I met some sleepy bees this morning, a swamp harrier hunting for breakfast, and cute magpie (who was alone and a bit picked on judging by the state of their head feathers). I also managed to sneak a closer look at the goldfinch nest in my rose bush - 4 eggs!
#PollenDreams #Photography #Bees #Birds

@Heliograph A few contributing factors. I only order food once a month (and they don't last long). I'm not very food-motivated, and now that I live alone, it often feels hard to justify a spendy treat.

Maybe I'll get one next month, though!

@Heliograph Yum! It's been ages since I had one :(

@Heliograph They are so good

The Economy is an insatiable beast and I don't think feeding it more humans for monsters to profit off of is actually the answer.

@joannaholman Absolutely not advocating patting wild animals, but if you happen to come across a not-wild one that's comfortable with being touched, they are surprisingly soft (especially when their quills are relaxed)

Despite more than usual reasons to not pat the wildlife, I was still tempted for this adorable puggle/young shortbeaked echidna/spiky puppy

#wildlife #wildoz

I read a lot of newsletters and whatever about the tech industry and finance and labour and it consistently annoys me that the majority of people writing about this loudly are dudes. recommend me your favourite tech/finance/work blogs and newsletters written by not dudes please!! assume I know none of the obvious ones, I’d rather get redundant recs than miss a good one

And to be clear, I'd love it if you bought other people's stuff. If you feel like you got more value from something than you paid for it, you can buy again to make up the difference (Itch lets you do that!). Support the people who make the stuff you like!

Itch are doing a Creator Day event again. I'm very happy for people to buy my works afterward this so that Itch receive their cut, but I think that this event's framing of supporting creators as worthwhile is very, very important.
https://itch.io/blog/839981/the-autumn-sale-starts-this-wednesday-plus-creator-day-on-friday

@jsbarretto Possibly! I deleted all my GitHub repos when Microsoft acquired it, so my own projects (which never really got a lot of contributions) are insulated from the immediacy of the cultural shift happening there.

But for more direct collaborations and for community events, I can feel a lot of my motivation sapped away as this stuff becomes more and more normalised

@jsbarretto But I also don't know how effectively I can enforce that kind of rule. It increasingly makes me less excited about working with others because micromanaging my collaborators' work isn't the kind of working relationship I want to have. That's a real bummer.

@jsbarretto I think this is where I end up as well.

I think there's also the aspect that human-authored contributions have a higher likelihood of being from people who are invested in their work, who are able to discuss and share insights, who will ask for help, who will want to be a part of and contribute to building community

@jsbarretto That's the impression I get, yeah.

I guess when you see yourself as a herald of some new age, it's easy to overlook/ignore/minimise the negative impact on others (and society at large/the environment/etc.?). I saw the same with people who put increasing pressure on me to bring NFT nonsense into my work. It didn't matter that they were wasting my time - it seemed that in their eyes, I was the one at fault for being "stuck in the past."

I think LLMs constitute in a real way a potential "end" of software. if they have their way we are going to start producing generations of people who cannot actually write software anymore, and it's completely unclear in that scenario how software maintenance let alone production is supposed to happen. who is maintaining the Linux kernel in this world. who is maintaining Python, CUDA, all of the conventional software that makes up the world and, incidentally, lays the foundation for LLMs themselves.

the guy in this PR is not doing it, and this is the kind of guy LLMs produce. in the near term he is an enormous waste of time and resources which is a wrench in the already precarious machine that is software production. but in the long term if the project of LLMs wins this guy is the baseline software developer, having known nothing but AI generated code his whole life and career, having never struggled to make a computer program do what he wanted it to do, bending his brain into the appropriate shapes to think in terms of computation. just "prompt engineering" and an insistence that the face he sees in the cloud sees him too.

I've had two conversations with people where I asked who is maintaining Linux kernel in this scenario and the answer on both occasions was that the expectation was that the models would get good enough that they could do it with good prompting. and, like, I don't know how to interpret that other than the end of software as a human project.

Very late Fossil Sweeper dev stream starting in just a minute https://twitch.tv/valiantcheese