Notices by David Smith (catfish_man@mastodon.social)

@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.

@skinnylatte oh that’s a great point, the event I was thinking of was in 2010

@skinnylatte fwiw I first discovered Tartine at a party where I hadn’t been told what it was, so I think this is really just a case of different people enjoying different things

@inthehands it's *surprisingly* hard to get it to stop doing it for return values from @\objc methods!

I've even resorted to lying about the return type and returning an Unmanaged<Foo> instead, since ObjC doesn't care as long as the representation is just a pointer.

Not aware of any situations where it will other than that one though.

Autorelease tidbits:

RunLoops wrap your code in autoreleasepool {} before calling it; so does Swift Concurrency

DispatchQueues don't, by default! Configure them with .workItem autorelease frequency to fix this

It's much less overhead than you'd expect from my description

swiftc can autorelease objects when returning them from @objc methods

Neither ObjC nor Swift ARC will autorelease things other than that

Use "Allocations" in Instruments to see where adding a pool would help

#swiftlang

This makes me feel old, but lately I've been seeing misunderstandings about what autorelease actually is in objc/swift. "It's a GC", "it's weird magic", "it's a batch allocator", etc…

Autorelease is just an array. You (or, 99% of the time, SDK methods you're calling) manually put things into the array by calling `autorelease` on them, and then when you reach the closing brace of the autoreleasepool {} block, it calls `release` on anything that was added.

That's literally all it is.

#swiftlang

Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that some of the RTO push is powerful people projecting their own untrustworthiness https://mastodon.social/@MattBinder/114016804969031069

@quephird the plunder of Rome by the goths

In hindsight the single best feature of the Pentium 4 was having horrible x87 performance. If it weren’t for that, the world would probably still be saddled with the dang thing being relevant.

@skinnylatte reminds me of reading the yelp reviews for Slanted Door and seeing people baffled and angry that a Vietnamese place is upscale/expensive. Bizarre mindset >.<