Notices by mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)

Do you ever wonder what the total number of songs your brain can recognize is

@nora once on twitter read the words "a mermaid is a depoliticized siren" and i've never been able to get it out of my head

I *could* go to sleep… or I could file a 95-line bug report on cargo. Hm… *hmmm*…

@evan Probably not

@inthehands @lambdageek yes but what if we actually did it (as an art project) instead of pretending to do it (to scam people out of money)

@lambdageek Back before "neural network" meant "boil the oceans and elect a fascist President", I spent some time imagining a language whose parser is just a neural network trained on various other programming languages. Have it *guess* what you meant— a RNN could probably deduce "elseif", "else if", "elsif" and "elif" mean one thing. There's jokes about Python being "executable pseudocode". Why not make literally executable pseudocode. Like yes it's a bad idea but when has that ever stopped

Just discovered that Rust allows you to create a macro_rules that is scoped to a single function and I am doing ha ha ha yes sickos.png so hard right now

A thing I've been thinking about a lot is how, whether, technology like computers and computer screens could be made "locally", i.e., within a limited area and without access to global trade in parts and minerals, even if you have to make drastic trade-offs to get there

https://www.theverge.com/news/631357/elecom-power-bank-battery-sodium-ion

Twice in a row CAPTCHA showed me a series of street views, told me to click on all the pictures of "cars", and refused to let me through until I agreed that a van is a car

I don't agree that a van is a car

Friggin St. Patrick drove me out of Ireland

Holy shit this dude just successfully argued that misgendering is a GDPR violation

https://not.an.evilcyberhacker.net/notes/a5ewu4lp9thb021m

He mentioned Roko's Basilisk and I was explaining that it actually *is* an infohazard, because it's a nonsense idea that comes close enough to making sense such if you're familiar with the underlying ideas you potentially waste a lot of time trying to figure out what it's saying and why it's wrong. And he was like, oh, sorry to bring it up then! And I'm like no, no, it doesn't do anything to me. I've argued with creationists before

@evan *eyes wild with terror* No… no!!

@inthehands @mhoye …you mean… with excitement?

…I doubt it, a little

Okay okay okay I am *excited*

Thanks to the kindness of @mhoye , I have now acquired an Artifact. And I am going to get up to some utter nonsense with it

Tech companies seem to have standardized on using the "sparkle" emoji ✨ to indicate where they have performed enshittification

*sighs* I used Google Calculator and this weird pair of symbols appears in the upper left. What the fuck is this. It's drawing little animated sparkles around it so I'm afraid it's going to be some kind of "AI".

@owen I think you touched on a larger idea here. I think what I'd say is fundamentally there are two different types of software and sometimes a piece of software misunderstands which one it is

@owen oh i mean. i think there are some kinds of software that work like the thing i'm describing in this thread ("i shouldn't have to think, it should just conform to my intuition") and sometimes it works like you're describing ("models are powerful, the user should learn the model"). Maybe there's a synthesis where the software is "self-teaching", the user adopts a mental model without knowing it. Maybe that's what you were trying to say. I am spitballing here not attempting to produce Theory

@whitequark @owen my ideology remains that of the 1991 macintosh, that there are some things that can be intuitive to a true newbie. there used to be a Theory of this.

part of this is the "visual metaphor" i.e. draw a connection to a real-world thing. post-2010 design rejects this because making reference to real-world objects can mean referencing things that either lack universality or have themselves been obsoleted by computers. but i think post-2010 design is worse, so something there worked