New to me personal infosec idea: the deadname canary.

https://mastodon.social/@fesshole/115758701342987137

This perspective on human performance is super interesting!

Many of our stories about "genius," "superstars," and high performers are grounded in assuming that the patterns of early learning will extrapolate to the rest of life - e.g., child prodigies, gifted students, and those with early steep curves on the achievement trajectory. But what happens when you expand the window of observation?

This all came from the office christmas meal. I didn’t go (hard to eat and drink in a mask!) even though I desperately miss the old days and really want that sort of communal social activity again, especially at this time of year.

Everyone else just considers it a risk worth taking, cos covid is just a cough, you know? 🫩

Update: 7 people are off ill. Two other people have lost their voices but are still in the office. A couple of other people are in the office coughing.

Only one person has tested positive for covid 🤔

@grimalkina @jannem @osunderdog

Young me: making robot doctors would be super hard, because it isn’t a job that’s just about knowing stuff.

Less old me: maybe a computer system would be better for some of this work, as it isn’t limited by the personal experience and prejudices of an individual doctor. Current ai couldn’t do this though, because it gets stuff wrong all the time and that would be bad and dangerous and no one would want that.

Current me: taking an awful lot of money and giving a confident diagnosis and solution with absolutely no guarantee that it is true, relevant or works at all and then immediately forgetting about you is absolutely something that both doctors and llms do 😕

I wanted a Christmas tree for our house, but the Bushwick vendors wanted too much money for even a tiny tree. So I printed perhaps the most unhinged 3-D print I’ve ever attempted. ”Oops, All Overhangs!” reliably triggered spaghetti warnings every half hour, until I figured out that turning off the light in the build chamber prevented the Bambu’s computer vision system from detecting this ~~abomination~~ extreme cleverness. https://makerworld.com/models/1949917

I’m hoping it won’t be as painful to learn as lean or rocq, where my intuition about how complex a problem is was just completely wrong (let’s prove fizz buzz! haha, no) and how there was a gulf in the teaching material between “prove baby’s first elementary arithmetic theorems” and literally anything else (see also, fizz buzz).

I’ve finally run into an unpleasant enough technical problem at work that I’m finally going to have to do some sort of formal model checking, presumably tla+ (but maybe alloy can do concurrency well enough these days?)

I don’t know anyone else who does this stuff, so I’m betting it’ll be Lots Of Fun to self-teach.

Overheard conversation at work today: (coughing) yeah, I’d rather be at work doing something than being stuck at home ill all day (further coughing) anyway, I don’t think I’m contagious now (cough)

😬

I’m so glad I still mask.

@bat I’m assuming that as there’s no ? at the end there, this is a polite request rather than a question.

@markgritter perl, of course, took it slightly too far, but does have this nice list of acceptable paired delimiters including gems like

꧁ ꧂ U+A9C1, U+A9C2 JAVANESE LEFT/RIGHT RERENGGAN

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlop#Quote-Like-Operators

When I have connectivity issues with codeberg, I know it is because they’re underfunded and some arsehole with a pointless grudge is ddos-ing them.

When it happens with github, I know it is because they have spent years making a gun which shoots them in their feet, and are working as hard as they can to sell that gun to everyone in the world, and is now trying to blame me for the fact they can’t stand up anymore.

@angelthorns the ones I’m thinking of were projected onto a human-shaped background, so they stood out from their surroundings. I’ve no idea what they were called and can’t seem to search for anything relevant. I’m fairly certain I didn’t imagine them.

Turns out the basic idea is back with holographic adverts, and they’re still too expensive for me to have encountered one but I guess that’s only a matter of time 😕

@angelthorns i remember a brief fad in projecting a short looping video of a person onto a person-shaped cardboard silhouette, sometimes with a voice track, someone’s triggered by movement or proximity. I remember one at a station warning people about slippery floors as they walked past.

I assume I wasn’t the only one to feel that was entirely too annoying and deep in the uncanny valley as I don’t see them anywhere now.

You've heard of 'what if the Ship of Theseus was sentient', but now it's time for 'what if Plato's Cave refused to show you any shadows that might offend the cave's sponsors or damage the cave's brand?

Most people are probably familiar with the whole “if you like sausages, never learn how they’re made” thing. In mature open source project land, you can not only learn about how a sausage was made, but you can see the complete and horrifying history of how the sausage factory came to be the way it is too.

Calibre has over ten thousand lines of build scripts. Not alarming enough? You deal with that much every day for breakfast?

How about twenty thousand lines of “rapydscript” which appears to be a python-like language that transpiles to javascript?

And that’s without even looking at the main application code 🙈 https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/115677592362638008

Made the mistake of watching youtube without filtering, and had to watch three ads for gemini ai video generation on quick succession, and the whole thing is kinda pathetic and desparate.

We’ve gone from promises of agi servants for everyone and new drug discovery and the solution for climate change, to “we can create a fake video of your dog on a red carpet”.

It’s fucking blingee.

I just went to look up this old James Mickens presentation for an unrelated reason, but he talks about mapreduce and word counting and that joke about counting words with sweatshop workers for pennies a day lands different now that AI companies are doing exactly that but for preventing horrors from showing up next to the brands that pay for AI placement.

https://youtu.be/3-GpiKQr9Rs?t=154

Saw someone saying that rust would never replace C (which, fair, it isn’t a “better C”) and also wouldn’t replace C++ because C++ would be able to do all the same things as rust in due course and…

I get that you don’t like rust, but hating another language to the point where it completely clouds your judgement is just bad, dude. The C++ committee is pretty dysfunctional, and given the ongoing slow motion failure that is safety profiles and the sidelining of circle c++, I’m wondering how anyone who isn’t herb sutter could think that everything is going great.

Two sentence horror.