Shit, is that being considered?

I can’t imagine it’s going to be very long before Elon’s hostile attitude toward basic safety results in a high-profile catastrophy involving human deaths under the ospices of Space X.

Honestly, this isn’t much of a hypothetical for me. At work, my choices are Windows, Mac, or Ubuntu. I’m quite happy with Ubuntu, though I’ve switched away from the default desktop environment to i3.

I use Arch (BTW) on my personal systems. And Ubuntu isn’t as bad as I worried it would be.

My main gripe is snaps. Firefox is practically unusable as a snap. And my employer forbids installing any software (save for a select list of exceptions) not via the officially-supported Ubuntu way of doing things. Chrome is available without snap, so I use it on my work machine. Which annoys me, but if I’m less efficient in my job as a result, it’s their own fault.

I was really excited for CJDNS (not to be confused with “Domain Name System”) at one time. It’s a mesh networking protocol. And they’d established an “Internet 2” (as in, a sequel to “The Internet”) based on the CJDNS protocol called “Hyperborea.”

I haven’t heard anything about CJDNS in a good while now. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other efforts looking to do something roughly the same, but I’m not up to date on anything more recent.

Llama is not Open Source

I kindof hate the slogan “they go low, we go high” (from Hillary’s campaign.)

But this is an example of the “good” side of that slogan. The political left(-of-what-passes-for-center-in-the-U.S.-now-a-days) isn’t given to publicly calling for assassinations of the opposition party. It’s not even given (and, yes, there are exceptions) to calling privately for assassinations of the opposition. And that’s a good thing.

It means the left(-of-U.S.-center) hasn’t turned into the fascist-dictatorship-trying-to-happen that the right has. It’s not the left(-of-U.S.-center) calling for civil war and pandering to creeps who chant “blood and soil” while carrying tiki torches around the capital.

The day left(-of-U.S.-center) news sources delight in assassinations even of opposition as dangerously unhinged and power hungry as Trump because that sentiment started with snide remarks like yours is the day we have to worry that maybe the Democrats are sliding into their own brand of fascism.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m for radical support of LGBT rights, womens’ autonomy in matters of personal health, universal free healthcare, and most other “liberal” causes. (I also identify as well left and libertarian-ward of the Democratic party and would love to see “to each according to need” be our modus operandi. I’m also for direct action.) I don’t fault the Democrats for being “too radical” by a long shot. (More likely, the Democrats will continue to be far too willing to let the Republicans control the narrative and cheat their way to political power. And that’s the bad side of “they go low, we go high”) And I don’t believe it’s very likely that the Democrats will slide into widespread advocacy for political violence like the Republicans have much more so already.

But taking delight in assassination attempts and wishing they’d been successful – even those directed at Cheeto-flavored Hitler himself – isn’t helpful.

All that said, I get it. I’m pissed at the U.S.'s descent toward fascism, too. But wishing him assassinated isn’t going to change anything for the better.

The README in the repo indicates it’s based on the NEO-PI, which is kindof the gold standard in personality tests at least right now from what I understand.

Book recommendation for folks who might want to know more about the topic of personality psychology. Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being by Dr. Brian Little.

if you want to take OpenAI’s own research into account

No thank you.

OlympicArena validation set (text-only)

“Our extensive evaluations reveal that even advanced models like GPT-4o only achieve a 39.97% overall accuracy (28.67% for mathematics and 29.71% for physics)”

• The OlympicArena analysis that you cited.

Source?

Unlike this year when LLMs are more of a huge scam.

In this thread: Cryptobros downvoting every realistic take on cryptocurrency for being “bearish” and “FUD”.

Damn. I really wanted that article to show me photos/videos of transparent-skinned mice.

I write Java for a paycheck, but I really hate it.

It feels like everything is layers and layers of overengineered cruft, each added to the precarious tower for something extremely minor. But every subsequent card in the house of cards makes it more precarious. “But look, I don’t have to write accessors.” “But look, I eliminated the need for the web.xml file.” “But look, I don’t have to understand SQL now.” But look, the codebase depends on a shit-ton of completely opaque Automagic™ that you have no hope of understanding the moment something goes wrong – which it will if you even think of changing your Java version. And since it’s practically impossible to understand what’s going on under-the-hood of whichever dependency is fubar’d this week, you have to resort to a mixture of trial-and-error and copy-pasting shit (that you also don’t understand) from StackOverflow and praying to Cthulhu something works – which is also trial-and-error because Java questions in particular have tons of just straight up wrong answers.

