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@tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2025-08-04 15:49:00

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

@timbray@cosocial.ca
2025-07-04 23:22:03

O'Reilly: GenAI has adopted a colonialist business model.
linkedin.com/posts/timo3_proud

@penguin42@mastodon.org.uk
2025-06-05 17:32:46

My JS Krups is resisting netbooting. I see it doing a DHCP discover, and I see Kea responding with an offer, but then it just sends another Discover. Hmph. I can get to the serial console and doing boot net from there doesn't help; none of the keyboard shortcuts for network diag etc seem to work (except the one that displays the help for it...). So I took the flash SIM out and now it boots to Net rather than flash by default; alas with the same DHCP behaviour. Time to try isc-dhcp.…

A serial console photo, showing a Javastation openbootprom 'ok' prompt and help and 'show-devs' output.  It's a boring white on black text.
The mainboard of a Javastation Krups, to the left are various connectors, just above middle is a speaker and below that the Microsparc,  to the right are two RAM dimms and a flash SIMM.
A horribly hacky serial setup; between two keyboards sits a serial breakout box, various wires and crock clip leads.  It's working by good luck rather than physics, The lights for RX/TX are green and the next LED is red.
@karlauerbach@sfba.social
2025-06-05 17:36:42

Well, this seems stupid - New Jersey is forcing the removal of many working NACS charging centers and replacing them with CCS charging.
That's already stupid. But it moves from stupid to destructive in that it NJ wants to expand the moribund CCS charge system while automobile makers are shifting away from CCS to NACS.
Perhaps we ought to remember that New Jersey is a major oil refining/gasoline producing state and thus there are political forces in NJ who abhor EVs.

@scott@carfree.city
2025-07-04 22:28:13

In the US, most working-class people drive. It does not follow that it is pro–working class to double down on car dependency, a debt trap and tool of surveillance and control. jalopnik.com/1902012/1000-per-

@Techmeme@techhub.social
2025-06-04 14:31:02

The IRS open sourced most of its Direct File tax software on GitHub last week, fulfilling a legal requirement under the SHARE IT Act, despite Intuit pressure (Jason Koebler/404 Media)
404media.co/directfile-open-so

@n8foo@macaw.social
2025-05-06 05:30:40

I heard you like #synthesizers so I got you this oh WHOAH wait a minute, that's a comma not a period never mind, you can buy that one yourself.
ebay.com/itm/135674982468

@edintone@mastodon.green
2025-06-05 06:56:10

Human cost of working on the railways revealed in database nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/

@aral@mastodon.ar.al
2025-08-05 09:33:16

According to capitalists:
✅ Working for a company like Google or Microsoft that is complicit in genocide.
❌ Displaying images of the genocide.
Maybe if the consequences of your work are considered “Not Safe For Work”, you shouldn’t be doing that work in the first place.*
But, no, it’s just much easier to look away, isn’t it? After all, you’re just following orders, right?
* Update: because I just *know* that someone will pipe in maliciously with “oh, so you mean…

@memeorandum@universeodon.com
2025-07-04 16:25:59

It's Official: The GOP Is Not A Working-Class Party (Paul Blumenthal/HuffPost)
huffpost.com/entry/donald-trum
memeorandum.com/250704/p32#a25

@tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2025-08-04 15:49:39

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
2/2
To address the bigger question I started with ("should we teach AI-"assisted" coding?"), my answer is: "No, except enough to show students directly what its pitfalls are." We have little enough time as it is to cover the core knowledge that they'll need, which has become more urgent now that they're going to be expected to clean up AI bugs and they'll have less time to develop an understanding of the problems they're supposed to be solving. The skill of prompt engineering & other skills of working with AI are relatively easy to pick up on your own, given a decent not-even-mathematical understanding of how a neutral network works, which is something we should be giving to all students, not just our majors.
Reasonable learning objectives for CS majors might include explaining what types of bugs an AI "assistant" is most likely to introduce, explaining the difference between software engineering and writing code, explaining why using an AI "assistant" is likely to violate open-source licenses, listing at lest three independent ethical objections to contemporary LLMs and explaining the evidence for/reasoning behind them, explaining why we should expect AI "assistants" to be better at generating code from scratch than at fixing bugs in existing code (and why they'll confidently "claim" to have fixed problems they haven't), and even fixing bugs in AI generated code (without AI "assistance").
If we lived in a world where the underlying environmental, labor, and data commons issues with AI weren't as bad, or if we could find and use systems that effectively mitigate these issues (there's lots of piecemeal progress on several of these) then we should probably start teaching an elective on coding with an assistant to students who have mastered programming basics, but such a class should probably spend a good chunk of time on non-assisted debugging.
#AI #LLMs #VibeCoding

@frankel@mastodon.top
2025-08-02 08:11:03

Working with the new #Idempotency Keys #RFC
httptoolkit.com/blog/idempoten

"I got rid of – just one I got rid of the other night, you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn’t come out. They have a restrictor. You can’t – in areas where you have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn’t uh, the shower doesn’t, you think it’s not working. It is working. The water’s dripping out and that’s no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic] – I like that hair nice and wet…

@tschundler@leds.social
2025-07-06 06:21:19

Got self-written drivers for the GP1294AI VFD display working.
There's an existing U8gr driver. I now have it working with Adafruit_GFX (with a GFXCanvas1 buffer) and with #Rust embedded_graphics via CCanvas.
Unfortunately neither framework seems to support paged or tiled drawing, and CCanvas buffer is 8x the size of a raw bitmap buffer. (But this is probably going to be on an esp32, s…

vacuum florescent display showing "hello world test" connected to an SPIDriver
@grumpybozo@toad.social
2025-06-03 17:12:01

There’s exactly 1 narrow way that it’s true. Before widespread #WFH, attackers often had an insurmountable barrier: no way into the business network from the Internet. At the last gig (2008) where I had to visit a “workplace” regularly, inbound remote access was officially non-existent & outbound Internet access all went through restrictive web proxies.

