Tootfinder

I cannot stop posting. It's what I was meant for.

So #OpenAI is now complaining about IP theft by #DeepSeek? Seriously? What about Suchir Balaji? OpenAI LLMs are created without consent of millions of authors *and* it's clear that LLM output is not copyrighted.

Wow, what a weird rabbit-hole I just ended up down.
So, the “Spread Mastodon" page (tutorial?) recommends a cool-sounding browser extension as an alternative to all those constantly-dead 'fedifinder' / Twitter-person-looker-upper-tools: the ‘Whosum Social Assistant' browser extension.
Sounds cool! Sounds like the correct solution to this problem!

techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.

Rant about PHP
You know a technology is declining when the most basic questions about its most bizarre quirks are left completely unanswered for years.
#PHP is like that. Every day I have many of these questions. I look for them. No one asked them before, no one wrote about them before.
I'm baffled by the lack of curiosity and proactivity of its community.
I know it sounds like me piling up on people I don't know anything about, but I used to invest a lot of time programming in PHP. I went to conferences, I made some open source libraries for it, like a PHP kernel for Jupyter Notebooks, I even made a library to work with dataframes, tensors and matrices in PHP (although I lost this one because my laptop was stolen before I released... and I didn't had it in me to rewrite it again).
Then, the ones who I admired the most in that space, like Nikita Popov, started leaving it to work in more intellectually vibrant communities... and it shows.
I'm sure Nikita Popov would be much more gracious than me when talking about it. I can only speculate about his motivations, but at least I can tell you about mine: It was precisely about that same lack of curiosity and creativity that I mentioned before, it felt unbearably grey and sad.

"My view of professional software engineering is one where I get to find out about people’s work and the problems they have, and try to solve them, and discussions are key to this project. If what I wanted to do were to have some uninterrupted time to discover how to shovel a Haskell into a BEAM on Kubernetes so I could scalable actor lambda, then yes, I could understand why understanding what the deliverables are would get in the way."

Two years ago at #CSUN I learned about what became my favorite browser extension, BeeLine Reader. I've been a subscriber ever since.
It's easy to set up on desktop, but has been some struggle to get working on Android. But this week I discovered it works with Microsoft's Edge Canary mobile browser, which has experimental support for extensions. Instructions are here:

Can the ai components (NPU) of new processors be used for non-ai work?
What I'm thinking is along the lines that the vector-processing components of GPUs have also been used to speed up non-graphic mathematics on large arrays.
#NPUs #AIProcessor

"It is no secret that the latest SARS outbreak has reshaped the world of work. Particularly in software engineering: where the work can be done anywhere with an internet connection so codes can be pasted from Stack Overflow, and the practitioners generally have a dislike of meetings. Your average software engineer would rather build the wrong thing for eight hours in a flow state, than have a 15-minute conversation in which they find out what direction they should go."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/your-place-or-mine/

Is my profile hostile enough?
I mean am I saying:
"If you do x, I will mute you"
"If you do y, I will block you"
etc.?
I guess my most "hostile" thing in my profile is:
"Replyguys/Attackers vs Mastodon/Fediverse: What happened? Did the attack stop!?"
It was more hostile earlier, I said something like:
I won you loser Replyguys, I have a filter shield now!
I try to make it nicer and more neutral...…

Anyone noticed how the characters in the Alien movies (the ones about Rippley) got progressively dumber as new chapters were released?
Don't remember it? Try to watch them in a row, it's astonishing. It's a good "exercise" because them being part of the same series makes it much easier to make comparisons.
I'd say that's what makes a big difference between the first one and the rest, not the plot in itself, but how idiotic are the characters after the first chapter.

Could anyone spare a "Like" for these kids who are trying to plant some seeds of Open Source in the USA Midwest?
#FOSS

"Quite simply, if you have not read this book yet, read it. If you have a colleague who has yet to read it, get them a copy. If someone asks you what one book to read about software engineering, it is this one. It is not Code Complete, Second Edition, nor is it Clean Code, nor any other book that claims to teach you how to get software right the first time around (you will not)."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/michael-feathers/

uspolitics, trump
I keep seeing smart people writing stuff like
> [the US] kept peace through strength balanced with restraint, and wielded influence through culture, values, and diplomacy
I understand that #Trump is terrible and some people feel tempted to idealize what they had before him, but we should be more discerning, or otherwise it becomes impossible to understand how this happened in the first place.
Let's start with some questions:
- peace where? and for who? was it true peace, or "Pax Romana"?
- are we going to take seriously that statement on "restraint"? after all the lies, internal witch hunting, sanctions, coups, wars, invasions, genocides, and last but not least, 2 unnecessary nuclear strikes on Japan?
Now, on "culture, values, and diplomacy". Sure. Why not. Not everything was going to be bad, right?
But the thing is, abusive husbands aren't bad all the time either. From time to time they know how to be sweet and seem to care: one present here, flowers the next day, a little bit of gaslighting, and fake apologies after that "accidental" slap.
Given enough time (if the wife is still alive), at some point the victim decides to leave, and then all hell breaks loose. Trump is the manifestation of that moment. He does not represent a change in #USA's nature, but a hidden side that was "always" there, just waiting to play its role.
Others believe this is because #US citizens have been intentionally dumbed down by a combination of propaganda and a disfunctional education system, and I'm sure it's partly true... But let's see what many of their most brilliant and educated citizens are choosing to do with their lives today: https://sfstandard.com/2025/03/12/stanford-students-want-in-on-the-military-tech-gold-rush/
So, all I'm asking is: please drop the act. It was always a clusterfuck.

"Jim Coplien ends his talk with a simple call to action: at every conference where new technology is introduced, software engineers should strive to be skeptical; to ask whether it improves the quality of life of society as a whole, and to take it home only to increase the human value of our products and services.
Focus on the people. Again and again. Because that is what Agile and OOP were all about, to begin with."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/james-coplien/

I'm 37 years old and I finally finished a #JRPG game for the first time in my life ( #SeaOfStars ).
I like them a lot, but I often get bored of the grinding, or I have to leave it for some time and when I come back I don't remember what I was doing.
Why I managed to finish it this time? Because I had more important, stressing and boring things to do instead, and my brain demanded procrastination. #ADHD