Sometimes Google lens wins.

Like making it easy to image search a "failures of socialism" propaganda image to be able to know it's the Studebaker plant in Detroit.

It is a sad day for deeply-misanthropic basement-dwellers everywhere.

"Hey babe, what you thinking about?"

"Oh, you know. Traditional vocal sounds without a direct meaning."

"... What?"

#Rokosbasilisk

"Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or a physicist what energy is."

Definitely not rescuing an online tool from archive.org, slapping it down in some hosting space I own, and field-stripping it into serviceability because it had become a part of my workflow and its creator got so mad about AI that he chucked his whole website to go live on a mountain or embrace the life of the humble dairy farmer, nosir.

That doesn't sound like how I'd spend a Saturday afternoon. You must be thinking of someone else.

(When I'm done with this, I intend to give the creator some credit - if I can figure out how, they seemed to like being anonymous. But I don't think I'll be publishing the URL, because they made a valid point: hosting costs money, and getting popular on the Internet can be a very double-edged sword. I'm lucky that my hosting is still from a grandfathered account from the early aughts where the baseload is a flat fee and if I blow up online one day they'll just pause the server and go "Mr. Tomczak, you took all our bits, we have to cut you off for the rest of this month, sorry.")

Oh dear.

I have tripped over some fluctuation in the algorithmic æther and now Facebook is showing me unlimited AI generated furry animations.

Folks... We're cooked. All arguments against AI generated imagery will collapse in front of the unyielding juggernaut that is "people can animate their fursonas without slaving over a hot blender for 3 weeks now."

I don't make the rules, I just recognize the patterns.

Cvs has installed faster receipt printers.

This is very funny to me.

"I don't get this genre of video that's just someone talking over footage of running an obstacle course in Minecraft. How does that hold anyone's interest?"

Me, who logged like 87 hours in Jet Set Radio Future in college: "... Yeah, I can't explain that."

So, #BigWalk is every bit as brilliant as I hoped it would be.

My only criticism to date is that there is no effect from shining laser pointers directly into a character's eyes, and that's maybe not even something the developer wants to encourage anyway, even in jest.

10/10 game of the year.

I should probably write a blog post about using AI for programming.

But I can boil it down to its essence right here: "I want to automate tasks on a Macintosh like opening an app and setting up my workstation after mandatory company-forced reboots, but I don't want to learn osascript. Again. Because I already did, back when it was called AppleScript.. And in the limit, learning every single language and tool deeply isn't worth the squeeze."

#ai #llm

Remember: the humans in your interspecies crew need social enrichment.

Not all species need, want, or enjoy sentience-to-sentience contact, but it's essential for humans. Their neurological wiring is deeply socially-fixated. If you cannot provide them contact with other humans, actively seek out volunteers in your crew to interact with them regularly. They will need high tolerance for myriad human behaviors (see related chapters), but this interaction is essential to your human's welfare.

A socially-isolated human becomes dangerously unstable, and the risk isn't self-destruction; it's creativity. On their home planet, they taught sand to think.

#TheSpaceCaptainsGuideToHumans

Experimenting a bit with MapQuest on news that they've decided to buck this whole renaming trend.

Regretfully, the renaming situation around the bodies of water has reminded me that Google has authority over probably more of my data than I should be comfortable with.

One downside to software engineering as a career is that your reward for caring so much about how things work that you go into software engineering is to spend almost all your time surrounded by things that don't work.

Hot damn #emacs .

Just when I think I've hit a roadblock and something is truly impossible, you hit me with "no really, I'm just a LISP engine someone implemented a text editor in."

unread-command-events is the nuclear option for forcing code to behave as if you literally invoked it from the keyboard. It pushes a key sequence into emacs's event handler as if the keys were literally typed.

I'm doing black magic with hydras and it's gross but it works. ;)

Each of the death ray tubes came with a heart-stopping machine in the back. For your convenience if you had too many moving hearts around and needed to stop one.

Thinking about the era of technology where the easiest way to display images was to take all the air out of a tube and point a death ray at your face.

It's fine though. There was a thin screen between you and the death ray that caught all the death and turned it into pretty colors.

My patience for 403 errors that don't self-document has basically run to zero.

Dear everyone in the security industry: it's the 21st goddamn century. The hackers already know the shape of the attack surface. If I'm feeding you a valid API key and the shape of the rest of the query is flawed, do everyone a favor and return a response that clarifies what's wrong with the query.

Stop hiding behind the assumption that the request comes from an attacker with partial information as an excuse to create a bad API.

The biggest challenge in software for most people is discoverability—there's a universe of capabilities behind that blinking cursor, but the cursor won't tell you what's there. Even having the tool tell you what it can do is fraught; do you get help by -h or --help or running the command bare or... The CLI's greatest strength is its greatest weakness; it gets out of the way and doesn't force anything on you but feeding it strings of text.

The biggest challenge in discoverability is the information is out there, but diffuse, poorly-indexed, and heterogeneous. You have unlimited potency if you RTF every M... But there are too many Ms now. It's not a practical thing to accomplish for the same reason that you can't read every book published each year. HTML's greatest strength is its greatest weakness: it's thin and requires very little rigorous semantic structure.

... The biggest benefit to AI code assistance is it's read all the manuals. And now that we're here, I doubt we're ever going back. Going back is like making people learn Linux with no manpages or Internet access.

So how do we go forward without burning the world.

#ai #llm

If chatting with AI you like
Or Bluesky you like
Or hot takes you like
Or deep fakes you like
Or cheering crooks you like
Or shredding books you like
Why nobody will oppose!