runner/CSI. 🙂
I guess it’s a notch or low pass filter to remove high frequencies which will remove some colour artifacts and also soften the picture.
the future is still old news
Social media responses to jokes:
(0) I understood your joke
(1) I understood your joke, but I assume you do not, so be please allow me to explain it to you.
(2) I understood your joke, but did not find it to be sufficiently humorous to warrant my having read it.
(3) I did not understand your joke, but I believe that if had, it would have undoubtedly caused me great personal offense for reasons that you could not have anticipated. I therefore must challenge you to a duel.
What is your favorite color?
| Red: | 1 |
| Orange: | 0 |
| Yellow: | 0 |
| Green: | 0 |
| Blue: | 2 |
| Indigo: | 0 |
| Violet: | 0 |
| Something monochrome: | 0 |
| Something metallic: | 0 |
| Other: | 0 |
Closes in 1:16:36:57
Recommend telling your kids that back in the day the length of time it took to dial a phone number was proportionate to the sum of its digits
Slowly realize that everything is terrible: sadness.
Quickly realize that everything is terrible: comedy.
RE: https://mstdn.ca/@drikanis/116107120926277506
I'd like to comment on the common "AI is just a tool" thing: I'm a woodworker by training & that means a lot of machines - but almost every craftsperson knows how to do their job with hand tools, or "lesser" machines.
Similarly, a writer can write without a text editor - just as well, only slower.
If loss of a tool = loss of your skill & knowledge, then that tool isn't an asset, it's a liability. You're signing over your ability to do business to whoever sells & maintains that tool.
A common theme in science fiction is that if you're in space, don't trust a corporation. And Earth is in space
Ffs, YouTube. Either let me cast Shorts, or don't show Shorts in my feed when I'm connected to a TV. Why do you insist on making this so annoying?
@max Seriously?!
@attoparsec also fun: if you use the cast API directly shorts cast just fine
Regardless of what TheGuardian says, your musical life doesn't have to end when you hit your 30s. Not only because this might be a case of #enshittification 's "revealed preference", since this is apparently about listening data from Spotify, but also because, thank gods, other places that have #music still exist!
E.g. at https://somafm.com real human people select music of various genres for you to enjoy at your leisure, and they do a wonderful job at that 📻
@khobochka Also, don't underestimate the power of asking people for music recommendations! I keep finding new gems in new genres all the time, in spite of being a bit above the big 3-0.
And the transformer architecture represented an important step forward in language modeling, that brought improvements to things like spell checking (Doctorow's use case).
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