Notices by Ben Ramsey (ramsey@phpc.social)

@chris Oops! Sorry for lumping you in with the old-timers. 😅

I didn’t realize this was still an issue in 2012.

The first time I saw a well-defined IC track, it was at an agency I joined in 2007. The titles went: Assoc. Software Eng. → Software Eng. → Sr. Software Eng. → Software Architect → Sr. Software Arch. → Dir. of Software Eng. (IC) → VP of Software Eng. (IC).

It blew my mind.

Nowadays, those upper levels are Staff, Principal, and Distinguished, rather than Architect, Director, and VP.

@chris In the early 00s, it was pretty easy to get to senior fairly quickly. A lot of us with little-to-no formal computer science training ended up as the senior-most people building web things, which isn’t a bad thing; CS degrees didn’t yet teach what we knew, and there were no “software engineering” degrees. At the time, the only way to “advance” was to switch to management. I’m glad the industry finally solved this by introducing the IC track, as well as slowing down promotions.

@thomasfuchs I took a (mandatory) AI training course this week, and I was pleased to see the instructor went into the history of these terms and why they’re simplistic and antiquated in the way they create analogies with the human brain. He also focused very heavy on the probabilistic auto-complete nature of LLMs, showing the math and how it works, to demystify any notion of consciousness and intent. It was kind of refreshing.

Go upgrade FFmpeg to 8.1.2 now! This vulnerability affects all versions of FFmpeg before 8.1.2 (that are built with the MagicYUV decoder).

https://jfrog.com/blog/pixelsmash-critical-ffmpeg-vulnerability-turns-media-files-into-weapons/

@silverpill @achim @dansup What’s the other format in your “both?”

@dansup Isn’t JSON-LD what ActivityPub uses?

@stux @inthehands There probably aren’t any sidewalks or crosswalks, which is a whole other thing about the US.

Another day, another argument with a robot.

@tchambers @paninid @anildash From what I understand, they’ve talked about it.

TIL AmigaOS is still being developed, and there are folks who use it as their daily driver. Is there something it does better than other OSes, or is there software available for it you can’t get on anything else?

@ThreeSigma @tchambers A lot of folks use agents to summarize things for them, so that’s one use-case for “read my feed.”

ActivityPub doesn’t have a 500 character limit. That’s a Mastodon limit. The mindset for drafting a post like that is to state casually what you want to say and have it reword it for you. From a business standpoint, it would draft it for brand voice, etc.

@ThreeSigma It’s not any different from a chatbot. I can’t speak for @tchambers, but I didn’t read his posts as meaning we needed to embed agentic experiences in Mastodon itself. I think it was more a call to lead in designing what those experiences look like at the network level, which is something we can do with or without Mastodon.

@axbom @inthehands Is there an alternative that’s not Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go?

This is great! Stephen Colbert hosted Only In Monroe the day after he went off the air. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJTXB5uT_C4&feature=youtu.be

@dansup What if you post a video where you talk about AI and use it as a hashtag? Does it apply the “AI Generated” label then?

I’ve never bought a rice cooker, but I’m interested in getting one. Folks who have rice cookers: what’s a good brand? What are things to look for when shopping for one?

#LazyWeb

@chris No. She claims they aren’t doing anything. I mean, she should be right—maybe it’s something else.

@chris My MIL has diffusers running, which she claims are hypoallergenic and, since they’re natural essential oils, harmless, but my body begs to differ.

@chris Is it the stress of being there, or is she running some essential oil diffuser, or something like that? Or maybe a pet?

@oli @blogdiva I had literally heard zero rumors about Melania and Epstein before she opened her mouth.