Notices by samir, object-disoriented (samir@mastodon.functional.computer)

@aral Someone has got to get this guy on a plane to Malaga to meet all the English people who are Very Good at Spanish.

Signed, a Brit who’s lived in Switzerland for 5 years and can’t speak German or French.

@cwebber Pasta sauce.

I’m not sure if this is genius or should be reported to The Hague.

In addition to all this, @jneen wrote one of the coolest papers I’ve ever read, reimagining programming via the shell’s pipe: https://files.jneen.net/academic/thesis.pdf

https://unstable.systems/@jneen/114055114470578029

Some banging euphemisms for LLMs in the comments.

I am very partial to the original, "stochastic parrots", by Gebru, Mitchell et al.

Stop saying “artificial intelligence”. (And “neural networks” too.)

Be more specific. Say “reinforcement learning”. Say “generative modelling”. Say “Bayesian filtering”. Say “statistical prediction”.

These are incredibly useful tools that have nothing to do with “intelligence”.

And say “model trained on plagiarised data”.

Say “bullshit generator”.

Say “internet regurgitator”.

These are also nothing to do with intelligence, but they have the added bonus of being useless, too.

Prompts already won.

There's a middle ground between CLIs and GUIs, and it's *better*. So I wrote a post about what that might look like, if someone were to spend a lot of time digging in it.

https://functional.computer/blog/prompts-already-won

Thank you so much to @sarajw, @ross, and @katachora for reviewing this post, offering many excellent suggestions.

@skinnylatte Totally. Wouldn’t listen to anyone else’s opinion. 😛

The one universal truth about Indians is that we are everywhere, and we need our food. You can find a dhaba anywhere.

@skinnylatte You can absolutely get proper Punjabi food in the UK (or Tamil, or Bengali, or Gujarati, or…), and there are many, many options in London and other big cities. (I miss it so much.)

I used to go to Pakistani places, mostly, because it’s the closest to what I grew up eating. I took some German friends once. That was fun.

But: do not ask a white person. They will direct you to the nearest “curry house”, a.k.a. approximate Bengali or Bangladeshi food with fries and beer.

Almost half the fedi* is Edward. No surprise there.

* if election pollsters can extrapolate from 12 data points, so can I

The Web Design Museum is wonderful.

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/

I mean, just look at this: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/exhibitions/search-engines-in-the-90s

One really stands out there. Beginning of an era, that was.

@cwebber Thank you. I’ve been feeling like I don’t like computing on the computer much recently but you’re right, it’s not the computer, it’s all the things that get in the way of the computering because of Must Grow Bigger Syndrome.

@jwildeboer Of course it was, it just seems to be about 10x more wrong recently. 😛

@jwildeboer “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” is very last decade, isn’t it? Now you’re the product regardless. You don’t even have to visit the site; they’ll find a way to make you the product regardless.

@rysiek @dysfun @mwl I already bought the book, but it turns out reading it is the hard part.

I did read Savaged by Systemd the other day though. Highly recommended.

@dysfun Why would you tell me this.

Now I’ve gotta fucking learn how to run my own mail server.

Did you not see the part where I’m tired?

Dear Fastmail,

I would very much appreciate it if you didn’t come out in favour of a fascist government. I cannot be bothered to change email provider today. I’m tired.

Much love,

Samir.

If you want to know details, perhaps because you were a fan of Gaiman and need to know the truth, then this thread has them.

Do not read unless you have a strong stomach and, ideally, a very weak empathy gland.
https://mastodon.art/@vicorva/113826905678271418

@GossiTheDog The vapid, pointless suggestions at the bottom of the screen there are the icing on the cake.

I aspire to be as cool as rachelbythebay.

Here’s her list of things her website doesn’t do.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/01/04/cruft/

She doesn’t mention it, but her Atom feed is also perfect; it’s a first-class way to consume her website. It does not truncate or mangle posts.