Notices by Greg Wilson (gvwilson@mastodon.social), page 5

"This department has worked [10] days without an apocalyptic event."

My proposal for a "Bridgerton" / "Avatar: The Last Airbender" mash-up was just dismissed without, I feel, the consideration it deserved.

Found this hand-drawn world map from a campaign I put together in (wait for it) 1982. I wonder sometimes where they all are…

@powersoffour I don't know, but if I had to place a bet…

In case there was any doubt left that Russia is backing Trump financially: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/03/trump-media-es-family-trust-2022-loans

A bit of good news: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/thailand-marriage-equality-bill-1.7156766

should I stay or should I go?

I have a dozen data scientists who are comfortable with Pandas and requests but have never written code to open a socket, who use Docker almost daily but aren't sure what a certificate is, and who understand that machines have IP addresses but haven't ever been shown how DNS works. They would like to learn some more about computer networks—would someone in/around Toronto be willing to teach a one-day hands-on workshop in person, virtual, or hybrid? If so, please DM me—thx.

Paul Simon: "That Was Your Mother" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im9KnAg0r-w #nwit

Once you realize that "Dune" is basically SpongeBob SquarePants' tragic backstory, but with live action, many other things become clear as well.

Docusign just admitted that they use customer data (i.e., all those contracts, affidavits, and other confidential documents we send them) to train AI:

https://support.docusign.com/s/document-item?language=en_US&bundleId=fzd1707173174972&topicId=uss1707173279973.html

They state that customers "contractually consent" to such use, but good luck finding it in their Terms of Service. There also doesn't appear to be a way to withdraw consent, but I may have missed that.

@KFosterMarks I remember a Sun Microsystems rep talking about "programmer comfort" in the late 1980s (more specifically, as something they had that IBM and SGI didn't). I also remember the phrase "engineering ergonomics" from about the same time, but can't recall context. The idea was definitely used by Unix fans as a stick to beat up Windows in that period even if the name varied.

turns out "satchel" isn't as widely used a word as I thought, but so far everyone seems to know what a "knapsack" is, so "knapsack-scale computing" maybe?

Looking for a word to use in contrast to "exascale" to mean "the laptop-sized computing that is all 99.9% of researchers need". Thought about "human-scale" but that doesn't have enough zing. Suggestions?

AI-generated papers aren't destroying scientific publishing and peer review. They're just showing how broken those things already were.

Cowboy Junkies: "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJt9KFyJnbk #music

"Gonna spin some old vinyl for you this evening…" on the CoRecursive podcast with Adam Gordon Bell https://corecursive.com/beautiful-code-with-greg-wilson/#

I find it difficult to get excited about telerobotic brain surgery when an increasing number of people are dying of preventable infections. Similarly, I'm unenthused about discussions of systems thinking applied to digital transformation of enterprise architecture when the overwhelming majority of programmers don't have meaningful test suites. 1/

@EmilyG meanwhile on Amazon…

Irugalbandara et al 2024: "A Trade-off Analysis of Replacing Proprietary LLMs with Open Source SLMs in Production" https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14972 "We present a systematic evaluation methodology for…Small Language Models (SLMs) and their tradeoffs when replacing a proprietary LLM APIs…across 9 SLMs and 29 variants, we observe competitive quality-of-results for our use case, significant performance consistency improvement, and a cost reduction of 5x-29x when compared to OpenAI GPT-4." #nwit