One of many things that's irksome about "are LLMs conscious" discourse is that humans are by and large fucking awful at telling what is and isn't conscious.

People got vibesick over ELIZA for fuck's sake! A lot of people playing Portal got broken up over melting down the Weighted Companion Cube, which is categorically inert even in the plot of the game.

At the same time, a lot of folks reject the humanity of neurodiverse people or people of color. We plain suck at determining consciousness.

Andromeda in Southern Spring
Image Credit: Lucy Yunxi Hu

Explanation: Looking toward the north from Mullion, New South Wales, Australia, the Andromeda Galaxy never gets more than a few degrees above the horizon. During the southern hemisphere spring, Andromeda is highest in the sky around midnight though. And in this telephoto scene from October 10/11, multiple exposures were used to reveal the spiral galaxy in tantalizing detail as it climbed above rolling Australian hills. Also known as M31, the Andromeda Galaxy is one of the brightest objects in the Messier catalog, but is only visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch. Digitally tracked and stacked frames were combined with a foreground shot in the deep astro-image composite to reveal the galaxy's greater extent in planet Earth's night. In the springtime night skyscape,the closest large spiral galaxy spans nearly 6 full moons.

https://science.nasa.gov/image-article/apod-2026-october-23-andromeda-in-southern-spring/ #apod

Gonna have to figure out why a woman keeps getting excluded from a discussion on things she’s leading. Sure I’m advising, but it’s not my project, stop asking me first.

I mean, I know why, but gotta navigate correcting this behavior.

who remembers pc load letter

RE: https://glammr.us/@jessamyn/117487748124291597

Everyone that works for a Silicon Valley company should have to read Jessamyn’s field reports of people trying to use their devices, then think about their own product quality, then make appropriate changes.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@datarama/117486006336793759

I’ll second all of this. PHP is a great example of how great people can do great work with flawed tools. And aren’t all of our tools flawed? Isn’t all good engineering this way? Isn’t the last mile of all truly good work a human solving the problems they have with the choices they have? Shouldn’t we tip our cap to every human who sees the work through that arduous last mile? I certainly do, especially this week.

Guess which project that just had *24* sweet hours of not a single vuln report coming in? This is like holiday. Wohoo. ⛱️ 🍹 😎

@dpnash @the_etrain mmmm yellowcake

RIP to the closed caption workforce, tossed aside by AI generated slop that can’t discern jargon, accents, idiom, slang and all the things that actual humans can understand and transcribe. I feel sorry for deaf people who use streaming services that use that garbage.

@lune @jcoglan

When people say 'this is possible only with LLM-generated programming' what they often actually means is 'this is possible only with massively subsidised automation'. An LLM is probably not the most efficient way of getting to the end point, but when the compute for the LLM is subsidised by a factor of 10-100x, if the other technique requires 20% as much compute it's still vastly more expensive if you can't burn someone else's money on it.

@mhoye Interestingly enough, this means not only that there weren't any minoritised people in the room, but also *no people that take any pride in their work*. Obviously the racism is weird and icky, but even taking that out, plagiarising from a white guy who was actually good at his work would still be aggravating.

Which means that everyone in that room was a mediocrity.

@davidgerard On an extremely cursory look at the patch diff, the code is of course awful because it's in C, but it looks like human-writen awful C. No obvious AI "tells" have jumped out at me. The tests even appear to test the fixes rather than just print "yeah, everything's just fine, ship it".

It looks like several people have in fact put in quite a heroic effort to fix this, for which they should get a commendation, but it's a shame that they have to waste their talents on this unmaintainable mudball.

If you are going to post that PHP is a bad language and nobody should be using it now, you are tone deaf and I am going to unfollow you and possibly even block you.

This is not a good time to be ranting while sysadmins are scrambling around trying to do the upgrades for their users.

Moxxi has forgotten the meaning of "take it" and is offering whatever this shit is 😂

(We haven't trained much with the reno madness so we're both rusty)

#Mondog #Dogs #DogsOfMastodon #Corgi #CorgisOfMastodon #Mastodogs #DogsOfFediverse #FediDogs

Without this DEI program, I wouldn't have worked in IT. Again, grateful to Capgemini ❤️

Unfortunately I now worked in corporate IT. I was the only woman in every team. A self taught junior dev. The micro aggressions that I had to deal were _insane_.

Daily:
- expected to get coffee and take notes
- ignored, side eyed or talked over
- expected to write CSS as a Java dev because "girls are good at that"
- SO MANY weird and inappropriate jokes and comments
- weird invites to a senior devs house

*licks your password* That's not expired. It's still good.

But is anyone else disgusted that it was the gas prices that moved a good chunk of the country and not the ethnic cleansing?

Sorry to make it about AI (why does everything have to be about AI now) but at a time when volunteer communities are tearing themselves apart both from the acrimony about the tech itself *and* the false sense that it can give you that You Can Do It On Your Own, You Just Need One More Prompt, the sight of a half a dozen people just typing some HTML whenever they had a few spare minutes to help out with a meaningful project that could make the world a lot better was honestly pretty moving

suggesting that people give up their ability to learn a skill in order to instead rent it out from an unauditable, unknowable, unquestionable third party that has disempowered people who already have that skill

is not fucking democracy

that is the opposite of democracy

that is creating a central, unquestionable authority that is not beholden to you.

also?  "democratizing skills"?  You do not have a *right* to the skills of other people.  So even if this authoritarian style enclosure wasn't already making a mockery of the term, the fact that it's literally built on the stolen labor of the individuals who it is disempowering (by removing their ability to gain pay for their work) IS NOT DEMOCRACY.

The first sentence of the abstract for the physics department colloquium this week should win some sort of award for understatement:

"Fusion energy promises to produce clean and safe electricity on a large scale, but it still faces some challenges"