Notices by Mⱺ℠ (nevali@troet.cafe)

the incident this relates to was a horrendous avoidable accident, but i did find the statement…

„Ab Tutzing ist alles im Arsch, also quasi wirklich richtig im Arsch.“

…linguistically fascinating

like, "quasi wirklich richtig im Arsch" is tremendous way of saying "it's legit fucked"

@stavvers i'm inferring from your tone that it is not in fact meningitis

i think it should be a requirement of being a web developer that you work exclusively via a 56k modem

28.8k if you're a senior webdev

i suspect the focus of efforts into LLM pseudomagic will actually hold back ML development generally

like there are genuinely useful applications for using ML to make human-computer interaction more fluid and accessible but nobody cares about that because everyone's all like "what if we bolt an LLM into our product as though it were a complete generalised intelligence as a service even though it's blatantly not" as if it were remotely the same thing

@stavvers oh god don’t get me started

my current fave is YouTube serving me „days out in Oxfordshire with Stagecoach“ when i live and work in the west of Scotland, which Google KNOWS

@stavvers Dante wrote poetry about it

@stavvers yeah, embracing the formal says *something*, doesn't it? my kneejerk would be that England's psyche is fundamentally that of Hyacinth Bucket, but i'm sure there are more complicated reasons than just toxic aspir…inity(???)

if you're learning German and get anxiety about the whole „du“ or „Sie“ thing… i saw a german meme yesterday about the stress of meeting your partner's parents for the first time and not knowing whether to address them formally or informally

which doesn't help you figure it out one bit but does at least demonstrate that the reality of the struggle is shared by native-speakers (give it a few more decades and it'll be relegated to only the most official of circumstances i suspect tbh)

what's the best open source (as in actual open source not just abandonware or reverse-engineered) interactive fiction out there? what would have blown the minds of those of us who grew up on 8-bit micros or spent days at uni in front of green and amber-screened serial terminals

presumably Linux distributions that care about licensing (e.g., Debian) just bundle whatever fairly random sets of sample fiction the package maintainers could dig up that say something explicit and compatible

ifdb doesn’t appear to have any means to let you search by predefined license

plenty of places will point me at open source IF *tools*, but open source IF *games* is trickier

like if i were to write a snazzy new OSS interactive fiction interpreter for some reason, like maybe i swapped out the Infocom-style text parsing for a large language model or something, what would be the game i’d bundle in the package to showcase it?

i always find it fascinating that when you have a large organisation, instead of lots of people being responsible for a small number of critical things, as you might expect, what in fact happens is that a small—and in fact insignificant relative to the size of the organisation—number of people end up being responsible for a monstrous number of things

it's not like you multiply up the workforce but keep doing the same scale of stuff—that might actually be sustainable—instead orgs seem to track "complexity of operations" on a log scale against workforce size and i am genuinely not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg

like i've been cooking up a proposal for a thing at work and it will get reviewed by literally dozens if not hundreds of people BUT part of it proposes making something the responsibility of the team it arguably (i am arguing) it should be managed by—so far so good, except i know that "make it the responsibility of that team" actually translates to it being added to one specific person's workload, so i am going to have to check with both them and their boss before i circulate anything

and objectively this is highly dysfunctional, and yet entirely normal

you know when there was the big furore about Apple and Google sidestepping governments to implement Covid tracking their way, did you ever stop to think how many actual Bluetooth experts Apple and Google have on staff and how many meetings (in a rising pandemic!!) ceding to all those govt requests would have amounted to? like we're talking 3-4 guys each tops, and dozens of govts saying "no! do it our way!!"; they HAD to JFDI

this is how you get Bitcoin PDFs in shipping OS images—Apple has zillions of employees but proportionally few engineers for all the things it's trying to do (judging by several indicators, waaaaay too few), or QA teams, or whatever

also i'm fairly sure that Apple, like EVERY other software-developing company except perhaps IBM, has fallen into the trap of believing that writing new software is the hard bit and maintaining existing software is just "overheads"

i tell junior engineers half-wryly that i spent 80% of my software development keyboard time *reading* other people's code and at most 20% writing code and they definitely always want to believe that i'm lying, joking, or not representative, but if anything i'm wildly overstating the lines of code written

that's why i do architecture now, after so many years reading other people's repeated mistakes, i have Strong Opinions and have a job in which this is literally in the description