@nemorosa@mastodon.nu#WritersCoffeeClub 27/9: How much time passes between sitting down to write and actually writing?
I am one of those unholy ones who writes in my head, not entire chapters but dialogue and short paragraphs. I try them out, see if it fits.
Which means that I can sit down and start writing before my behind has fully settled on the chair. Other times, it turns into an editing proce…
@comex@mas.toIt's kind of crazy that both GPT and Claude really love to manipulate files by writing Python scripts that do text search-and-replace. First of all, why isn't this a dedicated tool? Second, the generated scripts usually don't check that the search-and-replace was successful. Are they just good enough at regurgitating text that they never make mistakes? What if the file was modified in the mean time?
@hikingdude@mastodon.socialI spent some time #blogging today.
Oh man, why does writing take so much time?! Honestly, this time I tried dictating (Speech-to-text) and curating afterwards ... but it feels like it takes the same amount of time 🤔 Maybe it's just a lack of practice - or a lack of articulation.
Anyways - a bit of story, a peertube video and a couple of photos are waiting to be watched! 😉
…
@ErikJonker@mastodon.socialFor me this age of AI is the time we should appreciate less polished handwritten texts for their authenticity. I see this happening during selection of job applications.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026…
@aredridel@kolektiva.socialFor those that don't know, I help run a large women in technology chat group on Slack. It's been going for 11 years now! (ask me for an invite if you want one and that's appropriate!)
It has deeply shaped how I think about technology, especially the social side. There is so much embodied knowledge in that community, it's amazing. And it's also such a window into how much the mainstream of technology writing is dominated by men. We talk about it differently! We're much more likely to be critical, and to be critical of the _structures_ in tech. Sometimes that comes off as kneejerk "Ugh BRIAN!" to some of the bullshit men to do women in the workplace, but also embedded underneath is an understanding of rarely-mapped power structures in the field. So much advice out there is written assuming that there is no dissent, no silent frustration, no quiet abandoning the job when the pressures are unresolved. And so much of the tech world, press and on social media alike, has no insight that this attrition even happens.
Women, collectively, though, understand it. We notice the patterns of promotions. We understand the way that if we're in our 40s, we're rather likely to have a manager who is a decade younger than we are, with no particular experience. We notice when men are lauded for spending time with their family instead of work on occasion, but women are expected to be present at all times and rarely seen positively for doing the exact same things.
And yet, any given instance is always shrouded in deniability. The pattern generally holds, but is this one my fault? Do I not measure up? Or is it sexism?
That's what these structures rob from us: we never have the clarity in feedback that it is accurate, that is us that must change. When we stick to our guns, are we being obstinate, or are we correct? That information is denied to us by sexism. It only becomes clear in aggregate, and even then it is very hard to find action to take on it except to acknowledge it and move on.
I don't think people talk about that ambiguity enough: we're always looking for the clear sexism, the man speaking over the women, the trading sexual favors for advancement, the clear pattern of pet-to-threat that so many women experience as they age or gain skill in the field. But the bulk of sexism that we experience is in the structural poisoning of feedback.
@detondev@social.linux.pizzaOne resident at the retirement place I work at turned 100, and at his party, my grandmother learned of a nearly 200 year old bible he inherited and only recently physically acquired, elaborately decorated with over 1,000 engravings, a map of Palestine (specifically proudly advertised on the New Testament's intro), genealogies, summaries, interpretations, and even records of the owning family's births, marriages, and deaths, written in impeccably preserved cursive. She got my younger …
@Cognessence@social.linux.pizzaA lot of people are writing lots of things about A.I here already, all of which are more important than my complaint...but man, trying to buy a new NVMe drive at this juncture is utter insanity.
Really wish I'd gone for a bit more RAM and especially storage back when you could actually afford them.
Time to delete some of my praying mantis video collection to make space for less essential things, like work files.
@simon_jf@mastodon.scotI've had a lot of fun writing an interpreter for my mailbox-typed language Pat over the last month or so.
This was actually nontrivial: faithfully implementing the semantics requires us to detect that a mailbox is empty, and also *will never receive any more messages*. Perceus reference counting to the rescue!
