The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.

I very much get a "we just discovered radium and want to put it in everything" vibe from this whole generative AI bubble.

(Including the thing where companies used to slap the word "radium" on existing products even though they thankfully did not actually have any radioactive materials. Like "radium butter".)

@charlesarthur All things old are new again! This paper from 1996 details how machine learning approaches produce "weird" but super-optimal chip designs. Proper evolution — the fittest design *in a given environment* wins, even if it uses things that like electron leakage through the substrate.

This has long been a staple in the field of RF design. If you open up an old Nokia "candy bar" phone, look at the weird, seemingly random shape of the antenna — same thing.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=772374b2392e99429a0964b02fb944a4b5d163c4

@mattblaze The people who think they are good at everything because they are good at coding are also bad at coding.

@gruber Safari's Tab Groups have essentially eliminated the problem for me.

Bonus: They sync reliably and quickly across devices, which — for some bizarre reason! — iCloud Tabs do not.

who called it "legend of zelda speedrunning" and not "link-time optimization"

Yes, the enthusiasm for NFTs has cratered, but we shouldn't use junk analysis to make that point. Too many news outlets uncritically reprinted a bad "study", and the resulting eye-catching headline was widely shared.

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/news-flash-95-of-nfts-have-always

Please don't share the credulous Rolling Stone or Guardian stories quoting a paper shouting that almost all NFTs are now worthless.

As @molly0xfff points out, almost all NFTs have ALWAYS been worthless. She explains this stuff better than anyone else: https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/news-flash-95-of-nfts-have-always?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1109312&post_id=137396341&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=qs4z&utm_medium=email

SO good -- the best follow the money reporting on who's behind the global attack on digital privacy yet.

TLDR: it's law enforcement x AI companies posing as NGOs w a commercial interest in selling scammy mass scanning tech. Deeply cynical, deeply shady.

https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content/

@cstross I know it's a joke, and I don't want to be Well Actually Guy, but… interestingly enough, these things fly with external radar reflectors fitted all the time. Even in contested airspace (like Syria) because the US doesn't want hostile powers to know exactly how stealthy they are.

I propose a day, once a quarter, where the team maintaining an open source project sits down with a new user and silently watches them try to compile it, using only the instructions on the website.

v:dw is by far the most useful acronym I've run across recently, much more relevant than tl;dr.

video: didn't watch.

@charlesarthur It's often been remarked that it's easiest to regard speed limits in Germany as being akin to gun regulation in the US. Majority opinion seemingly has little chance to overcome deeply entrenched interest groups, widespread "culture"… and people going on about "my freedom".

Breaking: Bluesky and Netflix announce AI joint venture to be named SkyNet.
#SkyNet

Trust me on this. You absolutely want to spend 10 minutes reading about this random pedestrian bridge in Minnesota.

https://tylervigen.com/the-mystery-of-the-bloomfield-bridge

#bridge #bridges #highways #civilenginerring #history #Minnesota

@mjg59 I remember the model numbers for most C64-era CBM products… and I was a ZX Spectrum owner.

Younger brains … something something?

@zip Somehow I misread "glib" as "glibc" and… it still works.

@ivory Aha, thanks! 😊

I wish I had the skills to write like this.

Twitter: “Burning down the house” https://defector.com/burning-down-the-house

@ivory On my Mac, clicking on Mastodon links in Safari opens them in Ivory, even if the "Open in Ivory" extension is disabled. Is there a way to avoid this without uninstalling Ivory?