Notices by ben (benjamineskola@hachyderm.io)

@skinnylatte ‘deteriorate after independence’ is such an odd framing. One might think that wanting independence was a sign that the relationship had already ‘deteriorated’ (if it had ever been good, which is also a weird assumption to make about a colonial relationship).

Nobody asks why the relationship between the US and Britain deteriorated *after* the declaration of independence.

(Or perhaps the assumption is that the Netherlands granted independence to its colonies out of sheer progressive enlightenment?)

@inthehands @stinerman Yes, it’s spelled differently between the two languages and the spelling difference matches the phonetic difference, which in turn aligns with the respective romanisations.

(Being ‘spelled phonetically’ isn’t as simple as it might sound, generally speaking — whose phonetics? — but in this case it’s straightforward I think.)

@inthehands I grew up listening mostly to compilations and greatest-hits albums and so forth, or just having my entire music library on random shuffle once I switched from CDs, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve definitely started to appreciate the album as a distinct unit more.

@inthehands There was an article in the Guardian a few weeks back — an anonymous teenage girl talking about online misogyny and concluding that a social media ban would help. And what struck me was that yeah, it’s a real problem, but framing it as ‘about teenagers’ seems completely mistaken.

(Are we expected to think that misogynistic content is okay as long as directed only at over-16s?)

@inthehands One positive for me, I think, in the recent wave of nonsense, is that it’s sharpened my sense of what matters — that I actually enjoy doing it and being good at it.

@inthehands I might just add (in agreement) that just because someone suggested it before and didn’t win the election doesn’t mean it was wrong then, and especially doesn’t mean it’s wrong now.

You can’t use popularity as a proxy measure for right and wrong.

@dalias that… doesn’t follow at all.

What about people who thought about what it said, agreed, and voted yes?

@JdeBP @soller @neal @feonixrift @wwahammy @artemis

@thomasfuchs Yeah: I haven't been a macos user for as long as some (only since 2011–12) but all of the original appeal (it's unix, but with a polished and reliable UI) has gone.

@inthehands for a while I went about trying to do things the docker way and used one of the docker-oriented hosting services and eventually decided it just doesn’t make sense. It feels like it’s trying to solve problems most people don’t have. At least at the personal-project level; but I also suspect for professional use too.

It’s like microservices or something: not necessarily *never* useful, but people convince themselves it’s useful when it’s not, just because big tech likes it; and/or if it is useful in a particular case it may just be a sign of a deeper problem.

@inthehands no, that’s pretty much it.

IIRC compose was a separately-built tool that got bought by Docker and though the command is now integrated the configuration remained completely separate. So e.g., there’s a ‘port’ option in the Dockerfile that does nothing, it’s just indicative or something? You have to do it in compose, and there’s no requirement for the Dockerfile to have been set up to expect it even.

@thomasfuchs I have a coworker who seemingly can’t take no for an answer on this. As if it’s not bad enough to have to deal with his use of it.

@thomasfuchs @Floppy What people should have and what they do have don’t always match: I’ve heard recently of corporate IT departments banning password managers, for example.

(I assume the same departments also require password changes every three months, etc.)

@inthehands I could get behind a policy by the Nobel committee of just giving it everywhere to the individual or group that would most annoy Donald Trump, though.

@inthehands @julieofthespirits Yes, and I think it makes it difficult to talk about the history (and continuing existence of) concentration camps — because everyone thinks of ‘death camps’. So if you point out that concentration camps were invented by Britain (in the Boer war) it sounds hyperbolic — because we weren’t rounding people up to murder them.

(Or, as pointed out downthread, the US WW2 internment camps.)

But even without being a death camp it’s deeply unjust (and probably also does lead to deaths that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, anyway).

@inthehands my naive interpretation would be that it’s impersonation of a law enforcement officer, or some similarly-termed crime.

But of course it would still depend on other law enforcement being willing/able to enforce it — presumably they’d still have the ‘obstructing a federal officer’ issue?

@thomasfuchs agreed — there have been libraries I’ve stopped using because they were releasing multiple new versions a week, and backwards-incompatible major versions several times a year. Life’s too short to spend that much time thinking about pagination.

It’s not even that the updates were mandatory, but it just gives a strong sense that the developer isn’t stopping to think about what they’re doing.

@inthehands @Bfordham yeah this is what came to my mind too. I don’t think it’s meaningful to think of an LLM as being slave-like at all.

But listing it as a _positive_ about LLMs is deeply, deeply suspect. It’s not something one should want to be true.

@inthehands is an aspect of this also when correctness is hard to verify?

I can think of examples where the verification process would basically involve doing most of the same work over again. (e.g., summarisation, where if the summary needs to be correct, then a human has to read over all the same inputs and ensure that nothing has been missed or invented.)

@thomasfuchs I’ve wondered recently why people claim that sarcasm/irony is hard to detect in writing (in internet communication). Both have been used in literature for centuries.

@thomasfuchs There’s a suggestion that he’s plagiarising (or effectively plagiarising), which might be true — it feels like a risk that might arise from the lack of rigour? But I think that’s a different sort of criticism than “grifter” or whatever.