a good post all over, and something that’d be a good thing if other people also introspected their use of these things in a similar manner. I get why they don’t, ofc (good lord so many tired people), but it’d be nice

now every time you use the Google Assistant, you get a popup that compels you to switch to Gemini.

this is one of the things that is so very mindbending for me. to me it is so very obvious that: because all of these things are a service, because the shape of service is subject to the whims of the organisation creating it, because that organisation will always feel the pressure of “market forces” (or in the more recent case, product desperation), these things will almost every[0] damn time result in some shit that an end-user cannot control. and yet that same person ends up reliant and expectant on these things, only for it to be ripped from their grasp, in a manner that may well amount to it being “murdered” in front of them

the state of where we’re at with “service-shape” as it pertains to sociological impact is just very not good atm :|

[0] - I hesitate to say “always” here, but it’s more or less what I mean

Me, 17 days ago

this really isn’t a hard guess

You want my take

probably not

anyone who gets hired for slop cleanup should try to squeeze as much cash out their clients as much as possible

“people should try to get paid well”? that’s your whole take? really? you thought this was worthwhile posting? not, maybe, spitballing ideas for how people should get paid well? some advice on how to negotiate with clients who are quite likely to be pennypinching types (evidenced by them trying to get as much as possible for free)? none of that, just more fluff? okay then

noted for advancements in cryptography, and “stayed impartial” (iirc not quite defending, but also not acknowledging nor distancing) when the jacob appelbaum shit hit wider knowledge

probably about all you need to know in a nutshell

the most recent shit before this when I recall seeing his name pop up was when he was causing slapfight around Kyber (ML-KEM) in the cryptography spaces, but I don’t have links at hand

ah yes, that great mark of certainty and product security, when you have to unleash pitbulls to patrol the completely not dangerous park that everyone can totally feel at ease in

(and of course I bet the damn play is a resource exhaustion attack on critics, isn’t it)

in what seems to be a very popular theme of “maybe we can just live off defense money” for tech outfits, oura is planning to manufacture in texas for simping to the DoD

I’m struggling to sneer it, it’s so fucking absurd

also from a number of devs who went borderline malicious compliance in “adopting tdd/testing” but didn’t really grok the assignment

best advice I’d have for you is continuing with python is fine but

1. find a good mentor
2. read a lot of sourcecode (both good and bad), reason through stuff, try to understand the decisionmaking behind things

on the good, you could read code by people like glyph, hynek, projects like twisted. they have years of experience, high mark of quality, care for their work, and also do a lot of teaching

on the bad, you could read something like the code to home assistant (and/or esphome), or bits of calibre code (and calibre plugin code). I will say that these are not bad intentionally, but bad out of “someone inexperienced trying their best”. it ends up creating a very particular kind of other thing.

you can, and should, learn from both

µPython is a bit of a special beast in that it’s juuuust close enough (and handy enough) that it can trip you up, because there’s some notable significant differences that if you spend all your effort in it first you might pick up bad habits that don’t apply elsewhere (off the top of my head, some of the applicable: scoping, some arg-handling semantics, stack stuff)

other bit of advice: remember, it’s all just code. especially when you deal with libraries, if some error is coming out of a thing your first instinct may be to try ask the internet but you could also dive into the library - follow the callpath, figure out what’s what, see if you can figure the problem out yourself. it’s often not too hard, and it gives you some good practice of code reading and reasoning

frankly, it’s really not a good idea to early-years kids assembly (double especially not fantasy assembly), if your goal is to encourage learning the field. this is why all the strong/popular pi-based educational distros and options focus on stuff like scratch, some light python (often paired with light pygame and turtle), and other low-entry-effort exploratory things like sonic-pi

many do come to explore programming topics in depth later (asm via zach games, other structural/dependency things via satisfactory/factorio, etc), and that’s fine too

there is of course a longer-term balance to be struck with (and structural problems coming from) people not understanding the layers below them (cf. current nightmare of tottering piles of javascript and continually worsening app performance everywhere despite having literal supercomputers in our pockets), but “learn asm” is bad starter advice for the same reason that “you should know how to write in c” has been part of why we’re in this fucking mess in the first place

a banger toot about our very good friends’ religion

“LLMs allow dead (or non-verbal) people to speak” - spiritualism/channelling

“what happens when the AI turns us all into paperclips?” - end times prophecy

“AI will be able to magically predict everything” - astrology/tarot cards

“…what if you’re wrong? The AI will punish you for lacking faith in Bayesian stats” - Pascal’s wager

“It’ll fix climate change!” - stewardship theology

Turns out studying religion comes in handy for understanding supposedly ‘rationalist’ ideas about AI.

one that I suspect will surprise none of us

depressing how Cheetoh & Co. continue to wrecking ball the shit out of everything

(wonder how long it is before the US degrades far enough that other countries start ratcheting up border/traveller defenses, compared to the current ~free rein they have (which, y’know, was owed to years of hard and soft power that the orange man is also rapidly pissing away))

it has to be human tampering.

and of course we all have root on the prompt, where - at will - we can just instantly impose all manner of will on the corporate vendor chatbot. y’know, the chatbot operating in a service structured as much as possible to try to do what the corporate vendor wants to desperately maintain

(it continues to astound me that anyone takes yud seriously, at all, ever)

don’t think I’d seen that before but I shall earmark it for a weekend perusal :)

Honestly it’s probably most things we post

sidenote

you have so many of these! it’s amazing! are you going to publish soon? it seems like it might need a whole guide of its own!

moderately barbed jesting aside, a serious question: have you spoken with any programmers/artists/researchers/… ? so many of your comments have “part of me feels” parts hitting pop-concern-direction things and, like, I get it, but. have you spoken with any of them? what were those conversations like? what did you take away from them? what stuck with you that you want to share?

maybe that means something like this should be a linkblog/{atom,rss,…} feedsite on its ace?

Being paid 90s tv ad money has to suck donkey nads :<

look if you give them one bit of satisfaction imagine how much extra they’ll go

“give an inch, they take a mile”, etc etc

I’m curious, do you get paid for being a multiprotocol rss repeater?

in today’s world? too many possible answers to that question

read to the tune of, naturally