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.

#AI

A common theme in science fiction is that if you're in space, don't trust a corporation. And Earth is in space

CC: @attoparsec@clacks.link

#Food

Alt...

freshly baked potatoes up close and personal

What we argued in Stochastic Parrots, however, was that you can get those benefits of the transformer architecture without ammassing datasets too large to collect with care (meaning consentfully, intentionally, and with the ability to document what's in the data).
>>

In bare-metal or embedded programming environments, a natural kind of simple example program is one that just counts up from zero, on whatever output device you have – 7-segment display, or in binary on a row of LEDs, etc.

But it's quite confusing if the manual refers to it as a "counter example"!

@cstross fun fact: I've been to the old 3DFX headquarters: it's now a church.

I was hoping it'd be like Our Lady of the Rasterized Polygon but no, it's just boring regular christians

Come on

Alt...

4 panel silly comic in black lines only. A blob guy has a big pencil. It says “I draw”. In the second panel he seems happy with his drawing and it says “all done yeah”. Panel 3 shows him holding up the drawing of a triangle with legs and a happy face. He goes “come on”. In the final panel he’s very pleased with himself, closes his eyes and tells himself “I’m a bit incredible”

("Why do you post like this, Matthew" I hear none of you say, but I respond anyway. Because growing up I never saw people who knew things about computers talk about how everything was broken most of the time and so I assumed that I was doing something wrong, and now I am here to tell you that despite being *extremely* computer my stuff is randomly broken all the time and it takes me far too long to figure it out, so it's not you we just build things that humans are bad at handling)

i'll say one nice thing about ai slop: the ai generated preview images continue to be a reliable indicator that there are other major issues with the article or video they represent. if the author couldn't be bothered to try to land a solid first impression, why, you can bet they didn't care enough to try and make anything else worth your time

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration

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A tiny, rocky speck of an island somewhere in the middle of a vast blue ocean, under a vast and cloudless sky. Mounted on top of the island is a large red "location" symbol, that teardrop-shaped icon that you see on Google maps. This one looks like it's made of metal. It's at an angle, held up on a rickety framework of beams. A small white boat with a red stripe along it is docked at the island. Someone wearing an orange life jacket is on top of the island, repairing the beams. A white seabird is sitting on the top of the icon, while a few more circle above. The painting is signed "Chris Silverman".

There are generally accepted to be 6 stages in human history, based on the material that is most fundamental to the economy:

Stone Age
Bronze Age
Iron Age
Industrial Age
Information Age
Like and Subscribe Age (the final stage of human development).

My favourite piece of internet today is the theory that Jesus was actually a type of yeast.

Turns water into wine
Floats on water
Makes bread for 5000 people
Put in a cave for 3 days and lo - he has risen!
Jesus was a sourdough starter.

Also this would imply: We should be calling him 'Mother' not 'Father'

@regehr an old colleague of mine once said "these days they're all MISC architectures."

Had to be done...

https://marshdeer.github.io/xkcd2501-generator/

#BonkWave

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XKCD 2501 comic -a conversation between two people - only it reads: 1: "Bonk Wave is second nature to us Fedi Artists, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows socool and sknob." 2: "And AxWax, of course" 1: "Of course." [Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.]

#PolyendTracker #Etude #MusiqueConcrete

i’m so old, i remember when computers got cheaper over time

Call me old-fashioned, but "I rented a robot that wrote some code" doesn't seem like participating in FOSS in good faith.

@starchy

Reluctantly crouched at the command line
Desperately typing to keep it online
A green light flashes, the systems come up
Churning and burning for the latest markup
Deftly inserting some Python or C
While guzzling down a coffee or three
Reckless and wild, he pours through the code
His prowess is potent, an effortless flow
As he speeds through the lines, the servers go down
As 404 errors are suddenly found
The department is empty except for one man
Still loading and coding as fast as he can
The sun has gone down and the moon has come up
His coffee gone cold long ago in his cup
But he's typing and striving, debugging the terms
And thinking of someone for whom he still burns

He's going the distance
He's coding in C
He's all alone (all alone)
All alone in his time of need

It's very annoying the way I have to get half way through writing a long detailed explanation of why someone is wrong before I figure out why they're right.

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration

Alt...

A strange and disturbing figure, rendered entirely in dark, dull, monochromatic blue-green against a pale tan background. The figure is lurching forward, the way a zombie would, arms hanging down. One arm is longer than the other. Its legs are oddly thin compared to its upper body. It is wearing a suit coat and tie, but the left arm of the coat is short, like a short-sleeved shirt, and the left side of the coat is higher than the right. Also pinned to the left breast of the coat is what looks like an ID card, although whatever is printed on it is not visible. The figure wears mismatched boots, one of which is open, and appears generally dysfunctional. Where its head would be is a shapeless black smudge; a void that looks like a large ink blot. At the center of the void is a small orange icon of a gas pump—the icon a car displays when it is close to running out of fuel. The painting is signed "Chris Silverman".

Math trivia: the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stands for Benoit B. Mandelbrot

[uneasy music playing]

Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ISO_7010_W071.svg
Author: Wikimedia Commons user Clemenspool
CC0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en)