Notices by David Smith (catfish_man@mastodon.social)

@inthehands @shantini I need this as a possible reaction on posts

@sindarina @skinnylatte warms my heart to see people still remember us fondly :) </former Adium developer>

Why the fuck are there all these cars on this road. My bus has places to be, gtfo

@mcc What I want along those lines is an “introject” syscall that makes a particular thread in a daemon act, for security and other purposes, as though it’s a thread in the app that sent the daemon a message

Sometimes I want to post about The Horrors but also don’t want to inflict more posts about The Horrors on folks timelines

@inthehands and it turns out all objects are C strings, as long as there’s a \0 before the end of the memory page 😭

"Hey David why are you so enthusiastic about Swift being strongly statically typed?"

@squeakypancakes @inthehands things got SO MUCH clearer for me when I realized they weren’t contrasting rational with irrational, they were contrasting it with empirical.

“What if we try to derive the nature of reality from assumptions without ever touching grass”

I have a new favorite conspiracy theory: someone in the talk page for the wikipedia article on branch prediction thinks that branch prediction, in its entirety, is fake

@inthehands yeah he, arguably, is kind of a genius. Just, his skill is large scale cons, not engineering.

@inthehands one of the deeply frustrating things about being an anticapitalist is the realization that it's so deeply entwined into our systems that just tearing it down naively will do a lot of harm, while also acknowledging that an orderly transition is orders of magnitude harder than an already herculean task :(

@inthehands this leads directly to my current pessimistic position of “we have not made an artificial intelligence, but if and when we someday do, we won’t be able to tell and probably won’t notice”

Periodic reminder that if you must link to or include pictures of propaganda from your enemies,
a) must you, really?
b) at least put an X covering it or something

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect

This post brought to you by unredacted terf protest signs on my timeline >.<

@inthehands @hacks4pancakes @bodil Lando executing the classic iterated prisoner’s dilemma strategy of “grim trigger”, aka start shooting as soon as they betray you once

@inthehands @jrose @thias @quephird I have a similar thought exercise that I do when I'm feeling down, which is look at a city skyline at night, and then attempt to trace everything that had to happen to get all those little points of light there

I now have a full month of data to do comparisons with, and wow the before and after heat pump difference is striking. I could leave my microwave running on high 24/7 and still only be using as much power as I was in December.

@inthehands @siracusa

2029: GitHub introduces a super intelligent AI with a reward function tied to code quality

2030: global revolution after the AI manipulates news, markets, and the contents of everyone’s GitHub repos to achieve its goal of removing time-to-market pressure

@inthehands @siracusa “how do we get people to stop and think about what they’re doing” remains the greatest unsolved language design question

Maybe the answer has something to do with reducing the amount of pressure people are under to work quickly… 🙃

Hot take: If you really want to make an effective Swift linter just grep for

* .detached
* Task { @MainActor
* any

and ask "are you sure about that?"

@siracusa I actually really disagree! I think assertions are great, and ! is just a compact spelling of one.