Notices by Chris [list of emoji] (suetanvil@freeradical.zone)

@tek @bitartbot @benoitmandelbot

Unfortunately, certain people's actions has made it ineligible for my "only silly cryptocurrencies" rule.

@tek @bitartbot @benoitmandelbot

Thanks for understanding.

It was small, unmarked, circulated bills, right?

My employer is currently looking for a senior dev doing really complex stuff in and on C++ code. This is in Ottawa (Canada) and not remote.

The product is a niche dev tool. It's not a compiler, but it's that kind of problem space.

If you're interested, please DM me and I'll provide more details. I'm being vague because I don't want to link my work and personal online presences.

FWIW, I genuinely like my co-workers and enjoy this kind of work.

Boosts are okay.

@tek

Wasn't this also the origin of Jenkins? (I.e. the owners of Hudson failed to understand the implications of the GPL.)

The reason Microsoft is so heavily invested in LLMs (i.e. "AI") is that they are trying to bring about a world where computing is by and large something that you rent from them instead of doing yourself at home. Hence the whole push to clown-based services.

LLMs are great for that because in practice, nobody can DIY it; the hardware requirements are just too high. It will only ever be a billable service.

@evan

Also: Not to be confused with anti-BSD laws.

@craigmaloney

❤🐢

@hacks4pancakes

I will point out that Heinlein *did* intend Starship Troopers to be pro-military and *did* write essays in favour of stuff like the fight-bugs-to-vote thing.

Heinlein was a bad influence on young me. Fortunately, I got better.

@Tipa @pluralistic

My theory: LLMs, like cloud services, are (widely believed to be) things that can't be done on inexpensive desktop computers and so will make us dependent on large service provider. Thus, Microsoft et. al. will be able to forevermore charge us rent.

@craigmaloney

Tumblr is currently looking to hire entire Twitter teams, FWIW.

@technomancy @SpindleyQ

Oh, um, never mind then. I find the concepts cool in principal but IRL, mature and robust will always beat new and cool so I stick with apt-based distros.

So my opinion on this is *really* shallow.

@SpindleyQ @technomancy

I'm pretty much Team Guix right now because they at least use a language that also gets used for other things.

(The one time I used Nix, it was to solve a specific work problem. It went okay because there were a couple of plain-English posts that addressed the extremely rare and uncommon task I was trying to accomplish (install a specific version of a tool) but had I not found them, it would have been faster to just build it by hand.)

@evan

I lol'd at the third choice.

@BethanyBlack

In Canada, we have butter *tarts*. They are extremely different things. ("Butter" is a euphemism for sugar, AFAICT.)

@mcc

I hate to be That Guy, but every time I've bought a laptop, I've managed to get it to sufficient usefulness within a couple of weeks of tinkering. Which is a pain but I typically then get 3-5 years of (mostly) trouble-free operation out of it, so it seems like a worthwhile deal.

That being said, NVIDIA GPUs are a huge headache and my Linux experience is a lot better with AMD or Intel. Since I don't do GPU intensive stuff, YMMV.

@jerry

"Say you're new to the Internet without saying you're new to the Internet."

(Facebook doesn't really qualify as Internet.)

@LilahTovMoon

Ah, no, that's a common misunderstanding. BSD actually stands for Berkeley Standard (Linux) Distribution.

Also, the "Free" is for "free as in free speech", as Stallman put it.

@thomasfuchs

So a thing that I've realized from thinking about the Yegge essay is that the way I use Stack Overflow is fundamentally different from what "AI" does for me.

I don't look to SO for *answers*. I look for strategies ("use this API/algorithm"), pointers to existing documentation, and examples of things I've already read the docs for and am having trouble seeing idiomatic uses of.

@thomasfuchs

What I really want from "AI" (or just AI) is something that will find the website(s) containing the information I'm looking for, not just a contextless "answer" that may or may not be correct.

Someone should really try making a good search engine.

@thomasfuchs

- Lisp Machines (*sigh*)
- Prolog and other 4GLs (*sigh*)
- Expert systems