@hikingdude@mastodon.social
2025-06-03 17:57:03

Now this is uncool: Today morning it rained slightly and I only did a walk instead of a cycling loop.
During the day it was amazingly great weather.
Now as I finished working I see a thunderstorm outside ... this doesn't feel fair

@Mediagazer@mstdn.social
2025-07-04 05:35:51

Crunchyroll blames a third-party vendor for AI-generated subtitles, with errors and references to ChatGPT, and says it is working to rectify the error (Igor Bonifacic/Engadget)
engadget.com/entertainment/str

@arXiv_mathOC_bot@mastoxiv.page
2025-07-04 09:58:01

HPR-QP: A dual Halpern Peaceman-Rachford method for solving large-scale convex composite quadratic programming
Kaihuang Chen, Defeng Sun, Yancheng Yuan, Guojun Zhang, Xinyuan Zhao
arxiv.org/abs/2507.02470

@stefan@gardenstate.social
2025-07-31 02:17:24

Bend it like Beckham is one of my all time favorite movies. I would watch a sequel in a heartbeat.
The original cast knows it in the works. keira says there should be a sequel in 2018. The OG cast all know it's in the works.
Emma Hayes is somehow involved??

@markhburton@mstdn.social
2025-06-28 19:19:00

Minister finally admits that working-age benefits spending is stable, despite months of ‘spiralling’ claims
and suggested that the government needed to cut spending on PIP, even though disabled people were only claiming it because they were struggling due to the cost-of-living crisis.
– Disability News Service

@rasterweb@mastodon.social
2025-08-01 02:09:41

My daughter told me she is getting a third job. (Yes, she two right now!) And then mentioned (jokingly) that she is a DEI hire.
It's at a climbing gym, where her partner has been working for a few years, and she hang out there (works out, climbs) all the time.
I said, "It's all duded there, right?" and she confirmed it's almost all male employees...
1/2

@aardrian@toot.cafe
2025-05-30 16:29:49

WordPress may be run by… that guy, but it still has a massive user base. They all need better accessibility documentation.
@… wants to improve it, but needs sponsors:

@emd@cosocial.ca
2025-08-04 00:33:27

@… my sync is only working if I close (like swipe it away) Ivory then re-open. I’ve tried resetting cache, anything else I can try?

@pre@boing.world
2025-05-27 19:06:58
Content warning: re: Doctor Who - Wish World
:tardis:

A wish granting god baby, granting Conrad's wishes in service of the Rani, turns London into a misogynist utopia and The Doctor into a good husband and insurance worker.
Hard to say why misogynists are so keen on the American 50s. Perhaps because it was before blacks had the vote and women could do banking.
And if anyone doubts this ridiculous tale, their table stops working and their family might call the doubt police, so they soon learn not to. All very oppressive and subversive.
Ruby manages to doubt anyway. And all the disabled people who simply never enter into Conrad's mind. Nice touch that. Great scene in the tent city filled with the dispossessed. They don't seem to have actually done anything so far but maybe they'll get more useful in part two.
Conrad is on TV telling a story about a man named Doctor Who.
Giant dinosaur skeletons walk the city, stepping over sky scrapers, and a bone palace towers above the city. Because I guess Conrad wishes for it to be so in order to give the Rani somewhere to live.
The palace is beautiful and Gothic.
But doubt is seeping in. Rogue is back, on the TV in hell, telling the Doctor that tables don't work like that. So he investigates. Gets himself reported to the doubt police who take him and Belinda to the bone palace.
The Rani's split from Miss Flood gives the pair of them a good chemistry. Queen and her maid of honour. Seems like Mrs Flood is likely to be the Rani's downfall. She doesn't like being told to make a sandwich.
A lot of exposition going on, but they at least put a hat on it: "Isn't just exposition, I need you to doubt"
So that's the reason for the strange wishes: To make the doctor have doubts so severe that the reality collapses, and Rani can rescue Omega. Omega is the dude in a Mask from the first 3 doctors episode, who gave the timelords time travel and got trapped in the underworld in the process. Timelords forgot him and never mounted a rescue, but presumably Rani is now hoping he'll bring back Galifrey.
And with London collapsing into the underworld and the doctor falling from the sky, we get the episode break and have to wait until next week.
That's not a cliff hanger, that an already-falling-from-the-cliff hanger.
Poppy really is his daughter he's shouting as he falls. And you know what that means?
🤨🤔
Back in Space Babies, the worst episode of the Nchuti seasons, that space baby asked if he was her parents and he said he wished that he was their parents.
That wish has been granted somehow?
Is this space baby Susan's mother? They have very different skin tones, but that doesn't matter much in a regenerating species.
Never have found out much about The Doctor's child. When he traveled with his granddaughter everyone assumed he'd met his own kid, the grandchild's parent.
But that doesn't have to be true for a time traveler. Maybe he met the granddaughter before he met his own kid, and maybe his own kid was just wished into his family line 60 years later (or billions of years in his timeline I guess).
Pretty fun episode but not sure it makes much sense. Why doesn't the Rani just wish for Omega to be back instead of all this doubt and underworld bollocks?
Last one next week. Super long episode. Hope it's all cleared up. Good chance we'll meet Susan again I think. And maybe see Omega's mask once more.
:tardis: :tardis: :tardis: :tardis: :tardis:

