Notices by Professor_Stevens (professor_stevens@mastodon.gamedev.place)

@aral

I found out they were doing this a year ago. Dropped them then and told them why.

I just voted with a large majority of the University of Maryland senate to approve a resolution in favor of joining the same mutual defense pact against the Trump administration that Rutgers and seven other Big 10 schools (including Ohio State, about an hour ago) have passed.

Time for all of us to stand together against the fascists.

@anatudor @sortius @aral

I sometimes cruise Twitch, looking for people having coding problems, so I can offer some help. Found one guy who wrote 100% of his code by asking ChatGPT to do it for him. If he had tried to learn from the parts that worked, he might have been on the road to being a programmer. But he didn't. He just kept rephrasing his requests until it looked like his code was working.

I kept cruising.

@aral

Man, all that screen space and she's using such a tiny size for the text. Those of us with inferior vision would really appreciate bigger letters.

(BTW, do you know if there will be video of this? And, thank you for keeping up the fight.)

God, I love Hip Hop Chicken in Beltsville. They sell you 20 drumsticks for $20. However, they are in a hurry. As a result, "20" is a number defined as, "however many we can fit in the aluminum carry-out pan." Usually, that's 24 or 25. Today, it was 33.

@aral

America is not far behind. Trump has been issuing executive orders seeking to penalize law firms that assisted in any of the cases against him. Both Erdogan and Trump are hoping that this will make other lawyers scared of representing their opponents which, in many cases, I'm sure it will.

@aral

"We make a great mistake when our Press persists in abusing him. Let it abuse his evil advisers but give him a chance of being a good boy. If our object is to achieve results that is the only line to take. If our only satisfaction is to slang him, then we must abandon hope of ever getting results."

Extract from a letter from Nevile Henderson, British Ambassador in Germany, September 6th, 1938. You know whom he was talking about.

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/chamberlain-and-hitler/

@aral @EUCommission

Ah, so you did. I am up, but wasn’t fully awake.

@aral @EUCommission

No, but I am. Nice assessment of the parts you read, and I can see why you stopped. One must consider that these "tell all" books only tell the all the author includes. At the risk of being Pollyanna, there's always a rebuttal they leave out.

That said, Facebook is evil. People farming is evil. But bans are unpopular and hard to justify to the masses. Until they know what Facebook is doing to them personally, no one will care.

Let's hope they read this book.

One more time, with feeling (but not empathy).

https://apnews.com/article/cybertruck-recall-tesla-elon-musk-nhtsa-8c517e21aa1119d74b9db39f6aca01b7

@inthehands

A family member is faculty there. I can assure you, she is on the verge of exploding.

I am sitting here on a warm winter evening, windows open, listening to the rustling leaves and the mournful song of the train whistles passing in the night. Intruding on that, my phone trills. A student has sent me an email. They have a question about the assignment. The one I issued last Thursday. At 9:10pm, they have a question about an assignment issued last week, and that is due tomorrow at 2:00pm.

Listening to the leaves rustling, and the trains singing...

Bless you, MapQuest.

https://gulfof.mapquest.com/

@georgetakei

No, he doesn't think there is one. But he'll hear about this and suggest it as a way to save fuel costs.

@aral

No, we shouldn't. But democracy means you can do any shitheaded thing more than half the voters want you to do. (We used to have a document here that put limits on that, but it looks different now.)

"...there were too many red flags, such as a clause waiving the right to sue if the government failed to honor its side of the deal."

That's not a red flag. That's an absolute show-stopper. A contract that allows one party to choose whether or not to perform its side of the deal, while binding the other party, is legally not a contract.

No federal worker should even consider this, particularly in light of whom that other party is, and his history of not paying people.

https://apnews.com/article/buyout-offer-deadline-trump-federal-workers-ce854b19c41b90cd657f75cf09511e96

"DeepSeek 'distilled' knowledge from OpenAI’s AI models, a process that Sacks compared to theft."

Let me see if I've got this right. These vultures have been gobbling up everyone else's intellectual property to repackage it as original output from their Gort-level Teddy Ruxpin, justifying it with Mad Hatter logic about internet distribution being some kind of public domain conversion, but when their work gets borrowed, it's stealing.

Got it.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/28/david-sacks-claims-theres-substantial-evidence-that-deepseek-used-openais-models-to-train-its-own/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon&guccounter=1

They're making it harder all the time.

Despite my love of overnight (or sometimes same-day!) delivery, I have adopted the practice of buying whatever I can from someone OTHER than Jeff Bezos and Amazon. This time, it was a door lock from eufy.com. I bought it direct off their web site, yesterday.

Eufy has informed me that my lock has shipped. Indeed, it will be delivered today.

By Amazon.

@aral

We need an example that proves the viability of alternatives. Who has got the best system today?

@aral

There is a subtlety to this that I hope is noted: The point is not that the reporter must report whether or not it is raining, nor that the reporter cannot avoid the question of whether or not it is raining by reporting that one side says it is and the other says it is not.

The point is that the reporter must report what both sides have said AND report whether or not it is raining.

That way, we don't just know the truth. We also know who we can trust, and who we can't.