Anyway, I thought with this merged it was time to give it a proper home, rather than a scrappy repository under my personal user:
@jamesthebard@social.linux.pizzaThings I've learned today:
- Valgrind does not support AVX512 instructions. That was an adventure because I was writing purposefully bad code at the time...
- However, changed strategies and used `clang` with the `fsanitize=address,undefined` option which seems to work perfectly fine.
#clang
@DamonHD@mastodon.socialOooooh I just got #mansplained at on a forum I won't name, telling me that something I am already doing (and writing a paper about, and is a rather key feature of electrical grid operation) is stupid and impossible. I have replied with very mild snark and a couple of links to the commercial services and real-time data in GB, but I don't suppose facts will prove important!
@davidaugust@mastodon.online
@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
@shacker@zirk.usJust back from traveling in Scotland for a couple of weeks, and this time I went without a computer - Just Lightroom Mobile on iPad. I encountered a bunch of caveats and ended up writing this guide at Framespotting for people who want to try the same - you'll want to plan and practice to make this work well! Sorry about the dorky Gemini illustration.
@theodric@social.linux.pizzaAs Autumn bears down on us from behind the heat, I think it's time to revisit some cabin-in-the-woods content. No, silly, not the Unabomber Manifesto. Thoreau *AND* the Unabomber Manifesto! You can hardly do better than Ken Kifer's annotated Walden. https://www.phred.org/~alex/kenkifer/www.k
@cdarwin@c.imUkraine will only halt attacks on Russian energy targets if the enemy does likewise and the US guarantees it,
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
The announcement came after Donald Trump’s uncorroborated claim that both sides have agreed to such a ceasefire.
Neither Ukraine nor Russia had said so at time of writing.
The US president regularly claims to have brokered what turn out to be nonexistent or extremely shortlived deals between foreign adversaries or with his o…
@hex@kolektiva.socialI'm mostly writing this for radlib folks who may be reading this, because a lot of my people have been targeted for a long time. I don't go to the US anymore.
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioI’ve been thinking a lot about the gulf between people who think LLMs can cut 90% of the cost of software development or whatever and people who think that’s a pile of catastrophes balanced on top of a nonsense wish.
I think a lot of that chasm boils down to the fact that software is already •terrible•, and people have very different feelings about that. I don't just mean “Liquid Glass is ugly” terrible; I mean “it’s broken and insecure and unreliable and just doesn't flipping WORK” terrible, like Arbiter Sports.
We are right now in a war between people who think software should treat humans humanely and people who are perfectly willing to offload their development costs onto captive users in the form of wasted time, anger, anxiety, and other forms of personal harm even more severe than those. That war was raging well before LLMs entered the picture, but LLMs drove it to fever pitch. I’m extremely skeptical of the idea that LLMs make any significant positive contribution to the long-term speed or cost of writing •good• software, but they clearly have the potential to lower the floor for •bad• software to unheard-of levels at unheard-of speeds. How you feel about that fact probably predicts a lot about how you feel about the “LLMs can 10x software dev!” hype.
3/3
@frankel@mastodon.top
@bourgwick@heads.socialmy final dispatch on dylan & the dead’s misbegotten 1986 shows for @…'s wonderful newsletter, in which dylan finds a new way to get booed, plays (to my ears) his best set of the run, & i rediscover my fave paul williams passage (& an all-time fave piece of rock writing, really), where he champions uncritical listening & hears genius in the specific w…
@rasos@fairmove.netI've been spending quite some time debugging fairmeeting, which seldomly forced all users to re-join a room. I found out that a plugin of prosody was writing too many messages in high volume instances. Moving those to memory fixed it. After some testing I notified the #Jitsi developer community and they integrated the fix upstream
@michabbb@social.vivaldi.net💡 The idea behind it, from Kieran Klaassen of Every: he built the Cora email client without writing code himself and spends roughly half his time teaching the system what went wrong instead of only shipping features
📊 #MIT licensed, ~24.7k stars, 2k forks, 1291 commits, artifact folders relocatable via docs_root
🌐
@lapizistik@social.tchncs.deRE: https://infosec.exchange/@jaythvv/117023948737805171
The numbers seem legit as¹ only 10–20 % of the time goes into writing code. And the numbers easily can get negative if the generated code introduces more technical debt than the average programmer.
