Notices by datarama (datarama@hachyderm.io)

@mattly @baldur I am torn between going back to hacking up the fantasy computer I wanted to do back in the before-times (basically: "what would I have had if I lived in the timeline where my Amiga was a Lisp Machine?") and ... well, just no longer coding in my time off. I miss coding for fun, but the AI industry has me vacillating between feeling it's all pointless and feeling that everything I make is just going to be another involuntary contribution to their attempt to create Mass Layoff As A Service.

@mattly @baldur *finally* all that so-called "useless" Lisp hackery pays off!

(And when that fails, I have Forth and Joy up my sleeve).

@mattly You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

@mattly As a first approximation I'm assuming every reasonably large tech company is.

@mattly Death is the ultimate anti-nihilist.

@mattly I've gone in the opposite direction: My trackball *is* a moving part! :-)

(I have, because the size is exactly right, replaced the actual ball with an 8-ball.)

@mattly @jenniferplusplus I will never stop singing the praises of CST trackballs (now made by XKeys) - but people who like mice generally don't like trackballs.

@mattly @inconvergent That is the most cyberpunk thing possible to do.

@mattly Isn't endlessly tweaking your config the one thing that unites Vim and Emacs users, though? ;-)

@mattly That's what I mean. I was promised a bicycle for the mind, and what I got was a cybertruck.

@mattly Mercifully I've seen few of those. The terrible metal I like listening to still seems to overwhelmingly go for terrible drawings *or* software renderings that look like they're from 25 years ago.

I think the reason AI-generated book covers repel me so is that they're the main AI artifact I see out in the world outside my screen. This reminds me that there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide; the garbage tsunami engulfs all.

We're a couple years into this now, but whenever I see a clearly AI-generated cover on a book, I still feel viscerally repelled.

Waterfall. The rock face is loosely based on Svartifoss, Iceland.

The pagan temple (or whatever it is) on top was a bit of an afterthought. After I'd done the rest, it somehow just felt *right* to add that.

#pixelart

@dalias I've used gotos much like this in lexers, and a few other state machines. When what you actually mean is "nonrecoverably transfer control to somewhere else", they're often the best you can do for readability in a langauge that doesn't have tail-call optimization.

@fkinoshita "Computer science is the study of self-inflicted problems."

-- my old theoretical CS prof.

@aral In fairness, I picked that phrase because it's a direct quote from Marc Andreessen - a uniquely reliable source of psychopathic language.

@aral I had a conversation today about how horrible it must be to be a person with a conscience across pretty much every industry. You work in advertising? You're manipulating people for profit. You work in garments? You're creating mountains of pollution heaped onto the Global South. You work in journalism? You're writing manipulative clickbait.

And you're probably a good person, anyway. Your work got turned evil by economic forces outside your control.

@aral Perhaps it's just because software is my own trade, but I think the software industry has been uniquely disgusting in this process. *Why* does that poor journalist have to produce shitty clickbait? *Why* is advertising now synonymous with surveillance? Because of the software industry.

Software did eat the world - and in the process, it unsurprisingly made the world into shit, half-digested by software.

@airshipper @malcircuit @spiegelmama The very short version is that back in the late 50s, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky wanted to hold an academic conference about computing, but the field of cybernetics (founded and headed by Norbert Wiener) pretty much dominated the area. McCarthy and Minsky couldn't stand Wiener, so they came up with the term "artificial intelligence" instead of "cybernetics" so they could get away with not inviting him.

@Wolven I doubt they're going to walk this one back. I remember Wave and Google+ too, but I don't think they've ever gone as absolutely all-in on anything in their graveyard as they now have on generative AI.