Unless you were largely cognisant during the late 90s, it's very hard to get across to you just _how_ bristling with positive energy computing was back then, just **look** at this opening screen, it screams "ARE YOU READY TO LEARN MOTHERF*CKER?!".
It has dolphins, in the clouds. How many smartphone apps welcome you with dolphins in clouds?
I'm seeing trees being severely water stressed, losing their leaves as if it was October, but in June.
Who knew that our local flora was never meant to handle three days above 40, including one at 43°C.
How long before food production is visibly affected?
Being a parent means having dysney songs in your head permanently. Even when you don't want it. Even when you don't like it.
I have to let it go. Let it go! Can't hold it back anymooore
Today 10 years ago was the UK's big morning after... The morning after the referendum, with the dizzying realization that Brexit would indeed become a bitter reality, though no one fully knew at the time just what a shit show it would turn into, bringing out the worst in UK politics, revealing a deep national (though mostly English) insular psyche which still refuses to grasp its post-empire status and feeds on false nostalgia of an imagined past. What followed has been, in part, a not-so-slow mask-off moment/period, a self-imposed descent into a political pit, still struggling to find its bottom, even a decade later...
It also was the last day of a coding workshop I ran with a group of 10 people in our kitchen in Muswell Hill. Everyone was gobsmacked, full of disbelief that it actually happened, including the two people who had voted Leave "to send a message", not actually believing it would make a difference. The result and barrage of news reports and immediate implications was the sole topic we could talk about in our breaks. I and other immigrant workshop members started worrying in earnest about our families' future in a country/culture, which would soon turn on us and to which I'd already given 18 years of my life back then, where my kids were born in and which I considered my family's home.
Within hours, the pound dropped to its lowest level since 1985. News emerged that Vote Leave insider traders shorted the country's currency and made hundreds of millions overnight. Cameron resigned, initially having called the referendum to ward off rightwing challengers, confident the referendum would cement his power, now was washing his hands clean of any responsibility, and firing the opening salvo for the ongoing downward spiral of UK politics with 5½ prime ministers since (somehow each one worse than their predecessor), intensifying nationalism, erosion/perversion of basic civil & human rights, rising pollution, inequality, hostility towards immigrants...
Immediately after the result announcement and resignation, politicians who'd actively campaigned for Remain previously, now were loudly voicing support for the absolute harshest form of "Brexit means Brexit": Total severance. UK pensioners who had retired to more comfortable lives in France & Spain (many of whom still voted Leave), started realizing they've just signed away their own rights & future. People with any Irish/EU ancestry rushing to apply for dual-nationality and new passports. "Go home" & "vermin" graffiti appearing all over the country, racial hate crimes rising sharply. Taking back Britain. Neighbors first "politely" inquiring when (not if) we would consider "moving back home" or feigning surprise "oh, you're still here?!"...
That June morning was the first major blow of the year, followed by a second one just four months later in early November. The feeling of shock and the conversations at work the morning after the US election like a Deja-vu. Long faces, long silences, colleagues in tears and disbelief. My own plans to migrate to the US put on hold. In the evening I was watching from my 9th floor hotel room window the Portland riot exploding on the streets directly below. Flash bangs & tear gas going off, people getting arrested and badly hurt...
Politics follows people. And it's exactly this what's scaring me the most. How can we hope to build a brighter, peaceful, livable future if 30-40% of people are actively wanting it darker... Not just in the UK or US, a large enough percentage of the populace everywhere is voting for the same kind of disastrous, damaging (and damaged) people, for more hostility, inequality, corruption, not just once, but repeatedly, out of spite, egoism or other harmful purpose...
Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0nmHymgM7Y
(Even though I know this song was deeply personal and related to Leonard's own nearing end, I always found it to be the perfect soundtrack for 2016, the year of its release and for Brexit as harbinger of Weltschmerz growing over the past decade...)
The past few days I've had to put an alarm at 5 am to open the windows in the hope of getting the temperature down in the house.
Yesterday evening we reached 34C in the house, that's despite being **very** careful about keeping the blinds closed, not cooking, etc.
Outdoor temperature has reached 40, then 43 on Monday and Tuesday, 42 today and 41 tomorrow.
My kids are understandably tired and cranky.
There's no other way to put this: this fucking sucks, and I'm getting increasingly angry at the general climate inaction.
