Notices by Kevin Riggle (kevinriggle@ioc.exchange)

“Why does all software require a subscription now” well you connected all the computers to the internet and now shit like this happens you dingdong

https://fosstodon.org/@libreoffice/113709550379921425

@Bronwyn And yeah it fucking sucks that my neighbors don’t know where they’re going to sleep tonight, maybe let’s build a lot more fucking housing and stop whining about our property values okay

@Bronwyn I lived there four years. It was fine. I had fourteen housemates and in the whole time we had only one time there was anything remotely threatening to any of us (attempted mugging). The guy living in a tent on the sidewalk outside the house rescued my road atlas when my car window got busted in and gave it back to me. It’s purely aesthetics and lies that people are mad about it

@Bronwyn BUILD HOUSING AND STOP WHINING 2028

@Bronwyn the fact that Bay Area homeowners seem to be fine with the idea that their children are priced out but not connect that to why people coming from elsewhere need to be accommodated is the purest form of evil to me. The people I grew up around did evil in many other ways but if you went to them and were like “also your kids can’t live here” they’d be like excuse me what

@Bronwyn ❤️

If you hypothetically were into dinosaurs as a kid in the 80’s and wanted to understand what’s happened since, where would you start? Books/movies/TV etc. Mostly nonfiction. Let’s take Jurassic Park and Prehistoric Planet as read

@inthehands One could imagine using a fixed set of model weights and not retraining, using a fixed random seed, and keeping the model temperature relatively low. I'm imagining on some level basically the programming-language-generating version of Nvidia's DLSS tech here. But that's not what people are doing and I'm not convinced if we did that it would be useful

@inthehands Another bull-case argument about LLMs is that they are a form of autonomation (autonomy + automation), in the sense that the Toyota Production System uses it, the classic example being the automated loom which has a tension sensor and will stop if one of the warp yarns break. But we already have many such systems in software, made out of normal non-LLM parts, and also that's ... not really what's going on here, at least the way they're currently being used.

@inthehands Yes! Yes. This is it exactly.

One can imagine a version of these systems where all the "source code" is English-language text describing a software system, and the Makefile first runs that through an LLM to generate C or Python or whatever before handing it off to a regular complier, which would in some sense be more abstraction, but this is like keeping the .o files around and making the programmers debug the assembly with a hex editor.

@inthehands The bet that a lot of these CXOs are making implicitly is that this will be like the transition from assembly to higher-level languages like C (I think most of them are too young and/or too disconnected to make it explicitly). And I'm not 100% sold on it but my 60% hunch is that it's not.

This, this, this.

@inthehands

As frustrating as it can be from the outside, anybody who's ever watched (or been) a developer who was like, "enh it was easier to write the library/script/tool that I needed from scratch than to use repurpose any of these several preexisting ones" has seen this in action

https://ioc.exchange/@inthehands@hachyderm.io/113641949254508839

@GossiTheDog betteridge’s law but for cybersecurity headlines

@GossiTheDog the worse it sounds , the sketchier the methods section

What I’m taking from this is that software engineers spend most of our time on engineering software, and writing code is (as expected) a relatively small portion of that work.

Imagine this for other engineering disciplines. “Wow structural engineers seem to spend most of their time on meetings and CAD and relatively little time physically building bridges! This is something AI can and should fix. I am very smart”

https://fortune.com/2024/12/05/amazon-developers-spend-hour-per-day-coding/

Now testing whether the attribution on link cards feature works, cc: @CriticalPointTV

https://warstories.criticalpoint.tv/episodes/he-won-george-hotzs-money-andrey-petrov

@skinnylatte I very much regret that I never did any fishing while I lived in California, but also it had never occurred to me that sea urchin would be, like, a thing you could just, like, collect and eat

(In the same way that I’m still flabbergasted every time I remember that lemons and limes grow on trees there)

@futurebird Malka Older calls this “narrative disorder”, which I think about every time I find myself falling into it

@mhoye By this standard Google did RSS a favor by shuttering Reader when they did

@aardvark @Mordoukna @mekkaokereke As “invariants which must be true for the system to be safe” go, “the door handles work in the event of a power outage” is a big one