Notices by Ian Smith (katachora@hachyderm.io)

@mattly no reason, I was just thinking that there's a kind of arbitrage where you bail out of a toolchain before hitting the place where the ancient metaphors cripple it.

@mattly although, CAD toolchains are relics of a different set of people who can't let go of a different set of metaphors that you're mostly avoiding because you aren't turning bits into atoms.

@mekkaokereke

X = content addressable distributed file shares (i.e., ipfs, etc) for storage to diffuse the cost of cloud storage across all members on the server.

Y = content distribution cooperative to increase buying power worldwide for data connectivity.

Z = p2p client update propagation between members of the same server to reduce the hit rate on the servers themselves.

@mekkaokereke {fatalities / mile} feels like "if you make a thing that moves or operate a service that moves", you MUST report this number every time you report earnings, taxes, or file misc forms for regulatory or statutory compliance.

And if we lived in the future we were promised in the 2000s, every time the company is mentioned, the text would include this number... "Acme [0.76 f/m] announced today..."

@thomasfuchs my point is that if you have 0 and someone offers you 0.9, but you reject it because you want 1, you still have 0.

Inscrutable error messages are useless to anyone who can't interpret them.

@thomasfuchs sure, however there *is* something to be said along the lines of "mostly right and comprehensible" vs "completely right and inscrutable".

I'm 100% this is a business hype event, but neural nets, language models, and generative synthesis are tools I've fiddled with enough to see that they work as designed, can solve some problems, and have progressively improved over the past decade.

@thomasfuchs my sense is that it succeeds now in two places:

1: experts in a field who are also good enough at the setup and config required to create digital workers for their rote and mundane tasks can seemingly do this pretty well if they're coders.

2: using llms to "smooth over" that way programs interact with people works very well -- think voice input and rewriting error message output -- and this does work ok for packaging up into a product or solution to give to a non-coder.

@thomasfuchs distractionware is a moat, and moats are just another tool in the strategic toolkit.

Javascript and kubernetes are roots of their respective distractionware trees.

It's the programmer version of consumerism as a hobby, like the catalogs of aftermarket crap for hot rodders and 4x4ers, so we're always wanting, always chasing, always spending time and money to make the unimportant, peripheral, and cosmetic changes to perfectly good but boring stuff that works fine.

@aral 1. It's commendable how you're not suffering assholes. 2. Forgive me if this is already recorded as part of the saga, but a question: is the screen reader broken, or is this (yet another) case of Weyland being an insufficiently functional replacement for X, or are the program and the display server collaborating to be broken?

@alienghic @thomasfuchs According to my wife, based on her extensive behavioral analysis, retro is anything that stopped being sold before you could afford to buy it new.

@thomasfuchs that was my "when I get money it will be mine" computer for a year or so. By the time I got money, it wasn't.