We keep seeing people flying away for a fucking weekend and selling it as sexy, we keep eating beef, we still buy gas, we don't install heat pumps.
We're in June, I'm increasingly getting the feeling that this isn't even the worse we're going to see this year.
#ClimateDiary “Above is a fictional weather forecast for August 18, 2050, broadcast by French television in 2014, intended to warn against the disastrous consequences of global warming.
Below is the weather forecast for June 22, 2026.”
(By @jakubwiech on unmentionable)
This brings out super starkly how #ClimateChange has accelerated so much more quickly than we thought even just 12 years ago.
We know we will need gigatons of durable carbon removals alongside deep mitigation to reach net-zero emissions globally and eventually stabilize (and reduce) global temperatures. And to do that we need to use the 2030s to develop and mature these technologies.
🛠️ sbt 2.0.0 is released
sbt 2.0 is a new major series of sbt, based on Scala 3 constructs and Bazel-compatible cache system. many thanks to Scala Center, Anatolii Kmetiuk (new maintainer), Adrien Piquerez (alumni), and other volunteers like Kenji Yoshida
https://eed3si9n.com/sbt-2.0.0 #Scala
I'm a software developer and sysadmin who could really use being #fedihired.
What I'd really like to do is Rust, but once you ignore the dubious scammy stuff, there seems to be nothing out there. Prove me wrong with a counterexample!
I've spent decades fixing Enterprise mudballs mostly written in #Perl. If you've got a crufty legacy system that everybody else is too scared to touch, I'm your man. I love fixing stuff like that.
I've also done commercial #Scala, #Python, #C/#C++, and although I don't usually admit it on my CV but these are now Trying Times when everything is on the table, even #PHP (the longest six months of my life).
Perl naturally leads into Unix system administration and infrastructure. I've built and maintained mail clusters, VoIP systems, network monitoring, DNS management platforms, that sort of thing. If it's non-sexy but something which needs to be done, I'm there.
Available immediately, for contract or permie, onsite in Amsterdam/Randstad or remote to anywhere.
Drop me a private mention or mail peter@mooli.net if you have or know of something.
I saw this excellent interview with @ohd about the French - German - Dutch collaboration building #opensource office suites together. 🇪🇺
A relatable part:
"Technical collaboration is one thing. But collaboration between administrative cultures is quite another! [..] Olivier humorously recalls the omission of beer during a shared meal - an unforgivable cultural faux pas for the German and Dutch partners!" 😂🫶
Great article by the @EUCommission 's OSOR:
https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/how-france-germany-and-netherlands-co-developed-public-tools
🇳🇱🇩🇪🇨🇵
Douglas Adams explains the fear of #AI
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
something I'm finding frustrating recently is
a) I feel like LLMs have helped me learn some programming things that were hard for me to learn previously
b) I'm tired of LLMs being relentlessly pushed on us and do not want to participate in that by talking about my positive experiences
c) there are also lots of hazards associated with using LLMs to generate code that are not that easy to avoid
While I’m down the QR code rabbit hole, here is another one.
Cover any corners to make the decoder latch onto the others.
🚀 @humancoders cherche un·e formateur·rice freelance CUDA.
Si tu es à l’aise en programmation GPU et que tu as envie de transmettre, ce thread est pour toi 👇
This week's comic: The dangers of solar panels
As a contractor at the Guardian I have access to the photography feeds, where agencies are pushing photos of all sorts of events around the world. Wars, sport, festivals, documentaries etc. It's a mesmerising continuous stream of the best and worst of humanity in a single place.
Today's contrast is very striking, you get the glamour of the Cannes festival, red carpet fancy dresses... and 600km north of that, the french military doing drone exercises in preparation for war.
Graph of the day: in just 2 years, batteries have replaced gas turbines as the firming generators for the morning/evening peaks in Queensland. Now *that’s* a disruptive technology.
Are we still debating the "counting Rs" as a lack of intelligence for LLMs? I'm seeing another post in my timeline.
Either it's a joke and yeah haha, that's funny. Or is a complete misunderstanding of how the technology works and is akin to saying a blind person can't count fingers.
Counting letters is not a benchmark of intelligence if you can't see letters. And by focusing on that detail we're missing the pace at which these models are developing new abilities.
Now whether you want to call it intelligence or not feels like a more productive conversation.