@nemorosa@mastodon.nu#WritersCoffeeClub Sept. 7: What's something you thought would help your workflow, but didn't work out?
Scrivener.
It vexes me. Somehow it manages to make my entire process about itself rather than the story I'm writing.
It turns writing time into binder-organising, metadata-tagging, corkboard-fiddling time. Instead of putting words on a page, I end up doing a…
@bibbleco@infosec.exchangeJust did very approximate calculations; with 10g of lithium per drone*, and assuming the Russian and Ukrainian drone efforts consume 5m units a year**, that'd be ~50 tons of lithium deposited into the environment per year, mostly within, let's say, 50km of the grey zone***. It's only about $20,000 / ton****, which means $1m of metal*****.
So to answer my own silly question: no, it won't be economically viable to scalp the top few inches of topsoil and extract the lithium from it.
* Roughly right for quadcopters / small FPV; larger and longer range ones will have more, so this is a bottom bound. (OTOH longer range UAVs will tend to use ICE kerosene rather than batteries
** Changing all the time as both sides try expanding production as fast as they can manage. Ua are scaling much faster at time of writing
*** Handwaving. Contact zone's hardly moved since early 2023; OTOH Ua are pushing range limits on small battery-powered form factor, saw a 60km claim for the Logistics Lockdown operation the other day
**** There was a big spike to the $70-8000 range in 2022; median price is closer to $10k than $20k
***** (IDK the chemistry but presumably it's in an exciting range of different compounds, depending on how many bits the battery was blown into, how hot / pressured the blast wave was a few tens of mm from the boom, what other stuff was in the vicinity that the lithium would combine with, etc etc.
@jtk@infosec.exchangeThis is the first time I'm aware of since Russia's invasion into Ukraine in 2022 that this data center was disrupted due to hostilities:
"We are writing to inform you that our data center in Kyiv has been damaged in a drone attack. As a result, all cloud services hosted from this facility are currently unreachable." - oneprovider
@cdarwin@c.imMartha Lillard had just turned 5 when she was diagnosed with polio
and depended on an iron lung to live.
She died June 26 in Oklahoma,
the last U.S. polio patient who used the machine, her sister said. She was 78.
“They told her she wasn’t supposed to live past 20 years old,”
Lillard’s younger sister, Cindy McVey, told The Associated Press on Friday.
“She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living and make the best of her life.”
McVey attri…
@brichapman@mastodon.socialJust spend the same amount of time planning for success.
So here's the drill for your next big decision. Write the disaster plan the way you always do. Then spend the same amount of time writing what happens if it works. Get specific.
@hex@kolektiva.socialHonestly, I really like writing code. As I'm writing, I think about ways to put things together, ways things could change. I run across awkwardness that reveals internal design problems. Just sitting and writing code puts my mind in a really calm and creative place.
An LLM just slams out code. A lot of the time it's garbage, but it's never creative. It's never making something beautiful or challenging. And if you're using an LLM to generate code you're missing that.
Now, there's plenty of boiler-plate code that can be automated effectively. But even automating that that is suppressing a signal.
Code doesn't exist to make computers go. It exists to communicate what the computer is doing. If you just want to make a computer go, you write assembly (or perl, I guess). But if you want to communicate ideas then you use a language that facilitates that.
Programming is a creative process, and statistics aren't creative.
I've been on medical leave for a while and I'm finally getting back to getting my feet under me (which is also why I haven't written human language stuff in a while). Last week I spent a bunch of time coding and I didn't realize how much I missed it, or how much I got out of it.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialWish inspiration hadn't struck right at 1 a.m. when I have to teach tomorrow, but we'll see if I can get back to sleep now that I'm done with a draft of this story. Glad to have my first entry in my "incredulous young historians of the future" series actually written instead of just imagined. There are surely some typos ahead...
#SciFi #Writing #Technology #ShortStory
"The Age of Progress", a short story by Tiota Sram.
"Your assignment", said the teacher, "is to describe why the progressive vision of technology that gives us the name 'Age of Progress' today failed, and why it was actually a pessimistic view of technology. Your study guides have links to a few sources, but as usual you should synthesize information from at least two knowledge systems, and one of those shouldn't be family-based."
"Ugh", said Ye'xik, "this is gonna be tricky. Wasn't the whole problem with the Age of Progress that they were too optimistic about technology?"
