Notices by David Nash (dpnash@c.im)

@inthehands This reminds me of the (fortunately) brief time during the cryptocurrency bubble when a few techbros thought that “code as law” would be a workable concept. Even without the instances of “code as law” losing badly to “existing law as law”, there were way too many cases of the code doing exactly what code will do, and screwing its own designers over in ways that were completely predictable to non-techbros.

@inthehands @exchgr The Republican Party, now desperate for someone to run at all, drafts their nominee from 2012, Mitt Romney, plus some luckless Senator or governor as VP. The non-Democratic vote is gloriously split, and Harris wins all the states won by either Obama or Biden at some point, with the possible exception of Indiana. A few other states fall in her column that wouldn’t have otherwise. Romney wins Utah and maybe Idaho and one or two other Western states. Trump, whose loss is beyond the wildest ability of corrupt election officials to undo, disappears into a black hole of self-pity before any of his remaining trials.

@FibroJedi @inthehands This precise set of shenanigans is the main reason I left Facebook almost entirely about 5 years ago. I still have some family members who are there all the time, so I drop by occasionally to look at some of what they're up to, but it's been a *long* time since it was even sort of useful for its ostensible purpose of staying connected to any significant number of important people in my life.

Apparently the change from "mostly reverse chronological, plus ads and similar junk" to "engagement, engagement, engagement all the time!" meant that "I *just* saw this but didn't engage with it right away" was considered a negative factor for "I may, just may, want to see it again in the future".

@JessTheUnstill @inthehands After seeing this dynamic play out multiple times with words or expressions that seem neutral to positive to me*, my increasingly common addition to "fsck racism and white supremacy" is "in addition to all the other awful shit they do, they eat otherwise useful words and phrases and turn them into racist garbage."

* one of the more recent ones, and a clear example: discontinuing the former standard default name for git repository branches. That was an easy change for me to make, but I've run into too many white folks who have trouble understanding why it's important.

@inthehands That workflow only works with pastry tubes that have the Mibbler interface for stapler/JavaScript integration. Note that Mibbler version 14.67.blobcat or higher is recommended for best performance. If you haven't mibbled your pastry tubes yet, the next best bet is a NoSQL plugin that routes the JSON into the cloud with the LightningWeasel protocol. With that particular setup, do *NOT* plant the high bits in any type of soil. They need to be artisanally curated in hydroponic pods for 6 weeks first.

After a period of relatively restrained handling of "AI" topics, my division at work decided that all the developers, designers, engineers, whatever, ... need to "use AI more in our everyday work". (Oh, joy.) This included a series of workshops designed to introduce everybody to some representative examples.

One workshop involved Github Copilot, and the following things happened to one development team, all senior developers:
- Copilot generated a unit test case that was hard to get to pass.
- When asked to generate empty test cases, Copilot generated the same (irrelevant) code over and over again.
- Copilot stopped giving suggestions to one developer after a while.
- Getting useful information out of Copilot frequently required a lot of fussy or non-obvious prompt editing and tweaking.

I won't supply direct quotes without the explicit consent of the people involved, but there was a very clear general sense that Copilot was not fit for purpose -- even when it did produce something not totally wrong, it was not a useful timesaver for the types of work this team was doing.

It wasn't just Copilot that seemed half baked. The workshop's guidelines (which are themselves part of a fairly polished Github repo) were poorly proofread. One example had a prominent typo in some HTML you were supposed to generate: '<button class=""btn" ...>' (note the extra double-quote). A newbie to web development would very likely add the spurious double quote mark to otherwise ok Copilot output to make sure it matched the instructions.

Finally, our IT department disallows results from Copilot that come from training on "public" code, for what should be fairly obvious legal concerns regarding copyright and similar issues. For one developer, Copilot repeatedly started to generate a result but then stopped, with an alert that the result appears to match known "public" code.

If it wasn't clear before that Copilot's basic mode (no "private code" option) is a copyright-laundering and license-laundering tool, it's really obvious now.

@airwhale @inthehands This has also been a bit hard for me as an #ActuallyAutistic person who's worked in software development and adjacent fields for a while.

I know exactly what sort of knowledge and skill indicated by "X years of experience doing Y" tends to look like in practice.

I have also seen, or have been in, situations where not *literally* having the exact specified experience (or more) would be anywhere from extremely unpleasant to disastrous, even if the rest of the job was fine. So there are times where it's safe, and even desirable (if the rest of the job looks like a good match to skills and experience) to ignore them ... and other times where it very much isn't.

For me at least, the #ActuallyAutistic barrier here is not one of failing to understand that job applications have hidden or at least not-made-very-explicit conventions, it's of not knowing *which ones* can be safely bent or ignored outright when applying for a given job.