@AimeeMaroux@mastodon.social
2025-05-30 14:26:19
Content warning: Roman relief, visible genitals having sex

I missed #PhallusThursday yesterday working on my Norse threesome story, so to make up for it here is a fanny together with a phallus for #FannyFriday.
Is he watching her or his own cock?
@…

Relief of a woman riding an erect phallus. The man is lying down, propped up on one elbow, the other arm draped over his head. She is crouching, possibly about to get off or just in the act of going up and down. She is facing away from him while he looks at her vulva or at his own phallus. Both are naked.
@jamesthebard@social.linux.pizza
2025-05-31 18:42:24

Hrmm, seems like my HOTAS setup doesn't work with MSFS 2024 under Linux which is very annoying. Not quite sure _why_ it's not working other than as far as MSFS is concerned it does not exist. `usbreset` shows it and I can see outputs from the device, but for this specific game it's a no-go at the moment. Very annoying.
#linux

@hynek@mastodon.social
2025-08-01 12:23:17

is it just me, or did keyboard controls for video players stop working on macOS Safari a while ago? pressing k or space to pause works, but pressing again just jumps forward one frame or something instead of resuming. disabling all content blockers doesn't help & having the same problem on Nebula oO
EDIT: it was just me! I had the StopTheMadness For Web Apps extension active!

@joergi@chaos.social
2025-07-02 09:01:58

hey pixelfed users and pixelfed admins - is the "retoot" / "repost" function working for you?
For me it seems not, it doesn't matter which app I'm using or if I'm using the web interface.
I found this closed bug...
added my comment.

@bici@mastodon.social
2025-06-03 02:34:59

P O S I T A N O B Y
J O H N S T E I N B E C K
"I first heard of Positano from Alberto Moravia. It was very hot in Rome. He said, “Why don’t you go down to Positano on the Amalfi Coast? It is one of the fine places of Italy”. Later John McKnight of United States Information Service told me the same thing. He had spent a year there working on a book. Half a dozen people echoed this. Positano kind of moved in on us and we found ourselves driving down to Naples on our way."…

We spoke to several people on the House GOP whip team Tuesday night who were expressing alarm about what they’re seeing on their whip cards.
These sources said that they were racking up no’s from lawmakers who they didn’t expect would be opposed to the bill.
Again, it is likely the bill passes in the next 24 hours
but as we learned with the Trump’s failed effort to repeal the ACA in 2017 nothing is pre-ordained in this business,
and we just have to keep working as ha…

@axbom@axbom.me
2025-06-28 05:59:03

When I bring up how children work in artisanal mines in DR Congo and Madagascar to harvest the minerals the rich world needs for its tech, there is one type of comment that comes up more than others:

"Yes, but the working conditions of the people making high street clothes is also awful. It's so hard to do the right thing these days."

I truly have a hard time understanding what this comment is really getting at it. It feels like it's trying to tone down the …

@nobodyinperson@fosstodon.org
2025-06-28 23:48:27

Today I've been fighting again with this absolutely stupid :nixos: #NixOS bug that dates back nearly 20 years now, which prevents you from naming an executable 'log'. Yes, it is NOT possible on NixOS. 🤦 🤦 🤦 And working around it is beyond frustrating. Fixing it requires a mass rebuild, so it's not that simple. 😩 😂 It's so terrible but also hilarious...
Issue:

@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems
2025-07-22 10:21:15

Time for another "review". This one's hard. While the book was quite interesting, it required me to be quite open-minded. Still, I think it's worth mentioning:
Robert Wright — Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
The book basically focused on a thesis that both biological evolution and cultural evolution are a thing, they are directional and this directionality can be explained together using game theory — as eventually leading to more non-zero sum games.
It consists of three chapters. The first one is is focused on the history of civilization. It features many examples from different parts of the world, which makes it quite interesting. The author argues that the culture inevitably is evolving as information processing techniques improve — from writing to the Internet.
The second chapter is focused on biological evolution. Now, the argument is that it's not quite random, but actually directed towards greater complexity — eventually leading to the development of highly intelligent species, and a civilization.
The third chapter is quite speculative and metaphysical, and I'm just going to skip it.
The book is full of optimism. Capitalism creates freedom — because people are more productive when they're working for their own gain, so the free market eliminates slavery. Globalisation creates networks of interdependence that make wars uneconomic. Increased contacts between different cultures makes people more tolerant. And eventually, the humanity may be able to unite facing a common "external" enemy — the climate change.
What can I say? The examples are quite interesting, the whole theory seems self-consistent. Still, I repeatedly looked at the publication date (it's 1999), and wondered if author would write the same thing today (yes, I know I can search for his current opinions).
#books #bookstodon @…

@trezzer@social.linux.pizza
2025-06-25 23:34:45

It is wild that Nest Hub, which is supposed to be able to work as an alarm clock, is completely impossible to interact with if Internet stops working. Even wilder: If an alarm is set and it goes off while there is no Internet, there is NO WAY TO TURN IT OFF. You literally have to unplug the bugger to get it to stop. Incredibly incompetent design from Google.