"Well, they did talk a lot about the end of the world and extinction, and I did almost happen, right?" said Finan.
"Yeah, that's gotta count as pessimism, doesn't it?" Gedi chimed in.
"Well..." said Hallavia, with their usual deliberate tone, "I think it's not that simple, or at least it doesn't have to be."
The four of them were walking outside to have lunch, pondering the new assignment from this cycle's history and culture teacher. A brief silence fell as they pondered the Age of Progress.
"Maybe we should look at it through another history system?" offered Finan. "I mean, we've been learning about knowledge systems and lenses, and the 'Ages' lens of just one perspective with its own distortions, right?"
"My mab is working with my omeh on an oral history right now", said Gedi, "maybe I can use that as my second knowledge system? I'll see what they have to say about it!"
"We shouldn't all use the same knowledge systems though", said Ye'xik. "I think there's a bit of a thesis/antithesis thing going on here too? Like we were learning in ideas class?"
"Wait, I missed ideas last week", said Gedi, what's an antithesis?"
"It's just an opposite, really", said Ye'xik. "You take the thesis statement and construct any statement that contradicts it. The two form a pair, and then you can try to find a synthesis that combines both ideas."
"I didn't really get that part", Finan interrupted, "like, if they're contradictory, how could they be expressed together? Wouldn't you need to pick one that's true?... wait I guess maybe if you mixed different knowledge systems? But then would they really be contradictory?"
The group fell silent for a moment in thought.
Hallavi spoke up: "Incommensurate isn't the same as contradictory, I think. That's what it would be if you had two truths from different knowledge systems that didn't fit. Plus... not all knowledge systems have a concept of truth, or of contradiction?"
The group pondered this for a bit more.
"I think maybe there's lots of ways to be contradictory, even in a very logic-hungry knowledge system", said Gedi. "Then if your thesis and antithesis contradict in one way, you could find another sort out 'axis' in which they don't, and state your synthesis from there?"
"Oh, that makes sense", said Ye'xik.
"Anyways what were you saying about the Age of Progress, Ye'xik?" said Gedi.
"Wait", interrupted Hallavi, "Did that mashes sense to you, Finan?"
Finan had been silent, looking down at their feet, but replied "Oh yeah, thanks for checking Hallavi! I think I got the part about synthesis now, thanks Gedi. I was just thinking about optimism and pessimism more. Is that where you were going with this, Ye'xik?"
"Haha, yeah Finan, you got it", said Ye'xik. "Since optimism and pessimism can be opposites, does the teacher actually want us to form a synthesis of them?"
"Oh..." muttered Gedi, "that's a good idea."
"I think..." began Hallavi, pausing to collect their thoughts, "I think the teacher would have told us that, though. Obviously it's not a wrong way to approach this assignment because it incorporates pessimism, but teachers usually aren't too tricky. I think it's okay to be literal about the pessimism thing. And I think I have an idea..."
When Hallavi remained silent for a moment, Ye'xik opened their mouth to speak, but then looked at Hallavi and closed it again. Finan and Gedi were looking at Hallavi too. They pushed through the doors out to the meadow, and settled in their usual place to sit, pulling lunches out of their bags. Hallavi finally spoke up while the others were chewing: "The Age of Progress lasted from the Enlightenment to the Dim Times, and they believed that technology would always get better, no matter what. That's the progressive vision of technology our teacher was talking about. They thought it could solve any problem, and they wouldn't have to worry about weapons or extinctions or the climate or pollution or any of that stuff, because technology would eventually come up with a solution. They looked at the technology that solved problems like diseases or overcame engineering challenges and extrapolated too broadly, basically. That's the idea they had?"
The other three were all nodding their heads, knowing Hallavi needed room to think and put words together.
Hallavi continued: "So it seems like it's optimistic, because they thought it could do anything. But they were thinking about technology like I just talked about it: like an 'it' that could 'do'. That's not what we've been learning in our technology class. Invention is a social phenomenon, and technologies have both material and social bases, not to mention communities of practice and knowledge maintenance. So I think the idea of technological progress divorced from social participation is pessimistic, because it mythologizes technology in a way that makes it seem uncontrollable."
