https://social.coop/@cwebber/117468157927856842

@foolishowl Reply to a deleted message. SOrry =P

@foolishowl Perl really fit the bill for people used to Unix... it combines a lot of stuff from sh, sed, awk, etc. If you aren't used to Unix, that has to be incredibly alien tho. And I think there was a BASIC effect or ASP effect... a shitton of people learn to program in Perl (then PHP) during the dot-com boom where anyone could make money with no prior experience, and that created a flood of extremely poorly thought out, buggy, awkward code. Ironically Java for a time was the super serious ivory tower language that only super serious senior level programmers programmed in, so CompSci classes started all using it and teaching it, then four or five years later, the market was flooded with inexperienced programmers who wrote poorly thought out, badly structured, buggy Java, until there was terrible Java everywhere. I think any programming language that becomes essentially "the learning language" suffers a pendulum swing like that. But I think it was worse with Perl... a lot of Perl programmers were incredibly arrogant, maybe not unlike some Linux hackers. I leaned in to that for a while. That arrogance keeps you from seeing yourself honestly. There was an incredible contrast for me tho between Java shops having a spirit of collaboration and mentoring and Perl shops being dog-eat-dog and every person for themselves. This is a social problem, but Java having a type system helped a lot... it at least discouraged changing code and breaking everyone else's code. It didn't prevent it of course but type signatures helped create a norm. Wanting to see more collaboration in Perl, I created a typing system and did some talks, but never got any buy-in. In the later years, a lot of people talked about how it's possible to write good Perl with good docs, and a lot of people started doing. But otoh I had/have a coworker who goes hard on doing the opposite, documenting nothing except ultra terse commit messages, and belittling anyone who asks any questions about what he did or why he did it that way etc. I think that shit is what really gave Perl the bad rep.

There isn't enough interesting shit or cool people on Mastodon. I have to go back to LinkedIn. It's required.
Am I doing this right?

I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that datacenters in the US are operating legions of political puppet accounts too.
Correct the Record etc were paying foreign workers overseas to do this just a few short years ago. You couldn't make fun of the ruling elite without getting swarmed with WELL ACTUALLY replies.
Kicking Threads to the curb must have been a big blow there. Doubtless bots are sneaking in but people being empowered to catch them and call them out is powerful and as it should be. I was documenting coordinated 9-5 PR for Threads when that was still up for debate (maybe it's still going on, who knows) and calling that out.
Advertising shits in your head. Especially political influencing.

Media mail should include seeds. #InformationWantsToBeFree

tl;dr "are LLMs concious" is not the question. What the absolute fuck happened or was done to pervert the membership and actor safety instincts we developed over millions of years is. Empathy is fucking precious. It's our own survival. Directing it correctly is a matter of life and death. And it's been redirected.

Long reply I wrote yesterday on conciousness. AI researchers and anthrpologists etc have been talking about this for a long time but like "intelligence", it's complex. I'm reminded of stories of ants patting down other ants with their antenna to see if they smell right. And I guess also dogs sniffing you, and cats watching you, to decide if you're safe. That's a list of some things that make us tend to ascribe conciousness or agency or whatever to something or someone.

I wrote about billionaires with one example score on the general human "ascribing agency test". Billionaires in general, having a terrible grasp of other people's state of mind. They fail to demonstrate empathy. But we scribe a high level of intelligence to them. And we ascribe a high level of shared cultural/shared norms with them, except for some things like crashing ten thousand ton yachts in to coral reefs which is completely fucking alien to a lot of us but appeals to the "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" in others. So rich people fit in to an uncanny valley where some people see them as human or super human and other people see them as vampires. This more or less boils down to 1. do they have planning abilities and self-preservation instincts and 2. does the degree of the self-preservation extend to cooperation and community (anthropologists call this "reciprocity")? It sure as fuck does for dogs and cats.

But that begs yet another question... have general human populations... petite bourgeoisie, working people including the "temporarily embarrassed", etc... lost so much of the community safety instinct, so much of the demanding empathy as a baseline for participation in society, and our shared values so out of whack that we just no longer are able enforce this safety check, that we evolved as a fundamental part of our survival?

