rook

joined 1 year ago
[–] rook@awful.systems 19 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

It’s a long read, but a good one (though not a nice one).

  • learn about how all the people who actually make decisions in c++ world are complete assholes!
  • liking go (the programming language) correlated with brain damage!
  • in c++ world, it is ok to throw an arbitrary number of highly competent non-bros out of the window in order to keep a bro on board, even if said bro drugged and raped a minor!
  • the c++ module system is like a gunshot wound to the ass!
  • c++ leadership is delusional about memory safety!
  • even more assholes!

Someone on mastodon (can’t remember who right now) joked that they were expecting the c++ committee to publicly support trump, in the hopes he would retract the usg memory safety requirements. I can now believe that they might have considered that, and are probably hoping he’ll come down in their favour now that he’s coming in.

[–] rook@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago

Just take the same approach that mathstodon does with their latex formatting, to wit: just barf the probably-human-unreadable format strings out over activity pub, and shrug when people complain because what else are you gonna do?

It isn’t like inline images work any better over activitypub in general (and even markdown/html is tricky, in the face of various mediocre mastodon client apps, some of which I use) and doing server-side conversion of latex (or whatever)to mathml is a nonstarter because of it will just be filtered out by clients anyway as unsupported and possibly malicious.

The least bad option might be something like asciimath (which can be prettyprinted via mathjax client javascript in the web view of the site) as its raw form is less awful to read than latex, and so would be more suited to viewing via activitypub or in a lemmy app.

I wonder what proportion of awful.systems users view it via the web interface.

[–] rook@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Everyone and their dog uses mathjax or katex to render math client-side these days. I’m not gonna say that it would be trivial, but it also shouldn’t require you to get elbow-deep in lemmy’s own post-formatting code.

Unfortunately, there’s no obvious prior art that can be stolen here, and there’s only one slightly confused feature request in the lemmy-ui repo, so someone is going to have to nail all the bits together themselves.

[–] rook@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The austin allegro was far ahead of its time.

[–] rook@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)
[–] rook@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices

Haha, no. Flat UI was done for reasons of fashion, not efficiency. UI will always expand to consume the available memory and compute, regardless of how boring it looks. Exhibit A: Electron!

[–] rook@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

He will say what he thinks needs to be said, and the forced-birthers understand this. They haven’t defeated abortion yet and aren’t going to split their efforts, but they will continue to put pressure on ivf in the meantime. Remember, they weren’t always anti-abortion, and didn’t switch to it overnight! Their current position that life begins at conception necessarily conflicts with current ivf practises, and they’ll say they don’t disapprove of ivf in principle, and they might even have a friend who’s getting ivf, but talk is cheap and they’ll absolutely oppose any legislation that tries to guarantee access to it. Which is precisely what is happening.

[–] rook@awful.systems 3 points 1 month ago

They can sell out to someone else instead? Amazon seems to want to be an AI company, for example, and their current offering isn’t great even by the relaxed standards of LLMs.

[–] rook@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago

I’ve taken to calling the constant background sprinkles and unnecessary fine detail in gen ai images “greebles” after the modelling and cgi term. Not sure if they have a better or more commonplace name.

It’s funny, meaningless bullshit diagrams on whiteboards backgrounds of photos were a sure sign on PR shots or lazy set dressing, and now they’re everywhere signifying pretty much the same thing.

[–] rook@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago

He professed to have invented the video-sharing technology later made famous by Snapchat and TikTok.

Have a heart… the guy’s side-hustle in fluorocarbon refrigerants got poached, too.

[–] rook@awful.systems 16 points 1 month ago (7 children)

The reality is that some of us only have glimmers of sapience, and many not even that. Most humans, most of the time, are mindless zombies following a script

It’s a funny thing, that there are certain kinds of people who are assured of their own cleverness and so alienated from society that they think that echoing the same dehumanising blurb produced by so many of their forebears is somehow novel or informative, rather than just following a script.

(the irony of responding with an xkcd is not lost on me)

Much like the promptfondlers proudly claiming they are stochastic parrots, flaunting your inability to recognise intelligence in other humans isn’t a great flex.

[–] rook@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago

Not sure where there’s a good summary of the drama, but it started (I think) back in February with some serious concerns about transphobic moderation on tumblr. Openly trans user predstrogen posted

I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere

and he took it a bit too seriously, including banning them for dubious reasons then looking them up on twitter and listing all their old alt account names to their followers, because he’s totally not a transphobic stalker y’all and this is a reasonable thing to do when you’re worth half a billion.

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