"Huh" said Gedi and Finan while at the same time Ye'xik said "mhmm".
Hallavi looked up shyly at the rest of them, but they were all looking back with admiration.
"I think you're right, Hallavi", said Ye'xik. "Or at least, that's probably what the teacher wanted us to puzzle out. Good thing they asked us to include two knowledge systems so we can each have our own perspectives to contribute, otherwise you'd go first and our presentations would all just be 'What Hallavi said'".
Hallavi blushed but Finan laughed "Hah! You're right and that Ye'xik."
Gedi was looking at their sandwich with some intensity. They looked at Hallavi then back at their sandwich. "It's like they thought they were strapped to an out-of-control rocket, when you put it that way", they said. "It must have been scary, really, to believe that technology was almost an entity, changing in an inevitable way. That word 'inevitable' really takes all the human agency out of it, doesn't it. And even though they kept saying that technology would inevitably solve problems, look at what the technologies they invented actually did!"
Finan shuddered. He added, "Really, it was their dominators who were saying it was inevitable wasn't it? Back then it wasn't like today where historians travel and sample all kinds of ideas, so the primary sources we're reading are almost all from dominators, right?"
Ye'xik responded "Yeah, I keep forgetting to account for that. It was such a weird and horrible time, it's kinda hard to believe everything we read and hear sometimes."
Gedi picked up the thread again "That makes it worse, right? All those dominators saying the stuff they're doing is inevitable, and lying to everyone's faces about it being progress and wonderful stuff, meanwhile two thirds of it is the most awful stuff there's ever been, I mean they could have literally killed everyone and ruined the whole planet, and they almost did."
"They did actually crush a lot of cultures beyond recognition so the survivors had to rebuild with only weak ties to their old traditions", said Hallavi with a quiet intensity.
They all were silent for a moment, pondering the horrors of a bygone age.
Finan broke the silence: "That's a terrible kind of pessimism, to believe that technologcal 'progress' is inevitable, at a time when most people are dominators somewhere in a hierarchy and the ones on top constantly talk about how technologies like medicines will 'save' the world while mostly inventing new technologies of violence. Everyone must have understood what they really meant based on the technologies they were actually developing and investing into. I think I still don't understand how the Age of Progress and the Dim Times could even happen".
"Yeah, and the pessimism is only part of our assignment", signed Ye'xik. "We still have to describe why the progressive vision failed, although I think maybe you just did a lot of that, Finan".
A gloom descended briefly, until Gedi said "Well, this assignment is supposed to take a week or two, right? Thanks to Hallavi we've already cracked the crux, I think, so we don't need to ruminate too much right this moment about ancient history, and we know things turned out okay in the end. Let's finish lunch and go climb a tree!"
@pre@boing.world🧑💻 - Can't help really, dunno anything about Windows.
🧑🎓 - But don't you write programs that run on Windows?
🧑💻 - Well, yeah, I help run a website which windows users can use. But I'm just writing for the web. I think maybe the testers run some Windows machines but none of the programmer staff do. Certainly not me.
🧑🎓 - Oh.
🧑💻 - I mean technically I mostly write software that runs in a just-in-time compiler environment, in a virtual container running Linux, that's hosted on another machine running Linux, that delivers a program that compiles into web assembly that runs on a virtual machine in a browser which could be on Windows, or OS X, or Android, or iOS, or even BSD or some experimental phone or something net yet invented.
🧑🎓 - Please shut up.
@berlinbuzzwords@floss.socialAt #bbuzz 20026, Jarek Potiuk joined us to break down how the Apache Software Foundation is thinking about Open Source Maintainership in the age of Agentic AI, and why AI's biggest contribution isn't writing code, it's giving maintainer time back.
Watch the recording: https://youtu.be/gsm4UA-azAA?si=nXYBBN60xkXiofro
@hikingdude@mastodon.socialFinally in the mood to write a blog post about a recent #hinking adventure to the #mountains .
This time, I tried speaking & transcribing the draft at first and then just refining it. This feels better than start writing from zero 🤔. Was it faster? I'm not sure. But at least I had a skeleton to start with. ... the perils of #blogging
Anyways, enjoy the #photos
https://www.franzgraf.de/blog/2026/a-quick-escape-bike-hike-and-alpine-views/