If we let billionaires in but not the working poor, and we let corporate judas facades in through this evolved safety filter but dehumanize entire races and genders, maybe we should be asking what the fuck is wrong with us, not what's wrong with LLMs.

https://bsd.network/@scrottie/117372780104323956

linode emailed me and told me they're going to reboot my Slackware 12 VM:

root@li25-98:/home/httpd# uptime
07:21:08 up 399 days, 3:18, 11 users, load average: 0.02, 0.01, 0.00
root@li25-98:/home/httpd# cat /etc/*version*
Slackware 12.0.0
root@li25-98:/home/httpd# ls -la /etc/slackware-version
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17 2007-06-10 02:23 /etc/slackware-version
root@li25-98:/home/httpd# perl -e 'print 2026-2007;'
19
root@li25-98:/home/httpd# uname -a
Linux li25-98 6.14.3-x86-linode188 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Mon Apr 21 19:30:51 EDT 2025 i686 AMD EPYC 7642 48-Core Processor AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

Please sign my change.org petition demanding it's fine leave it alone.

Stop calling Signal "the secure messaging app". It runs on AWS. It's centralized. Amazon can peek in to whatever crypto they're doing inside the VM. There are already reports of nation state actors gaining device access. Just because some crypto is solid doesn't mean the whole thing is solid. Like anything, it is only as good as its weakest link, or as Bruce famously said, a lot of information security works by putting a post in the ground and hoping the bad guys run in to it. Hell, call it "Signal the insecure messaging app".

ffs if you're ever in a position of saying "if I just look past all of the massive ethical concerns of dealing with this insanely evil giant corporation, I'll get something!" that itself should set off every fucking klaxon. You aren't going to get anything by overlooking how evil the evil company is except turbofucked.

Microsoft is bad at writing code but they're really, really fucking good at Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. LLMs giving developers nuggets of copyrighted code to paste in to their open source projects is developer assisted Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. It's Microsoft and the BSA against Linux and BSD all over again. #KDE #LLM #LLMs #FOSS

Everyone should read Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ just for the glimpse of Fundamental Attribution Error that managers and wanna-be-managers absolutely wallow in. This is accidentally such a fantastic illustration of the idea that if you're poor, you can't do anything right, and if you're rich, you can't do anything wrong.

beige.party also tickles me a funny way but I could probably get over it... I'm sure it's unintentional but my brain reads "beige" as "white people" which is fine if self-deprecating but still would feel like easily mistaked for elitism or -ism and my brain is just stuck on that. But ALSO this account is not that cool.

Halp! BSD isn't a major part of my whole deal* and I've been waffling a long time on a good spot for this account. I post too much politics for tech, too much trash for politics, too much tech for trash, too much furry for politics (and honestly just post too much). And this server seems to be limiting a lot of accounts etc I'm interested in. Help me decide where I should apply! No particular order, and other suggestions welcome:

* But I'm extremely grateful for the invite here that got me started on the Fediverse.

I liked it better when we as a society solved every problem using lasers. Need to measure some distance or temperature or about any kind of science? Lasers. Make streets and hung photos and building frame square? Lasers. Defending against enemy vessels? Lasers. Surgery? Lasers. Printing? Lasers. Video game controllers? Lasers. Make your Sears Portrait Studio look awesome? That's right, fucking lasers.

But think of all of the jobs the data centers are going to create, like "oil war soldier"! /sarcastic

#caturday #peppers

2000s: The textbook costs $100, but it was written by one of the absolutely most respected people in the field. People keep their copies forever and continue to refer back to it throughout their careers. It's worth getting the second edition which incorporates decades of small fixes to the original, but the first edition is fine too.

2026: The textbook costs $660 with required online learning access code. It was written by fake people under the command of a giant corporation. You have to the get the 32nd edition or you'll fail all of your exams because everything completely changes each year. The book reads like it was written by toddler and it's full of pointless garbage that just insults your intelligence. The online learning is even worse. You'd sell it as soon as you could except it is completely worthless the instant you bought it.