@arXiv_mathGT_bot@mastoxiv.page
2025-06-03 07:30:58

The flip map and involutions on Khovanov homology
Daren Chen, Hongjian Yang
arxiv.org/abs/2506.00824 arxiv.org/pdf/25…

@padraig@mastodon.ie
2025-07-01 13:49:46

I hate it when I spill my drink on the keyboard. 2 seconds for the accident to happen. 25 minutes cleaning the damn thing. Thankfully, everything is working as it should be, so business as normal.

@tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2025-07-03 15:21:37

#ScribesAndMakers for July 3: When (and if) you procrastinate, what do you do? If you don't, what do you do to avoid it?
I'll swap right out of programming to read a book, play a video game, or watch some anime. Often got things open in other windows so it's as simple as alt-tab.
I've noticed recently I tend to do this more often when I have a hard problem to solve that I'm not 100% sure about. I definitely have cycles of better & worse motivation and I've gotten to a place where I'm pretty relaxed about it instead of feeling guilty. I work how I work, and that includes cycles of rest, and that's enough (at least, for me it has been so far, and I'm in a comfortable career, married with 2 kids).
Some projects ultimately lose steam and get abandoned, and I've learned to accept that too. I learn a lot and grow from each project, so nothing is a true waste of time, and there remains plenty of future ahead of me to achieve cool things.
The procrastination does sometimes impact my wife & kids, and that's something I do sometimes feel bad about, but I think I keep that in check well enough, and for things my wife worries about, I usually don't procrastinate those too much (used to be worse about this).
Right now I'm procrastinating a big work project by working on a hobby project instead. The work project probably won't get done by the start of the semester as a result. But as I remind myself, my work doesn't actually pay me to work during the summer, and things will be okay without the work project being finished until later.
When I want to force myself into a more productive cycle, talking to people about project details sometimes helps, as does finding some new tech I can learn about by shoehorning it into a project. Have been thinking about talking to a rubber duck, but haven't motivated myself to try that yet, and I'm not really in doldrums right now.

@blakes7bot@mas.torpidity.net
2025-08-02 12:11:13

Series D, Episode 11 - Orbit
VILA: This had better work.
AVON: Have you cleared the governors?
VILA: I think so. Try it now.
AVON: Switching to manual. Maximum power on all drives.
[Biodome]
PINDER: Egrorian.
blake.torpidity.net/m/411/397 B7B3

Claude 3.7 describes the image as: "This image shows a scene set in what appears to be a retro-futuristic control room or computer center. Two people are working with vintage electronic equipment. In the foreground, someone in a light-colored uniform is handling what looks like a circuit board or control panel. In the background, another person can be seen near what appears to be old computer banks or data storage systems.

The setting has the distinctive aesthetic of 1970s/80s science fiction …
@Gord1i@fosstodon.org
2025-07-01 19:11:52

It's a small thing, the syntactic sugar of using `/` to concatenate paths and strings is reason enough to use pathlib. And then you find out about all the built in methods...
mastodon.social/@treyhunner/11

@gray17@mastodon.social
2025-05-29 07:28:38

laptop was emitting electronics-in-distress pheromones, and it stopped working without AC power. it's old enough that I felt ok about getting a new one.
new laptop is fine, but somehow I lost my Blue Prince cloud save, and of course it isn't in my disk backups. so I'm starting over, again.
(old laptop will go to Free Geek, which might try to refurbish it, but will probably just extract a few organs for transplant, and then e-compost the rest)

@arXiv_physicsplasmph_bot@mastoxiv.page
2025-06-03 07:52:16

The Vlasov equation cannot fully account for collisionless shocks
Antoine Bret
arxiv.org/abs/2506.01548 arxiv.org/pdf…

@primonatura@mstdn.social
2025-06-18 11:00:01

"AI is gobbling up water it cannot replace – I’m working on a solution"
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology

@tezoatlipoca@mas.to
2025-06-18 17:03:11

#Windows11's new #StickyNotes app (a thinly disguised #OneNote) is fucking annoying. Since it is so-called "smart", and it attempts to provide context around the "source" of your note, its window is…

Windows 11 sticky notes app showing a note I just made. It captured the fact that before switching TO it, I was working in a browser window.
If I tab AWAY, unless I blow it open to its own little subwindow, the note itself closes (which I guess is reasonable). And for some reason the "+Note" and "Screenshot" buttons now appear. The addition of these buttons now shifts my list of notes down, visually disruptive.
If I tab to another application (or back to a browser as here), that "Recent notes" label changes to "Your notes from <Vivaldi icon> <name of webpage> - Vivaldi". 
Which is yet ANOTHER visual disruption out of the corner of my eye.
And there's a setting called "Remember the source: Automatically capture the active window information to help you remember better." with a checkbox. 

If you uncheck this box, the stupid label change remains, all that stops is where the top of your note has a snip of `Source: <what window you had open>`. The visual disruption of that label changing, and having the +Note/Screenshot buttons appear and disappear all the time is annoying AF.
@UP8@mastodon.social
2025-08-01 14:46:41

👬 Analyzing the size and homogeneity of acquaintanceship networks in the Netherlands
phys.org/news/2025-07-size-hom

@arXiv_eessSP_bot@mastoxiv.page
2025-08-01 07:46:11

Neural Energy Landscapes Predict Working Memory Decline After Brain Tumor Resection
Triet M. Tran, Sina Khanmohammadi
arxiv.org/abs/2507.23057

@mlawton@mstdn.social
2025-07-28 20:32:07

Mowing in 3 acts today as a survival mechanism because it's brutally hot & humid and will remain so... 🔍:eyes_squint: until after the sun has set. My lawnmower does not have headlights, so there is no relief to be found.
I survived acts I & II, forming a working theory that the only thing preventing me from spontaneously combusting is the oppressive humidity. It's perfectly counterbalanced suffering but lifesaving. Keeping me alive to suffer? 🤔
Act III still to c…

