And when they got out into the field with their dubious degrees, they had daddy’s connections to land a gig where they never needed to actually use the knowledge they pretended to have.

Not sure what we’re gonna do now that problem-solving positions are about to be filled by people whose only training is to produce incremental remixes of old solutions to well-documented problems.

Particularly with climate change promising to invalidate some fundamental assumptions baked into the literature of a significant chunk of our most important professions.

If understanding first principles means you move slower, look less polished, and are at odds with the majority of the paid staff in the field, then you’re not gonna make it.

And there’s a feedback loop, too. If it’s easiest to produce stuff that agrees with everything that came before, then that’s all we’ll make, and that’s all we’ll train new AIs on, so that’s what will continue to be easiest to produce.

Welllll… everything in software development is trade-offs.

It’s honestly pretty rare that one solution is unequivocally “better” than another, across every dimension you might care about (which includes non-technical things).

The kinds of egregious defects you might think of as brazen incompetence or laziness are more often the result of everyone (technical and non-technical alike) refusing the actively pursue one side of a trade-off and hoping that the devs can just “nerd harder”.

Technical constraints as in the case of the N64 example can actually help avoid the “just nerd harder” fallacy, because they prompt serious discussions about what you can and can’t compromise on.

Ironically, when we sit here as users and complain about games not being optimized in this way or that, we’re also refusing to engage in a conversation about trade-offs and insisting that devs just “nerd harder”.

Edit: That’s not to provide any excuses for the blatant financialization of the industry which prompts the whole “don’t trade off anything, just have them nerd harder” mindset… but to warn yall that even if the market wasn’t ruled by greedy suits, we would probably still be feeling like old games managed to do more with less, cuz well… trading away 500MB of bundle size so you can get better logging of resource management in production wasn’t really an option.

Recently had a password that was acceptable for the account creation page on the website but too long for the login screen in the mobile app.

Took me a while to figure out that pasting into that field was just quietly dropping characters.

I think this would be an example of metonymy.

Basically:

Intel, AMD, and Microsoft are all going down a dead-end road called x86_64, especially on portable devices.

Apple and Google took a turn ages ago, towards an alternative called aarch64. Originally just for phones, but now for everything.

VR headsets, Raspberry Pis, IoT devices, etc. also tend to run aarch or aarch64.

Microsoft has been trying to follow suit, but it hasn’t gone well so far. Windows for ARM (the aarch64 version of Windows) is supremely unpopular, for a lot of (mostly good) reasons.

So people avoid the devices or ditch them because none of their apps run natively. But Microsoft basically has no choice but to keep pushing.

So the end result is, Microsoft is subsidizing tons of excellent hardware that will never be used for Windows cuz it’s just not ready yet.

But Linux is!

Edit:

Funny thing is, ARM (company behind aarch64) keeps shooting themselves in the foot, to the point where lots of companies are hedging their bets with a dark horse called RISC-V that never had a snowball’s chance in Hell before, but now could possibly win.

And if Microsoft still hasn’t built a new home on aarch64 by the time that happens, they may accidentally be in the best position to capitalize on it.

Yeah, almost all of these Copilot+ laptops are Snapdragon-based

It’s definitely more than it was 10 years ago. Even so, I don’t wanna block people. I just want them to know more about the stuff they use every day. Everyone deserves to have the ability to convey their ideas effectively.

Someone named Tran? If so, disregard the following:

I assumed you were talking about “the rights of trans folks”, which is usually “trans rights”. In that case, “trans” is an adjective. Like “human” in “human rights”.

If you did want it to be possessive for trans folks, similar to if you said “humans’ rights”, you’d say “trans folks’ rights”.

Because while “human” can be an adjective or a noun, “trans” is only an adjective. So you can call someone “a human”, but not “a trans”.

If you boot aarch64 linux instead, you’ll actually get amazing battery life on these. And probably better app support than Windows ARM

There are two things I like:

• AI grifts failing
• Cheap aarch64 laptops

This story has it all!

This trend of putting an apostrophe before every single s has to stop

1. Fuck AI
2. This judge’s point is absolutely true:

“You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products,” Chhabria said. “You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person’s work, and you’re saying that you don’t even have to pay a license to that person.”

3. AI apologists’ response to that will invariably be “but it’s sampling from millions of people at once, not just that one person”, which always sounds like the fractions-of-a-penny scene
4. Fuck copyright
5. A ruling against fair use for AI will almost certainly deal collateral damage to perfectly innocuous scraping projects like linguistic analysis. Even despite their acknowledgement of the issue:

To prevent both harms, the Copyright Office expects that some AI training will be deemed fair use, such as training viewed as transformative, because resulting models don’t compete with creative works. Those uses threaten no market harm but rather solve a societal need, such as language models translating texts, moderating content, or correcting grammar. Or in the case of audio models, technology that helps producers clean up unwanted distortion might be fair use, where models that generate songs in the style of popular artists might not, the office opined.

6. We really need to regulate against AI — right now — but doing it through copyright might be worse than not doing it at all

Yeah, if we wanna make good use of the water we should replace the farms with AI data centers.

The underscore on 30…

I’m out here trying to answer reasonable questions techie folks might have about the most promising possibility I’ve seen so far for getting our normie families off of Google.

What are you here for? Calling people naive pseudo-scammers? Get out of here.

It’s the #1 thing that drives me crazy about Linux.

It seems obvious. You’ve got a Windows/Apple/Super key and a Control key. So you’d think Control would be for control characters and Windows/Apple/Super would be for application things.

I can understand Windows fucking this up, cuz the terminal experience is such a low priority. But Linux?

There’s some projects like Kinto and Toshy which try to fix it, but neither work on NixOS quite yet.

There’s a link in the second paragraph to the technical details, including source code for the implementation and documentation for the required infrastructure.

But the tl;dr is that the tokens aren’t associated to your account. Unless you were able to snoop on the original request that generated the tokens (in which case, you’ve got bigger issues!), there’s no way to prove that a token is related to a specific account. A token only proves that an authorization server once granted access to some account.

Edit: Wikipedia has a good intro:

Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs are cryptographic primitives, where information between a prover and a verifier can be authenticated by the prover, without revealing any of the specific information beyond the validity of the statement itself.

Edit 2: You should not be catching downvotes. You had a reasonable question.

Fine for you. I’m just glad there’s an option besides “sell your soul” and “invest hundreds of hours and dollars into self-hosting”.

Kagi Privacy Pass

It’s worse than that.

The goal isn’t to sell coding superpowers to programmers. It’s to drive a wedge between employer and employee. Make both of them dependent on an intermediary instead of each other.

Think DoorDash but for coding gigs. You don’t have a job, but a series of push notifications offering a chance to review an 18-line PR for $3.81.

Remember to respond within the next 90 seconds to maintain your priority status, and don’t decline too many offers.

Edit: See also, chickenized reverse-centaurs.