Notices by josef (jk@mastodon.social)

over the last few years ive been puzzled at a lot of the stuff i've seen come out of mozilla. there's just like, very little explanation for all the unforced errors and cringe messaging and like, weirdly just doing exactly the wrong thing in bizarre and novel ways and not even profiting from it. something about that "join the rebel alliance of better AI" thing has finally brought me clarity. perhaps they're just really stupid

@aerique https://mastodon.social/@jk/111749535910951398 ive thought this for a while. i am 15% sure that it is true

a 1949 marshall plan initiative to assist with reconstruction in the city of hamburg saw the general mills company awarded a large government contract to produce a special kind of light construction aggregate which became known as "hamburger helper"

many tech products were finished and then they kept 'innovating' until they were ruined. imo when a piece of software is over 15 years old, it should be legally removed from the custody of the rapacious american startup-turned-corporation whose uncompromising unsentimentality originally birthed it, and instead given to a medium-size, 120-year-old german company with modest annual revenue growth and 80 employees who produce a type of tube that goes inside air conditioning units of freight trains

an old paradigm: "the user will specify their problem to the computer, and how to compute the solution"

software did get more user-friendly: "the computer will ask the user what their problem is, and then compute the solution"

but then came Big Data and The Algorithm: "the computer will guess what the user's problem is, and then compute the solution"

this implies a final stage, which we have recently arrived at: "the computer will guess what the user's problem is, and then guess the solution"

in theory you can make a machine that does what you want it to do. but in practice that gets very difficult. its an intractable problem. you can solve it though: you just need to make the machine tell you what you want. then, it does that, and youre happy with the result. if you look closely, this isnt very new. in fact all machines work like this, at least slightly. its kind of a secret though. dont tell anyone!!!!!!!

theres a lot of AI bullshit in firefox lately, which i don't love. but apparently firefox is adding a new feature which destroys all AI. i think it's a command-line argument. if you run it like `firefox --destroy-all-ai` it disables all AI worldwide. we're talking like, ALL of the datacenters immediately blow up. probably dozens of people will actually die, for real, if you run it. but maybe its worth it. it's your call: you're the user. i admire that tbh. a bit extreme maybe? not sure though

me: im finally going to learn rust. maybe this time it will stick

rust: use leftpad::{*<>}::*;
#[derive()] Option<fn(&
{ [!])->T&(vec!(mut<::>&<'_>!
=> ===>
x:) = _() += 1 };

me: nah actually im not

even as a force-multiplier for people who want to feel powerful or capable, i don't think there's much value there. nobody respects the witless manager who's unable to control their subordinates. it's embarrassing to see pull requests where humans desperately try to rein in hordes of chattering automata. from the outside it looks like supposedly-capable engineers have traded in concrete work for a bizarre video game. it makes me question their judgement in general. they look silly

@hopeless sorry i cant parse what youre saying because im too stupid

@hopeless @kolya i think the open source world is kind of an attention economy, where gaining users can be a net positive, as some tiny percentage will end up becoming volunteer contributors. people want to use (and contribute to) high-quality software, so doing things that signal low quality is kind of a bad move economically. personally, the more human involvement and effort in a project there is, the more i value it. i think that's quite a popular way of intuiting the value of something

@kolya @hopeless ah right, thats what i thought they meant. my brain pattern-matched to "that stereotypical open source attitude where the users are leeches" or whatever. which seemed a bit rude? so i assumed maybe there was something i was missing

committing to that kind of approach is just so obviously a massive PR mistake to me, too. historically it's been so difficult to pin down exactly what 'causes' bugs and regressions (beyond "entropy" or "mistakes") that developers aren't really blamed for them. but if you've decided to "Go All In On AI", any user experiencing any problem whatsoever now has their explanation: it was your fault. you decided to let the AI in, on purpose. it wasn't neglect, it was willful damage you caused

a high-profile software project proudly announcing that it's going to start "using AI" is basically the same thing to me as seeing a big "this repo is archived" banner. perhaps even worse in some respects? intentionally or not, the message it sends is "we don't really enjoy programming and we don't want to work on this anymore, but rather than retire the project we're going to do a really lackluster job from now on". like if your favorite coffee brand proudly announced "now 20% more sawdust"

The process has terminated.

And that's right!! It's that time again!
Get ready for your
PID 47182 WRAPPED!!!

Starting off strong with a banger from KERNELBASE
Your No. 3 most-called function... GetExitCodeThread

You know a classic when you see it.
Back on the grind, and sweating it out,
with a well-earned second-place...
MatrixMultiply!

But it's clear, blocking means a lot to you.
The function where you spent 31.46% of your time...
Your No. 1, is the one and only
... WaitForSingleObjectEx!!

wait thats not steam

this room has the tapes. its the tapes' room

the tapes room

vaporwave, a history
---------------------------------

2009: nobody here
2010: ecco the dolphin
2011: new dreams & floral shoppe
...
...
2015: seinfeld
2016: hentai screengrab with a windows 95 start button in the corner
2017: any video game that has purple in it

windows 11 also gives me this feeling whenever i catch a glimpse of it. its very odd. it looks like a linux distro from the 2010s. the kind people would recommend because it "works just like Windows" and i would take one look at it and be like "no it doesn't? that doesnt look anything like Windows? i cant, in good conscience, recommend this to my grandma can i? she's going to be really perturbed by it" etc. but now it seems that microsoft themselves want to perturb my grandma