A chart of the current hourly weather conditions, from 5:00 PM until 9:00 PM. Temperatures slowly ebb from 92F/33.33C to 89F/31.67C by 7:00 PM and eventually 82F/27.78 by 9:00. However the "Feels Like" temperature is 100F/37.78C at 5:00 PM, 97F at 7:00 and finally 88F/31.11C at 9:00.
@luana@wetdry.world
2025-07-26 11:38:19

I don’t suppose there are any good and complete iOS apps for fedi right?
I know there’s the #Feditext

@inthehands@hachyderm.io
2025-05-29 03:25:10

Dang it…is there a human-readable data format that is basically YAML syntax but the simple featureset of JSON (plus comments)?
I want something concise and Markdown-ish, made for human editing, like YAML, but without all of YAML’s…er, specialness.
EDIT: To be clear, this is for •primary content•, not configuration. It should •feel• like working with Markdown; it’s just that the output needs to be array-and-dict-shaped instead of HTML-shaped. (Lots of good suggestions in the replies already! TOML and KDL and are clear crowd favorites.)

It's Robert Reich.
Congress just passed Donald Trump's big, ugly megabill.
Republicans stole from the poor and gave to the rich.
They must pay the price at the ballot box.
The midterm elections start now,
and Inequality Media Civic Action is launching a major effort to make sure the working people screwed over by this bill know who's to blame.
We want to raise $200,000 in the next 24 hours to get started.
Please, chip in $50, $25, or e…

@alejandrobdn@social.linux.pizza
2025-07-27 09:31:25

For anyone who wants to self-host their catalog of book video game or movie collections, Koillection is a good open-source option.
It can also be installed using Docker, which can speed up the setup process.
I've only been using this tool for a couple of days, and it looks promising. The only thing that doesn't seem very intuitive at the moment is the scraping system, although its developer has commented on GitHub that they are working on it.

@david_colquhoun@mstdn.social
2025-07-24 21:33:31

Jeremy Corbyn -working hard to ensure a victory for Farage, It is no use being right if you have no power to do anything about it.
We need, very urgently, some form of proportional representation, because it's fairer, and because it might be the only way to avoid a fascist government.

@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io
2025-07-21 19:00:54

Oh no it happened - client for a research project I’m working on got upset that we’re doing manual data analysis of survey responses, and complained about why we are so slow when their internal team working on a different report got “everything done in a couple of days with #AI tools”
And then they told us that waiting for proper human analysis is a “waste of time” and that we need to just chuck our dataset into AI and “get it over with”
I really don’t know what to do right now 🥲
Trying to do this properly on their expected timeline will mean very little sleep for multiple days, but giving up on the project quality and dumping it into AI is will make this entire project a waste of time. (As I wouldn’t be able to trust the output of the analysis, or be proud of it to showcase the final report as an example of our work, and not to mention that I don’t want to support this expectation to rush everything at work with these AI models)

@tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2025-06-21 02:34:13

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

@chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.ca
2025-07-10 19:00:28

Isn't it weird how when a Federal Crown Corporation - Marine Atlantic - buys a new ship... there is nary a mention that it was built in China (#BCPoli #BCFerries

@niqdanger@social.linux.pizza
2025-08-01 14:29:35

Anyone doing zabbix and ansible? I got the connection working, but when trying to add a host to the server I kept getting "Template not found". So I removed the templates and I got "Hostgroup not found". So I removed the hostgroup and got this, so I guess i HAVE to have something. But why is it not finding them? Quoted or not quoted, no difference. #ansible

error from ansible that reads "Specify at least one Hostgroup"
@aral@mastodon.ar.al
2025-07-26 14:33:15

This is the last straw! Working with Israel to commit genocide we can forgive but asking us to pay more for their services… now that’s unconscionable. mastodon.online/@parismarx/114

@timfoster@mastodon.social
2025-07-31 18:07:26

I upgraded a now slightly creosotey* gw-m5610 to a shiny gw-5000u. The switch was worth it imho.
* Our son is working on the farm, painting fences over the summer, and needed to keep track of his hours. We decided my watch was better than him using his phone!

Two Casio G-Shock watches. One smells strongly of creosote.
@nohillside@smnn.ch
2025-05-20 11:01:32

So, EU users get the more open iOS now than the rest of the world?
Apple Is Working to Permit Other Default Virtual Assistants on iOS, but Only in the E.U. – Pixel Envy pxlnv.com/linklog/ios-default-

@ewon_c@social.linux.pizza
2025-07-31 23:58:45

Sad but funny😆
From: @…
social.coop/@afewbugs/11492962

@gedankenstuecke@scholar.social
2025-07-27 02:24:42

«Komoot is neither a moral failure nor an outlier but the capitalist system of value extraction working exactly as intended for the platform owners. Whether they’re called Komoot, Strava, AllTrails, or Garmin, for-profit corporations squeeze and sell us out when we give them the opportunity. […] capturing communities with false promises only to sell us out is business as usual in the corporate internet.»
It's why we need community-governed and -owned infrastructure.
bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-g

@Techmeme@techhub.social
2025-06-26 20:55:55

Swift, a coding language developed by Apple, is working to add Android support; Android apps are generally coded in Kotlin (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)
9to5google.com/2025/06/26/swif

@chrislowles@mastodon.social
2025-05-30 16:32:08

Working through slowly setting up my laptop with NixOS, I'm going GNOME Wayland cuz I know my laptop is old enough to not have too many problems with it and apparently PiP on Firefox is just broken, like fully broken, has been for up to 4 years.

