Notices by mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl (mnl@hachyderm.io), page 3

can anybody suggest some bike tours around berlin, ideally 6h or longer (150-200km road), but gravel / offroad very welcome. I know it's flat af over there...

Looking at you @jack

#berlin #cycling

Not gonna reply guy in peoples comments but I think the phrasing “crisis of masculinity” is justified.

The fact that the space of role models for cis-male (if this is how you want to parse “masculinity”) teenagers and young adults has been colonized by abject to fully repulsive individuals such as Peterson or Tate is a crisis.

Not every teen is going to watch queer eye or contrapoints and resonate or make the bridge from the issues discussed to their own angst and struggles.

1/

I don’t know why and i don’t think it’s actually relevant, but based on my own experience as cis-male that hopefully has a healthy relationship to my gender identity, a lot of boys are competitive and brash and violent, and feel that traditional models that gave an outlet to these tendencies (sports, work, craftsmanship, …) are disappearing.

Feeling that one’s identity is not taken seriously is a fucking valid problem to have and hopefully one that many can relate to.

2/

A 13 year old is not going to care or understand or have a productive examination of patriarchy, he wants to get laid, punch the wall and beat those motherfuckers on counter strike.

In my childhood without internet, despite being on the receiving end of toxic masculinity, these were issues I wrestled with too. Had I found the manosphere, I would have been all over it.

I “lucked out” that I found the Linux, demo and hacker scene, and even those were pretty toxic.

3/

At least I could channel my angst and violence into being a fucking leet hacker until I my hormones calmed down. I could make weird shitty jokes and memes and troll people in an overall leftist environment rather than 4chan.

So please show some empathy and help us provide some positive cis-male roles, because you can’t hold lost teenagers to account the same way you can powerful men.

4/4

@playinprogress did you identify with schwarzenegger and mike tyson? or uh jimi hendrix and kevin mitnick, in my case?feel that "mess with the best, die like the rest" was not just ironic? (maybe you did, i don't think that actually matters for the point i want to make).

I'm out of my depth here, but the fact that so many boys are into tate and peterson sure sounds like a crisis to me.

Someone saying that they feel lost when trying to build an identity is valid.

@playinprogress but would be easier today, right? I do think in the 90ies finding role models speaking to you as a cis-male that weren't the monstrosities we have today was not a problem, and indeed the problem was more about society in general.

noob mastodon API questions...

a) if I want to download a complete thread tree, I can start with a single status, get its context https://docs.joinmastodon.org/entities/Context/, then walk that (linear) tree and get the context of each of these statuses, filter out duplicates, until I get to a fixed point?

b) in order to get a DM status, I need to be able to reach it through a context/notification, because I can't fetch it straight using its ID, since that ID is not stored on my instance.

#mastodon #programming

Remember: you’ll do more for musicians if you delete Spotify, pirate all your mp3s and buy a single album every month on a platform with fairer percentages (Bandcamp, formaviva, heck even iTunes).

#music #spotify #bandcamp

example of messing with claude.ai to explore books, some i've read, some i didn't, some with sourcecode. As expected, it doesn't do well at all with sourcecode, and that sheds some light on what it can do to human language too.

https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/Logs/ChatGPT/2023/07/2023-07-20--slack-claude-convo

#llms

The three steps of creating work documents (project documents, tech strategy, rfcs):

Paper sketching and obsidian, often over months. Freewrite rambling on the right. Llm + cleanup in obsidian, wordtune and google docs as a final step.

#TechLead #strategy #llms #pkm #writing

@enkiv2 @clacke I think a lot of programming for better or for worse is indeed almost trivial glueing of apis together. The fact that it is almost trivial is what makes it incredibly hard and cognitively exhausting for humans, yet any attempt to formalize things down to a level that would make it automated with “normal” software is just adding one more layer of “inhumane” (indeed, since we are adding it for the machine!) bureaucracy, and we’re back to where we started.

1/

@enkiv2 @clacke Because of that cognitive exhaustion of doing “inhumane” work like looking up wtf the correct field in the api for aws elastic whatever, we don’t have time or energy to do actual human work like designing software that actually is built by and for humans.

That’s where I see llms as actually liberating me from that toil, because I can now program using my language, not the machines.

2/

@enkiv2 @clacke Programming with llms is however a skill that needs to be practiced, and currently there are no teachers and no real body of work. It’s not about telling the machine to write a program and hoping a program comes out, since that obviously doesn’t work. I prefer to think of them as “language transformers”. I can paste in a badly formatted html table of api documentation and ask for it to come back as a go package. Do I have to fix and verify? 3/

@enkiv2 @clacke Sure, but that’s a) something a machine can do reasonably well b) we have to do anyway.

I touch slightly on this idea of llms allowing us to actually do software engineering at a human level in https://media.ccc.de/v/gpn21-80-go-go-golems-computers-should-compute (the llm stuff starts about 2/3rds in)

4/4

@enkiv2 @clacke I think the term “code-monkey ecosystem” is reductive and denies the complexity of “code-monkey work and languages”. These things are baroque because they are the work of humans working in corporate environments that for better or worse operate at scales that require that amount of redundancy and legacy.

Here’s a concrete example of an llm giving me joy from a couple of days ago. I need to test an app with a lot of barcodes for different skus, actions and logins.

1/

And after much computation, x.ai’s compute farm, tasked to understand the universe, finally output its answer.

It was a single number: “42”

#llms #ai

@jasongorman That approach centers the developer, instead of expecting the machine to write and comprehend code. The LLM is there to allow the developer to be more mindful about the creation and consumption of their code, as a linter for documentation and specification as well as a quick prototype playground.

I hope we see more UX going in that direction instead of pretending that a chatbot can write something decent based on a single line prompt.

@jasongorman This might be confounding multiple things. We might spend so much time reading code because: the code is hard to read and because writing code is hard too.

I think that LLMs actually help for both cases, but they need us to rethink how we write and read code. LLMs help a lot to make code consistent stylistically (API patterns and documentation phrasing) and they can generate a lot of code that can be thrown away on the path to consistent abstractions.

Landed in Frankfurt! It’s been 4 years, I already felt culture shocked looking out the plane window.

🇩🇪🌭