Tootfinder

The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang
Chiang is a great author, and I enjoyed everything I read but him so far. I started the mentioned short story but him, and all felt comfortable and interesting, and I thought already like I knew where this was going, and then, approximately just after the middle of the story, there are suddenly two sentences that shredder and shock me and I have to stop reading and process.
I really want to continue reading, but physically c…

I'm sorry, was it always that obvious a technology was fake and a bubble? If so, I seriously condemn all past generations for falling for this voodoo, crypto, nft, fusion reactor, new element nonsense.
https://…

Palantir’s CTO claims AI researchers are smoking to prove they believe AI will cure cancer, and he says it’s a sign of tech-fueled ‘mass psychosis’
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar said some researchers are smoking to signal to other researchers “how much they believe in AI.”

Okay, now this is getting interesting... I admit I haven't tried Linux on my T490s in quite a while, after my earlier attempts to get the built-in 5G modem to work failed.
Following yesterday’s controversy over why, in my attempt to boycott U.S. products and services, I’d choose Microsoft over Fedora of all things (because, as I said, I need Windows for work—just like any other common operating system), I installed a different SSD today just for fun and put the latest beta of Fedo…

RE: https://phpc.social/@afilina/117482632536321266
Imagine, for a moment, that someone built a community playground out of salvaged wood. It would be pretty cool. Kids come and play, but then kids start getting hurt. The people who built it don't understand safety. Boards rot and aren't replaced.
More people come in, they help, and it's slightly better. But the whole thing was built on an old garbage heap. The sandbox is full of rusty nails and broken glass. Kids get cut when they dig.
People criticize it, and other people get mad because it's a community project. They put in a lot of effort. No one else did it. It was filling a need, a real need, and people were just criticizing it.
Other playgrounds are built, by other communities. They're actually safe. People are careful. They move more slowly. But everyone knows where the big playground is. It's easy to get to. Everything wants to just fix the playground. It's where everyone meets already. There are so many friends. It's not just the physical space, it's the social space.
I understand the drive to defend open source, any open source, as such. There's so much invested. There are so many relationships. There are so many good memories. So many people learned PHP as their first language and have never learned anything else. It felt empowering to just jump in and build something. Feelings will always be more powerful than logic, regardless of what anyone says.
The sunk cost fallacy is real, and so much more real when the investment has been so great. But not all projects are equal. The amount of effort it takes to keep a project going is not equal to quality of the output. Some projects just take more effort to keep going than others. Some projects take more effort than they're worth.
At some point, I think the effort of keeping up with the bugs will be greater than we can sustain. We will simply have to abandon PHP as a language (like so many already have) and move on. It will be hard. Some people won't move on. They will keep going until they break and give up on the entire dream of open source, of building a better world together. That will be a huge loss for us all.
I wonder what we can do to ease that transition, to support those who are experiencing such great grief and loss. What would a death doula look like for a programming language? For a community built around a programming language? How do you help someone let something go when it has become part of a person's identity?
I think we need to answer these questions, sooner or later.

People who don't mind driverless cars will find all sorts out reason to brush off this kind of news:
https://flipboard.social/@TechDesk/117135628617386440
It was moving slowly already to be safe, it did brake before the collision, the injuries were minimal, the child is at fault, etc.
In the end, a lot of people will shrug and say: human drivers also make mistakes like this, so what's the big deal if a robot does? Maybe the robot even has a better safety record on average than humans. You can't ask for perfection!
Here are three related reasons why you shouldn't buy these arguments:
1. The crash statistics for the "average human driver" include (and are probably significantly driven by) impaired human drivers, like drunk drivers or people on their phones. When driverless car companies put "as good as the average human driver" as the goal, they're saying that they're okay with their systems being just as bad as drunk or distracted drivers sometimes. That's not the right goal at all! We should demand that driving robots perform at least as well as non-distracted human drivers, which is significantly *better* than the average human driver when it comes to things like crashes.
2. Mistakes made by a robotic system are fundamentally different in nature from mistakes made by humans, because the robot mistakes ate *systematic* across all robots in similar-enough situations. If a human looking at their phone slows down too late and hits a child, that's tragic, but it doesn't mean that *every* human driver put into the same situation would make the same mistake. In fact, many of them probably wouldn't be looking at their phone and thus would avoid the accident, *even given the exact same situation in which to react.* In contrast, *every Waymo taxi running the same software* will make exactly the same mistake in that situation. In other words, this kind of event will definitely repeat whenever a similar-enough situation arises around a Waymo taxi. That's why news like this should be scary, even though the accident was a minor one.
3. Some might claim that it's good that a software upgrade could potentially fix the issue that caused this accident. It's sort of true that there's an upside there (although any behavior updates can cause errors in other situations). But the question we should be asking is: why wasn't this already fixed before the vehicle was approved for testing on real roads with real children and people in harm's way? Why wasn't there a stimulation scenario for this exact kind of situation, so that the system already knew what to do? Why should it take a child getting injured for a fix to be developed v(if one in fact will be)? In theory, of course, it's possible that this was a truly exceptional situation where even an alert human couldn't have done better. I'm sure what's what the company is telling the investigators. It's also possible that the designers are following the Silicon Valley motto of "move fast and break things", which reaches an entirely new level of frightfulness when the thing that's moving fast is a car and the thing being broken is a child. "I'll just deploy it now and as test cases when I see what really breaks in production" is an attitude I've been guilty of, but then I make videogames, not deadly robots.

Found a site that always goes the extra mile for it's niche subject, to the point I genuinely feel bad tryna explore rather than be a sincere initiate https://enochian.net/

Folk who've been following me for a long time will remember that last autumn I was posting pictures of doing the joinery for a new workshop. And then I went mad, and got ill, and for most of this year there's been no progress.
But my friend Lucy has been here for a week, and between the two of us the frame is now erected. Now I need to sort the timber stack (which hasn't been improving while I've been ill), erect a roof, and build some walls. But the bit I couldn't …

I couldn't decide what to do today and where to go. I got up too late for a longer hike due to the heat. In the end I just got on my bike and followed the road and pushed myself for some training effect.
It was a really enjoyable ride except for the last 10km where the heat got really annoying.
Is this a #silentsunday contribution? I think so... No talking, less thinking, j…

How Trump and Musk made the Nepal disaster worse, by glaciologist dr Heïdi Sevestre:
"What about early warning systems?"
SERVIR Hindu Kush Himalaya, a joint initiative by NASA, USAID and ICIMOD monitoring, had mapped landslide and flood hazard in these valleys since 2010.
The Trump administration’s aid freeze cut it in January 2025."
https…

I spent the entire summer worrying about glaciers collapsing. With the crazy temperature records everywhere I knewit was only a question of time. On August 26th, all these fears came true. At… | Dr. Heïdi Sevestre | 62 comments
I spent the entire summer worrying about glaciers collapsing. With the crazy temperature records everywhere I knewit was only a question of time. On August 26th, all these fears came true. At 8:37AM, Nepal time, 100 to 200 million cubic metres of rock and ice detached from the north flank of Langtang Lirung at 5200m high, the equivalent of 90 to 175 Wembley stadiums, on Mohd. Farooq Azam's estimate at ICIMOD. Dan Shugar in Calgary and Jakob Steiner in Graz find from the satellite imagery that…

I want to throw companies who force login via emailed timed codes over a bridge. If they only have a username/e-mail field without a password field ready right away, I want to light them on fire. If they offer the option to add TOTP 2FA but still do the previous two, I want to crush them in one of those things for compacting trash. Kickstarter would be a little burning cube falling from a bridge, incidentally.