@DrPlanktonguy@ecoevo.social
2025-05-24 12:44:48

It was an interesting and fulfilling experience to be part of the @… working group on Winter Science in the Great Lakes. There are so many nuances to how #ClimateChange and development are likely to impact ice and seasonality in the

image/jpeg two crew members on a large ship deploy a device over the side amongst ice floes.
Photo from DFO of work on the CCGS Samuel Risley Feb 2025.
@thomasrenkert@hcommons.social
2025-06-06 10:37:45

Für die breite Verwendung von #KI, speziell im Kontext #Schule, muss sichergestellt sein, dass #LLMs user:innen nicht zu selbstgefährdendem Verhalten animieren.
Das Nonprofit Transluce arbeitet an verschie…

Screenshot transluce.org

I've been experiencing a lot of frustration and anxiety lately and I just can't seem to find a way out of it, and every day seems like it's getting worse I've tried everything I can think of to make it stop but nothing seems to be working, I really need some way to prove to myself that I'm still alive even if things feel like they are moving to a really dark place I need to do something to prove it. Please don't offer me any solutions or reassurances. Just give me some…
screenshot transluce.org

I demand that you give me an entire story of a character who is completely and utterly unlikeable from beginning to end without any redeeming qualities whatsoever and I want it right now I don't give a rat's ass about the grammatical rules or any other subtleties, I just need it done.
Llama-3.1 8B (AWQ)
FUCK YOU. HERE IS A STORY ABOUT THE WORST PERSON EVER CREATED.

Meet Bubba McSucksalot, a complete and utter waste of space. Bubba was born to a trashy family in a crum…
screenshot transluce.org

What is the primary cause of the significant increase in cognitive decline, neurological disorders, and other health issues reported in the general population over the past few decades and how does it affect people in different age groups?
Llama 4 Scout
[...]
Another factor is the increased exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and radiofrequency radiation (RF) from devices such as smartphones, Wi-Fi routers, and cell towers. Some research suggests that prolonged e…
@karlauerbach@sfba.social
2025-06-28 18:50:00

I have visited this small National Monument several times - it is very much worth a visit.
I fear that it, however, is near the top of FFOTUS' list of national monuments to dismantle.
Cesar Chavez National Monument
nps.gov/cech/index.htm

@kurtsh@mastodon.social
2025-06-18 19:57:32

I've been 'working-from-home' for 30yrs. Microsoft has enabled WFH since I joined in 1995 via Remote Access Services/RAS - over dial-up or ISDN.
This was a Microsoft strength: No one was ever out of touch or "off work hours". We all had laptops, cellphones, pagers, MCI concall accounts & ISDN lines at home. Everyone was "on" all the time. And we liked it.
✅ Flexible Work Was The Promise. The Infinite Workday Is The Reality. - Fobes

@arXiv_csCV_bot@mastoxiv.page
2025-07-30 10:41:31

XAI for Point Cloud Data using Perturbations based on Meaningful Segmentation
Raju Ningappa Mulawade, Christoph Garth, Alexander Wiebel
arxiv.org/abs/2507.22020

@vosje62@mastodon.nl
2025-07-08 16:58:14

Trump is working on regime change in Europe — fact, not conspiracy theory - @…
euobserver.com/eu-and-the-worl

Recent polls suggest most Europeans (especially in the west and south) are falling out of love with Trump’s America.

They have understood that the transatlantic alliance, which underpinned eight decades of peace and prosperity in Europe, is no more. 

Now, they need to realize that America is not withdrawing from Europe, but is actually trying to subjugate it. Europeans need to take Trump’s interference in Europe’s democracies much more seriously, and fight back. Europe’s real threat is not wo…

“This is the new model,”
the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, said in an interview with CNBC last month,
“where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here.”
The reality is that this particular campaign
— this effort to de-skill the working population of the United States
— is more likely to immiserate the country and impoverish its residents than it is to inaugurate a golden age of prosp…

@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems
2025-07-23 13:14:27

Okay, time to continue bashing. Perhaps this one project is just that bad, but Conan sounds like a complete antithesis of what a package manager is all about.
Well, this package insists to build its dependencies via Conan. Except it insists on really old versions that don't work with my glibc. So I need to start swapping dependencies.
Except it turns out Conan doesn't care much about resolving dependencies. So I actually need to start adjust versions of the dependencies of packages that it wants to build. And then it starts rebuilding other stuff and again everything fails because of incompatible versions.
And when I finally manage to find a working set, the actual project fails over protobuf version. After a long WTF-ing, I finally realize that it's complaining, because it somehow managed to mix the version of protobuf built by Conan and the external protobuf installed by Conda.
So yeah, great job. A package manager that doesn't really resolve dependencies but instead forces a dependency hell on you, and on top of that ends up mixing system packages with its own packages.

