Notices by Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop), page 2

So many people have pissed in the pool, it's just a toilet now.

I pulled a random arXiv preprint¹ off a Google Scholar search for prompt engineering, and this is the size of the datasets² that they're using for all their conclusions.

The quality of evidence in that field is almost nonexistent. They're reporting on deltas of less than 1% based on a sampling procedure that can at *best* give 3% margins of error.

¹accepted at a major conference, using a preprint to avoid paywalls
²apologies for shitty alt-text, getting alt-text of tables is tricky

I am very tired and am having a hard time focusing, which leads to the strangest rabbit holes. I just looked up and realized I was reading REL definitions for Magic, without having remembered looking them up nor why.

I promise you, chat, that was not what I was intending to work on.

(I eventually reconstructed the chain that caused this: "Chewie wants our Fblthp doll, but he can't have it" → "he did the same thing with our Torgal plushie" → "oh, if there's a Torgal MtG card it needs to be called 'Torgal, Fine Hound'!" → "huh, now that the FF set is Standard-legal, I should learn to play Standard" → "when is $LGS playing Standard?" → "oh, it's Casual REL? what does that entail?")

Chewie believes all soft plushies and toys are *dog* toys, and hence his. We've been able to draw the line at unique commemorative plushies, but that's about it.

If you want to create a hosted folder that folks of wildly varying levels of comfort with tech can throw stuff in and download stuff from, similar to how they might use a Google Drive folder, what do you like using for that?

@ireneista @trochee I can't think of any other form of engineering where it's ok to develop something, hope that it works without any specific theory as to ensure that it does, run a few tests, and call it good.

If software engineering was actually a form of engineering, we wouldn't have unit and integration tests, we'd have fucking safety proofs attached to everything that interacts with humans.

@jbowen @inthehands @mcc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broom_Bridge

Holy shit, the inevitable burst of the AI bubble is going to be truly catastrophic.

https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113319524266088617

@jalefkowit @glyph @mcc Let me think... QBASIC, VB4, C++, JavaScript, Java, Haskell, C#, MATLAB, Cg, GLSL, Verilog, Python, Rust, TypeScript, pulprog, F#, most every quantum language, Q#? I may be forgetting some...

[e: extending past Python, adding in DSLs, languages I worked on, and leaving out shell languages.]

Streaming movies suck episode whatever-the-fuck-we're-on-now:

Lion in Winter is available for rental only, not for purchase, and not on any subscription service.

If you haven't seen it, by the way, Lion in Winter (the original Peter O'Toole / Katherine Hepburn version) is fucking *amazing*.

(The later Patrick Stewart / Glen Close version is, unfortunately, not as good in my opinion. The directorial decisions kind of focus on the wrong parts of the story, I think, and emphasize one of the least interesting characters. But YMMV.)

There are so many iconic things going on here, but "C:\> ... </" like the DOS prompt is an HTML tag, and like slashes are symmetric with each other?

https://chaos.social/@realhackhistory/113295928732642760

Also, damn you, CP/M for introducing the world to the "backslash" for no apparent reason.

The scare site itself is sadly quite boring other than the quite horrifying "Modern Slavery statement" link in the footer promising that slavery was not used in the making of the website.

One of those "my t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my t-shirt" kinds of moments.

@ireneista What's truly fucked up is watching the very vocal minority of people who worship them *more*. Turning into the biggest of red flags.

This seems not great.

Having Democrats explicitly pick up *and use* right-wing dogwhistles about trans kids seems like the leading indicator of something very bad indeed.

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/tx-dem-collin-allred-responds-to

Literally, yes.

Those of us who have been warning of the surveillance state for years and years and years have also been warning of how it will affect the most oppressed people in society; how surveillance enables and reinforces oppression.

https://mastodon.world/@StillIRise1963/113267236435358792

Look, society's a fucking *mess* right now, at least in the US. Fascism is on the rise, and is just listed as a bullet point on CNN's PowerPoint decks. Transphobes keep ruining people's lives for no fucking reason, and the mathematical average of every VC-backed techbro in the country has directed so much hate at one particular city in Ohio that it's become a national crisis.