-dsr- (hypoparenthetically)

@feoh

I may have not expressed myself properly.

People have problems understanding variables. That's the first cut in CS100 courses.

People have problems understanding pointers. They end up needing to understand them when they get sufficiently advanced; there's a lot that can be done in […]

@feoh

If you have a syntax good enough to convey your intent to a computer, you have a programming language.

As far as I know, the two big barriers to learning to code (after willingness, time and opportunity, of course) are the concept of variables and the concept of pointers. There are […]

Northern lights

#aurora

Meta, Meta, Meta. So Meta. This Reuters report is 🔥

"Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show"

"Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates […]

The most consistently successful uses of LLMs that I'm seeing other than spicy autocomplete comes from places which have given the LLMs access to their databases with more permissions than they give to human users.

Yeah: they're solving their administrative/permissioning/query-builder issues by […]

@fatsam

Upton Sinclair:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

I knocked a tissue box off the table, and it landed on our grumpy elder cat.

He was unpurrturbed.

@feoh

Hang it on your wall. Then change it around every couple of months .

There are two kinds of reliability.

(Yeah, there may be more, but work with me for a moment.)

In the first kind, you set up a machine to do a job. It does it over and over again, exactly the same way. As long as you feed it the expected inputs, it gives you the expected outputs. Iron becomes […]

How many karma points to a util?

@emptywheel.bsky.social

When it's a tax, they don't want to pay it.

When it's a donation, they can select what it's used for, increase or decrease it according to whether they have been pleased, and otherwise use it as a means of control.

a marmalade and cream cat circled up on a black leather stool

Archimedes tries out cosplay as a Firefox.

#caturday a little early

Pearls Before Swine, a cartoon by Stephen Pastis. The scene is a reception desk in Hell, marked Satan's Helper. A human is talking to a rat-demon in three panels: 1. Rat: HI, Welcome to the underworld. Human: Me? What did I do to deserve this? 2. Rat: You're the guy who made the software updates for my phone which I didn't ask for, didn't want, and always made my @#$@#$@ phone harder to use. 3. [The rat is alone at the desk.] Rat: I love my job.

@futurebird Wot about carcinization, though?

running for president in '28, my entire campaign is just two posters, one picturing prominent members of the current administration beneath the banner headline "PRISON", and another of all the leading techbros beneath the banner headline 'WE WILL TAKE ALL THEIR MONEY'

If you describe a career as "meteoric", do you really mean it starts out in space and plummets to the ground while burning up in the atmosphere?

Screenshot of a website's cookie permission pop up. It says "we value your privacy" followed by 3 buttons to click on: "summary", "purposes" and the last one, circled in red by me: "1664 partners".

lol no you don't #privacy #cookies

Today I discovered:

I rarely think of "this software is written in this language with this toolkit" as a positive factor, only a neutral or negative factor.

#TIL #tech #neepery

#AI #crash

Assuming that the crash starts before the nominal end of the Trump administration, how will they react?

My instant assessment is that nobody in that administration has the ability or desire to soft-land the economy. When the ship is undeniably sinking, the rats will flee.

Today's ice cream: chocolate Irish whiskey.

My first critical taster said "professional level" so I am squeeing.

@Virginicus

I like Exodus 8:4

And the frogs shall come up both on thee, and upon thy people, and upon all thy servants.

.

Zimmerman, if an American jumps out of an airplane, you can't sell him a parachute until after he hits the ground. I don't even flap about it anymore. Americans are manic freaks who slack off suicidally between crises and then work their elbows to a bone to meet a crisis after it has bashed them […]

WOOT! The new 8G RAM, 500GB SSD and battery for my 2009 17" Macbook Pro have arrived! And I even have a super kind coworker who's offered to do the installation for me when we're in the office next week.

Now, the big decision, do I try for another assault on #nix DOOM mountain or do I embrace […]

"Bro, we want you to pay us and install our rootkit and spyware to protect you from the bad people out there who want to install rootkits and spyware!"

The evidence for the historicity of the “Founding Fathers” in the state religion of ancient USia is poor at best. The surviving fragments of the declaration of independence and constitution show evidence of heavy redaction over the generations following the fall of the First Wmpire. The […]

still maintain that saying "idk, I heard that's all going away" to crypto/AI fanatic techbros is the _funniest_ thing you can do.

@mark

Every solution in computers can either add a layer of abstraction or remove one, and can either simplify the abstraction by adding constraints, or complexify the abstraction by recombining the underlying layer.

Most ORMs start by doing the first and later end up doing the second.

It's […]

Four bar graphs showing, respectively, the most likely causes of death for Americans (heart disease, cancer, accidents, stroke, respiratory diseases, diabetes...) compared to the news coverage of each of these for 3 very large media outlets (NY Times, Washington Post, Fox News) -- all of whom cover homicide, terrorism, drug abuse and suicide as the primary news)

End of Story? Sorry. Had to get thinky this week.

Sorry about the nazibar link.

https://aliensideboob.substack.com/p/end-of-story

The *second* alien race we met told us it was VERY irregular for the Tang to grant a race access to the undernet and then later revoke it. They asked us what we did. We sent them RFC129301 (Encapsulation of IPv4 datagrams within the state vector of subspace network gauge solitons). We never […]