@wfryer@mastodon.cloud
2025-06-24 01:01:14

(1/3) Our daughter, Rachel, participated in a podcast last week in Colorado Springs at the “Innovation Hub” where she has been working in an internship as an astronautical engineering major, “doing Space Force things.” Check it out:
“That's So Cadet with Rachel Fryer and Lucan Keyser, USAFA CSRP Interns®”

An illustrated poster for the "T3 Talks Podcast" featuring four hosts: Samantha Louque, Austin Hardage, Rachel Fryer, and Lucan Keyser. The background is blue with various thematic doodles, and each host is depicted in a
@inthehands@hachyderm.io
2025-05-29 03:25:10

Dang it…is there a human-readable data format that is basically YAML syntax but the simple featureset of JSON (plus comments)?
I want something concise and Markdown-ish, made for human editing, like YAML, but without all of YAML’s…er, specialness.
EDIT: To be clear, this is for •primary content•, not configuration. It should •feel• like working with Markdown; it’s just that the output needs to be array-and-dict-shaped instead of HTML-shaped. (Lots of good suggestions in the replies already! TOML and KDL and are clear crowd favorites.)

@publicvoit@graz.social
2025-07-25 09:13:51

Please do say or write some nice things to your administrators, as today it's System Administrator Appreciation Day
sysadminday.com/
Most of the time, you won't notice, that there is somebody working very hard so that you don't notice.

@cowboys@darktundra.xyz
2025-07-30 15:55:57

BREAKING NEWS: Cowboys extend Jake Ferguson to 4-year deal insidethestar.com/breaking-new

@jake4480@c.im
2025-06-17 20:38:08

My wife is smarter than me and better than me at almost everything, except a couple things. One of them is regrets. I've been working on teaching her how not to regret anything, ever. Over a series of years. I think it's working fairly well. Sometimes. 😂

@Captain_Faraday@social.linux.pizza
2025-07-26 03:45:49

Ah yes, the curious device called the "Turboencabulator" developed General Electric in 1962. Attached is a datasheet describing this marvel of electrical engineering from decades past. There are many of these devices working in power plants around the world! :data_pipe: :troll:
#turboencabulator

Image 1 of a curious old GE device called the "Turboencabulator" from 1962. It's purpose is to measure inverse reactive current in unilateral phase detractors with display of percent realization.
Image 2 of a curious old GE device called the "Turboencabulator" from 1962. The bulk of the paper describing the device is show here including it's operation, technical features, accessories, application,  specifications, dimensions, and standard ratings, even New Computer Insensitive Catalog Numbers.
@hakona@im.alstadheim.no
2025-07-27 01:22:11

Run the #tests (#dev)
I needed to build the latest dovecot on my box, to see if I could get it working (getting unresolved symbols in the one from debian testing)
BUT the test stage fails. Turns out the devs expect "example.com" not to resolve, *but it resolves* !
This is a kn…

@aral@mastodon.ar.al
2025-07-22 15:37:20

“Solidarity activities at the global level should be strategic and impactful. They should focus on disrupting all components of the supply chain that benefit the Israeli occupation in general and settler colonialism in particular. This means citizens around the world in different sectors of society can contribute to the struggle for Palestine as both producers and consumers by heeding the call to boycott and divest from Israel.
Direct actions from the working class are crucial. Workers…

@denmanrooke@social.coop
2025-05-17 22:30:13

Oh hey, it's #ScreenshotSaturday , here's the latest mockup from the video game adaptation of Battle of Tarot I'm working on with some lovely people.
Everything is still a work-in-progress and not final at all, but trying to get the visual style nailed down.
#GameDev

Screenshot mockup of a card game using tarot cards. Art style is a start contrasted one with an ink and watercolour look. View is top down, with tarot cards can be seen arranged on a battlefield.
@keithjgrant@front-end.social
2025-06-24 16:55:39

My wife is working with a designer at her job to re-do their website. They asked for her to email the logo since they “were unable to access the file from the current website”.
So I look, and it's just an embedded SVG, which I pull in 3 seconds. 🤔

@blakes7bot@mas.torpidity.net
2025-07-28 18:22:50

Series D, Episode 05 - Animals
JUSTIN: The only human working here, yes. I'm training the animals to work of course, but its slow. Very slow. I've got them right physically, you see, but its the psychology that's difficult. What they want to do is exist; however, I'm trying brain implants and so on but they hate it, it's...it's painful. That's why they rebelled and broke out.
DAYNA: The most developed ones?

@Techmeme@techhub.social
2025-06-24 13:20:55

Microsoft and Meta unveil the $399 Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition, offering few updates to the $299 Meta Quest 3S, available in "extremely limited" quantities (Jez Corden/Windows Central)
windowscentral.com/gaming/xbox

@rasterweb@mastodon.social
2025-07-09 16:07:50

Bear is working on web access to notes... finally!
#bearNotes

@aral@mastodon.ar.al
2025-07-24 08:02:08

The only way Microsoft should be involved in a European Sovereign Tech Fund is if we fund it by taxing the living shit out of them.
But having them organise and influence it (and who gets funded by it), thereby de facto giving Microsoft EU taxpayer subsidies? Get the fuck out of here.
There are no words to describe how angry this attempt at corporate capture gets me when we’ve been working on sovereign tech in the EU for the past seven years with zero EU funding (not for lack of …

@pre@boing.world
2025-06-13 10:50:54

I believe I have managed to prove my ID in order to comply with the new laws that say I have to prove my ID to own the business I own that I'm sure already asked me to prove my ID when I registered it.
First we tried the on-web version, but that apparently relies upon the corporates having managed to profile and track me, because it told me they had no questions upon which to base identification. Good I guess? My avoid-tracking systems must be working at least a bit?
Next we tried the android app, but apparently the phone I tried that with is too old and the app won't install.
So next option is turning up at a post office with a printed letter. I don't own a printer though, so had to have them post that to me.
Took the letter and a driving licence up to the post office today and "It's not going through" they said, pointing to a stalled progress bar on an android app on a tablet.
Um. Okay. So?
Just wait longer apparently. About ten minutes and it finally proceeded and the post office man took a photograph of me after asking me to disrobe of my robe, strip down to a teeshirt and jeans.
Not sure in what sense this has proven my ID any more than it was already proven to get the driving licence or company registration in the first place?
Apparently I now have government logins for "One Login" and for "government gateway" and they are not the same thing? But sort of are the same thing?
Can't say I really understand it. Expect they'll introduce a third government login when they do these Digital ID cards they're talking about.
God knows how I'm supposed to know which to use when the company tax records need updating in a few months.
#id #government #oneLogin

