Notices by Cian O'Connor (cian@post.lurk.org)

@Epic_Null @aral

Oh is that what you thought you were doing.

Strange, it seemed like you were just being unnecessarily unpleasant to someone who is trying to fix a real problem.

@aral
Have you considered dying quietly?

I'd be less militant about LLMs if the industry could stop bullshitting us.

Case in point - 'AI Coding Assistants'. Most of the work is being carried out by an ad-hoc collection of logic rules/special cases (probably implemented as if/else statements, rather than something sensible like Prolog).

Is the LLM even needed? Who the hell knows. Certainly not the AI industry.

@urlyman
We need to be talking about how much of our current technology is useful and how do we keep that useful stuff going without fossil fuels.

Instead we get electric cars. When cars of any kind are part of the problem.

@rustoleumlove @OGjester @gerrymcgovern

This relates to 3 things:
1) Natural gas is cheaper/more flexible than coal in the US for electricity production.
2) Coal has become more expensive in the US has the cheap/good stuff has been largely mined out.
3) The heavy industries that require coal are mostly not based in the US anymore (e.g. steel).

You can't make solar cells, or wind turbines, without fossil fuels. Which seems like a big problem that everybody's ignoring.

And electricity is a fairly small part of the energy mix, and energy is not fungible. You can't just replace oil/gas with electricity.

@inthehands
Here's the thing. There are certain parts of the system that if they failed could have far reaching effects.

For example, let's say the part that ensures bond payments get made on time failed. Well that would probably cause a collapse of the world's financial and trading system.

I'm sure Musk would get the blame - but kind of a high price to pay imo.

@aral
Will this be integrated with Mastodon, or is it something else?

@zens
Not the most radical solution, but have you seen Glamorous Toolkit (built on Pharo, which is a Smalltalk variant)? It's reimagining the Smalltalk computer, and what I find most interesting is that it's exploring ways of making programming more visible, dynamic and exploratory.

I don't know that it's THE solution (and I'd also like to bring back analog computing), but it's one of the few genuinely fresh ideas I've seen in a while. And it's a lot of fun to use (ignoring some bad UX - but hopefully those can be fixed).

@inthehands
It's never been racially coded, and black people are statistically the group least likely to belong to it.

It means voters who don't care about policies/politics, and choose candidates based upon who is most likable, presidential, good looking, etc.

Even when it is used as code, it's used to refer to 'dumb poor white people who vote for Republicans'.

@technomancy

What did I miss in Windows world?

@Ember @inthehands

I think if you actually read what I wrote, you'd see that we don't disagree as much as you seem to think.

I'm not saying what you seem to think I'm saying.

@Mara
This can't be real, but who could make this up?

Maybe his daughter should start doing livecoding sessions. I'm sure we could all learn something from a self-taught 9/10 year old who is writing 'decently complex' games that don't crash in C++. The princess dress would be a nice bonus.