To be fair, I’m the guy on my team who people come to when they run into those sorts of “I bumped up one subminor version of Mockito to fix a bug that was preventing my unit test from working but now literally half of our unit tests won’t build” or “I added the war plugin to the build.gradle and now SwaggerUI is broken.” So maybe I see more than my fair share of “well shit, I guess I’ll just spend the next three hours hunting down which magical combination of Jar version numbers will fix things” kind of problems. But damn. This shit didn’t ever happen back when I was doing Python for a paycheck.

I don’t use Java if I don’t have to. If I have to use Java, I prefer to just use Servlets (mostly I do web development) and absolutely as few dependencies as I can possibly get away with. Fewer moving parts mean less that can break.

The other three quarters are just scared that Elom will sue them if they cut advertising.

(Not really. I suspect many of the other 75% just aren’t willing to admit they’re planning to loosen ties with Twitter (I will not call it “X”) just yet.)

Sweet! Now let’s all go commence scowling at Redis until they do the same.

I’m just speaking from their history. Like when they embraced Java, built their own JVM, shipped it with Windows, and then forked the Java language by adding Windows-specific APIs to Microsoft Java and not adding the Java 1.2 features to Microsoft Java. You can’t convince me their aim all along wasn’t specifically to kill Java, and cross-platform technologies like it. The whole “Windows tax” thing is another good example. And “Open Core.”

And, who knows. Maybe they’re either nicer now or less competent at that kind of evil. But if so, that’s a relatively new thing. Their history as a company is full of (not-so-)“secretly planning to control the world”. And they have never really faced any consequences for their anti-trust violations. And if they didn’t want people to hold grudges, maybe they should have thought of that before fucking everyone over as thoroughly as they possibly could.

I guess you could say Microsoft was perfecting the art of enshittification before it became such a pervasive thing. Plus, I largely blame Gates personally for the rise of the institution of proprietary software, which is also complete BS.

Mind you, I don’t blame you for working for Microsoft or anything. No ethical consumption (or employment) under capitalism and all that. And it’s not like I’m not doing evil things on a regular basis as an employee where I work.

Microsoft gives the Wine team infectious mononucleosis. Got it.

But seriously, Microsoft is nobody’s friend and shouldn’t be trusted.

Yeah, if I had just fucked over the world to the tune of $1 billion, I’d probably be deflecting attention to threats other than me too.

Edit: Typo.

To be fair, the team at the time was all business majors. (Is “Computer Information Systems” what they call that degree most places or just at my alma mater?) I think I was the only computer science major there.

They’d done a surprisingly admirable job of cobbling together a working e-commerce, loss prevention, customer sercvice portal, orderfulfillment, and CMS suite. And their schooling was in, like, finance, MS Office, and maybe one semester on actual programming.

None of them had ever learned how to count in binary. Let alone been exposed to 2’s compliment. And there were no QA engineers.

Oh, there was the sysadmin. He had a temper and was a cowboy. If you asked him to do something, it’d be fuckin’ done, man. But you did not want to know how he made sausage. The boss asked him to set up a way for us to do code reviews and he installed Atlassian Fisheye/Crucible on a laptop under his desk. We used that for years. And a lot of the business logic of the customer-facing e-commerce site lived in the rewrite rules in the Apache config that only he had access to and no one else could decipher if they did have access.

Those were good times. Good times.

Back when I was the “new guy” code monkey at a fairly sizeable brick-and-mortor-and-e-retailer, I let the intrusive thoughts win and did some impromptu QA on the e-commerce site. (In the test environment. Don’t worry.)

It handled things like trying to put “0” or “-1” or “9999999999999” or “argyle” quantity of an item in the cart just fine.

But I know my 2’s-compliment signed integers. So I tried putting “0xFFFFFFFF” quantity of an item in my cart. Lo and behold, there was now -1 quantity of that item in my cart and my subtotal was also negative. I could also do things like put a $100.00 thing in the cart and then -1 quantity of something that cost $99.00 in the cart and have a $1.00 subtotal.

(IIRC, there was some issue with McDonalds ordering kiosks at one time where you could compose an order with negative quantities of things to get an arbitrarily large unauthorized discount.)

The rest of my team thought I was a fucking genius from that moment on. I highly recommend if you’re ever the “new guy” dev on a team and want to appear indispensible, find a bug that it would never occur to a QA engineer who doesn’t have a computer science degree to even test for.