@clacke @mrundkvist Nope - I only heard about that one via someone who had reviewuated the situation and posted a summary on a blog or something like that.

@seraph @pluralistic Good grief, it’s the Yahoo “medireview” bug all over again. You know the one: Yahoo replaced potentially dangerous JavaScript commands with more innocuous synonyms in emails. As a global search and replace, with no regard for context (like spaces or punctuation). “eval” got replaced with “review”, and all of a sudden, people interested in history from 500 to 1500 years ago were reading about “medireview” topics.

*Twenty-three years ago.*

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/medireview

@thomasfuchs “…expert systems…”

“…That’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time.”

@ShaulaEvans
1995: Cool, the latest print encyclopedia is out.
2005: Nobody prints encyclopedias anymore because they think Wikipedia and the web in general made them obsolete.
2015: What’s a “print” encyclopedia? Something like those legendary “paper maps” of yore?
2025: Oh. Right. It’s one of those things that might still be useful for finding basic introductory information that was well-understood in 1985 or 1995 or even 2005 because it was never contaminated with AI sploodge.

@0xabad1dea Ah yes, along with the Coicert Drids, there is “Blllld Thf Ths Mththsrllnd” and “Zlngszur Mlrch”.

@Jain @FloatingGhost

> gpostcode

Unpostcoded in bash/CLI with “gunpostcode”, of course.

@prefetcher This list needs to include YES and NO for maximum cursedness.

I recently posted about how I once worked with a language that aliased the strings "YES" and "NO" to Boolean true and false, and how this kept fscking up user account info from users who were coming from Norway.

@hosford42 @thomasfuchs

Also, the diameter difference between the Earth and the Moon is just under a factor of 4, so O and o don’t really represent the scale difference well. It’s more like O and the circle in Danish Å.

Given that, it’s hard to answer the question as written. If you assign “O” to Earth’s diameter, you’ll get a different answer than if you assign “o” to the Moon’s diameter.

So, boring but hopefully more accurate answer: The moon spans about half a degree in the (Earth) sky, which is about 1/120 of a radian, so the distance is approximately 120 Moon diameters, whatever symbol you choose to use for it.

@neuralex There is a lot of point to this, especially given the rather debased approach to quality many web and mobile app developers expect people to accept, but I did want to mention one thing:

>they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort)

Inadvertent data *erasing* through normal user operations wasn't super common, but much like today, inadvertent data *loss* was reasonably common, often through non-obvious means (i.e., not things like your cat dumping a cup of coffee onto the stack of floppy disks inhabiting your desk).

When I was a young 'un in the 1980s, my parents got an IBM PC (a true OG PC, not a clone). One of the first programs I wrote was a BASIC program to display the entire printable character set (ASCII + the DOS extended "high bit set" characters) one by one. This PC definitely only used the old 8.3 file name format, so I saved the file as "IBM CHAR.BAS" on a floppy.

Note the space. It seemed like a reasonable way to abbreviate "IBM CHARacters".

However, there was, at the time, no straightforward way to access a file in DOS with a space in the name -- at least, not to a relatively new user. You could create such a file, but not access it. (I remember trying at least a few possibilities, none of which worked. This now-bordering-on-vintage blog post suggests there really was no way in ordinary use: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090709-00/?p=17563.)

The file was effectively gone, through some action that was not obviously problematic.

A lot of us who were proto-computer nerds in the 80s and 90s ran into issues like this quite a lot with the old CLI interfaces of the day.

@jacobat @thomasfuchs These companies claim that their use of copyrighted material is just fine -- that it falls under the "fair use" exemption in US law.

This *may* be true (in terms of being found in court to qualify as such), but if so, the law needs a refresh. "Fair use" was historically a way to allow a person or organization to take a *small amount* of copyrighted material to comment on it, or cite it in research, or make a parody or other highly-legally-protected form of derivative work. It has not, up until now, been invoked on a scale of "essentially all copyrighted works available publicly on the Internet".

@thomasfuchs Yep. Here's an acronym to make us fellow very early web design/development geeks feel old:

"VRML"

It came and went back in the 90s, before the web was really all that popular, and when the hardware really was not up to snuff for that sort of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

@nblr @nyrath The sequel to “Don’t Invent the Torment Nexus” — “Also Don’t Invent the Torment Panopticon” — is also being misunderstood.

@NamelessCynic @aprilfollies This is an unambiguous case where the UK English name for this stuff (“washing-up liquid”) is vastly superior to the US name (“dish soap” or “dish detergent”).