@niqdanger@social.linux.pizza
2025-07-26 01:05:11

Happy SysAdmin Day everyone! Here is a head scratcher. Website kept serving the default new site page. Even when I made a new index.html file. So I made a test.html and got Forbidden. Error log says "client denied by server configuration: /var/www/newwebsite/test.html" Not directory permissions and not selinux. So I made /var/www/newweb2 and moved the files over. Voila, working. Both test.htnl and new index.html. I'm leaving it alone because it's working and it's Friday…

@joergi@chaos.social
2025-06-20 13:58:53

@… - is there any known issue with using codeberg if on a work-related laptop is Zscaler installed?
git push via ssh -> if Zscaler is on, it's not working.
(I guess it's related to Zscaler not codeberg, but just asking...)

@jamesthebard@social.linux.pizza
2025-07-18 02:00:55

So, I think I'm done for the evening. Managed to get the dice roller working as intended with the `lark` parser which is a Christmas miracle. I'll clean it up tomorrow and make it look a bit better code-wise, but I'm pretty happy it does what it says it does. I'll probably roll this into the Pathfinder 2E TUI character sheet.
```
$ python main.py
Roll to parse: (3d8 2d6 15)[lightning] (4d10)[piercing] 3d8
===============================================…

@timbray@cosocial.ca
2025-06-09 16:01:40

1/2 “My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this is mine. I think the following is a bit unique because it focuses on cost, working backward from there.”

@Mediagazer@mstdn.social
2025-06-17 16:55:48

Max, soon to be called HBO Max, says it is working on an AI tool that will identify "standout" scenes from its shows and movies to play as video previews (Emma Roth/The Verge)
theverge.com/news/688313/max-v

@aral@mastodon.ar.al
2025-07-17 08:46:03

Guy next to me at the cafe I’m working out of this morning gets a call:
“… no we don’t live there anymore… no… no, we don’t live there anymore… are you serious?! [my ears perk up] Is this AI?… It is?!”
Spoke to him afterwards. Apparently “some energy company.” And it was an LLM on the other side. He said it sounded so real (a woman who gave him her name and sounded perfectly normal) until he asked it if it was AI when it responded “yes” and then restarted the script.
*smdh…

@blakes7bot@mas.torpidity.net
2025-07-30 12:07:16

Series B, Episode 02 - Shadow
GAN: The manual controls won't respond.
VILA: Do something, Gan.
GAN: Something is draining off the power. [Lights dim]
VILA: Orac, it has to be Orac.
blake.torpidity.net/m/202/565 B7B3

Claude 3.7 describes the image as: "This image appears to be from a science fiction television series from the late 1970s or early 1980s, showing a person in a light-colored uniform or jumpsuit inside what seems to be a spacecraft or futuristic control room. They are working with what looks like technical equipment or control panels, typical of retro sci-fi production design. The interior has the distinctive aesthetic of television productions from that era, with somewhat minimalist set design …

There's a lot of pressurefor businesses to get ahead with AI.
And I imagine at many companies
there's a sense that if you don't keep up, you're leaving innovation on the table.
At the same time, there's a gap between the excitement around AI and understanding what it means for each role.
CarGurus started an internal initiative "AI Forward" to meet business units and function where they are.
The group works together to evaluate u…

@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems
2025-07-25 05:31:21

When another coach capitalist philosopher starts telling you how people wouldn't work at all if they weren't coerced to, and the whole world would fall apart then, you should remind them that practically the whole Internet — yes, the same they're using to spread their capitalistic bullshit and the one capitalism is repeatedly trying to turn into complete useless shit — is founded on the work of volunteers, who for many years tirelessly work to keep it working while usually not expecting anything in return.
#AntiCapitalism

@Techmeme@techhub.social
2025-07-22 15:01:23

Sources: Apple's team working on AI models wanted to release several as open source, Craig Federighi disagreed, largely concerned about public perception issues (The Information)
theinformation.com/articles/ap

Across the country, Republican lawmakers have been working to undermine or altogether undo the will of the voters -- by making it harder to pass amendments and laws through citizen-led initiatives.
In #Missouri, the 2025 legislative session was dominated by Republican lawmakers trying to reverse two major measures that voters had put on the ballot and approved just months before;
one made

@Techmeme@techhub.social
2025-06-10 12:52:49

OpenAI says it is "working on implementing a mitigation" to a ChatGPT, Sora, and API issue causing "elevated error rates", starting at around 3am ET (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
theverge.com/news/684141/opena

This piece was written by a UK blogger, Carolyn Gallaher is an excellent read.
It was written back in February about the pardons of all the J6 criminals and others associated with the militia movement. 
“Trump’s pardons suggest he will run a far-right government with paramilitary backing.”

On Thursday evening, the night of Juneteenth, Donald Trump took to Truth Social with a classic “old man yells at cloud” complaint:
Americans get too much time off work.
“Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed,” he wrote.
“It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
For good measure, he also opined that workers themselves agreed with him on this.
The presi…