@blakes7bot@mas.torpidity.netSeries B, Episode 05 - Pressure Point
VILA: [Grabbing Blake's arm] You'll hit him!
BLAKE: Let go! [Shakes free, takes aim, and fires] Avon, run for your life! [Muttering] Come on, come on.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/205/447 B7B5
@cowboys@darktundra.xyzDak declares self 'full go' from hamstring injury https://insidethestar.com/dak-declares-self-full-go-from-hamstring-injury
@midtsveen@social.linux.pizzaI’ve realized I actually enjoy working. What really frustrates me is that the big decisions about my day are made by people who have never even been on my shop floor. On top of that, the things I help make don’t even go to my own community, which just makes it feel even more disconnected.
Honestly, I’d get a lot more satisfaction from my job if we could run things democratically and see our work benefit the people around us. There’s a real sense of pride in building something for your …
@grumpybozo@toad.socialI maintain a heterogeneous MSP environment for backup which consists of a collection of sh scripts (they mostly run on FreeBSD) with (c) notes dating back to 2004, with 5 authors, 4 of whom are no longer my cow-orkers. As the unfortunate 5th, I am still doing tweaks to catch edge & corner cases >20y after the 1st author had the idea that rsync, shell, mt, & standard POSIX tools could be assembled into a decent free backup world.
Use Python. Or Go. Or even Perl.
@jamesthebard@social.linux.pizzaDid a quick test fit of one of the Minisforum MS-A2s and ran some of the cabling. I think this should turn out pretty clean and everything fits better than expected which is a good thing. The PSUs will go in the bottom 2U "compartment" without issue which I didn't run.
#minisforum #homelab
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systemsMe: if I go through Września, I'll be 5 minutes earlier in Poznań, and I'll have a better chance of catching a transfer. But I'd have to run to catch the train to Września.
Me a minute later: the Września – Poznań train is delayed. No point in running, let's just go straight to Poznań.
Me at Poznań Wschód station: oh, the delayed train from Września goes straight to Leszno, so it is my transfer.
Fortunately, our train went first, so I could easily transfer at the main station.
@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to"There was once a programming environment made by Microsoft called Visual J . It allowed one to write, debug, and run Java code on Windows. Visual J was the first serious, usable, complete IDE Java ever had, at least until IntelliJ IDEA appeared in 2001."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/w…
@lil5@social.linux.pizzaAre you ready to rewrite your whole application every 2 years? Choose Remix/Remix2/ReactRouter7/Remix3, what is stability? & remember old bugs don't exist if you rewrite constantly 🧠
https://remix.run/blog/wake-up-remix
@happy_ly@social.luca.runHere we go!
@lmc@mastodon.social
@thomastraynor@social.linux.pizzaNever too many walkthroughs for a release. It may be a bit of overkill, but it works for us...
1. Pre-release the day before to go over the schedule of activities and assignments.
2. Schedule release and related backups.
3. Day of release and after schedule created for run another walkthrough to verify that the backups are where they need to be, checkpoints are there, start of the process is on manual hold.
4. Schedule an open teams call for the leads, devs and supp…
@padraig@mastodon.ie
@jae@mastodon.me.ukWell crap, was going to go on a coffee run for @… but it's raining cats and dogs. I do like being able to work in the same flat as James.
@hanno@mastodon.socialIs there a way to configure the Linux kernel or a tool that puts a laptop into a "no-fan" mode? Like, if it gets too hot, reduce the CPU frequency. It's definitely possible to run my laptop without the CPU fan, by reducing the cpufreq scaling_max_freq enough for all cores. But what I'd want is "you're allowed to go to whatever freq you still can do safely without running the fan, but auto-reduce if it gets too hot, never use the fan".
@sean@scoat.esI often run into web pages that make me think "I wonder if this is the worst page on the Internet today."
Today's candidate is Bell's outages checker. The javascripty text box thing for the address is a mess, and reloading the results page (you know, a thing people might want to do to get an update on their ISP's current failure) makes you go through the address dance every time.
Maybe avoid piling on the back-breaking straws here, broken ISP…
@samvarma@fosstodon.orgI mean, we knew it was coming. I can't understand why an otherwise sane person like Masnick would go to bat for this.
Probably I don't know enough about it. Or maybe I do. https://social.growyourown.services/@FediTips/114709669094147749
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialWhy 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.
@unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyzJulia Doubleday on the gamble that covid would be harmless to children
"It’s worth noting that at the time Kulldorff and the rest of the GBD crew were proclaiming COVID’s harmlessness to kids, they couldn’t possibly have had enough information to determine the veracity of their own claims. Viruses like the chickenpox, EBV, HIV, HPV, and HSV often present with mild initial infections but may cause major damage years later. We now know COVID can as well.
"For so-called experts to run with an assumption that an initially mild-presenting acute infection would be long-term harmless was just that; an assumption. They were willing to gamble the health of a generation of children on a guess in order to go “back to normal” because that’s what the oligarchy clamored for. Because it costs money to shut the world economy down. Because people who mattered were angry. Because children aren’t people who matter."
(GBD = Great Barrington Declaration, a bit of 2020 propaganda including the unfounded supposition that everyone who caught covid would be immune forever after)
Overall another excellent pointy article!
#children #covid #LongCovid #CovidIsntOver #GreatBarringtonDeclaration #misinformation
@chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.ca#PondLife #PoolPond #Backyard #DIY #PortAlberni #Home
$CAD1100 is a lot to spend on just a couple items, but I guess in the grand scheme of making a pond/pool that will completely transform our backyard, it's not crazy. This about equals the amount spent ($1200 iirc) to rent the digger last Labour Day weekend. The liner and underlay fabric was another $3000. So we're looking at about $5500 so far for the project as a whole. Still better (including for the ecosystem!) than your average $50,000 in-ground pool install. ;=D
I realized last night that I bought the wrong pumps (DCT vs DCP argh). One of those “oh that's cheaper than I thought it would be” moments... followed by... “oh crap.”
I'll send the previous pumps back immediately upon arrival.
It's ok though, these will be two 20,000L/h variable pumps. The entire pond/pool system should be no more than 23,000L. My biggest rookie mistake with the #pandemicpond in the front yard was too small a pump. I rectified that when I added the bog filters there.
So I'm overbuilding this time. I should be able to run them at low-speed/power for the same amount of flow. Which will be better for pump longevity and power over time.
Also got main piping for the system: 50ft of 2" flexible PVC (Schedule 40). This will move water from the intake bay (behind the tree) to the bog filter (in front of the tree) and connect to smaller diameter piping/valves/fittings for sprayers in the pool.
This should be the end of the big-ticket items. The rest will be a LOT of little stuff: electrical, piping, and a lot of rock. Probably another $1000-$1500 to go, all should be local, and some of it can be put off until next year if needed.
It took a few tries on the Bezos Site, but I managed to find a supplier within Canada to avoid tariffs on any of it because Tariff-flation is definitely a thing! (American .com store essentially doubled the cost!)
So ya, you can hashtag this #tariffs #TariffLife #TheAmericanFascist and #TrumpTariffs
