https://youtu.be/aESqrP3hfi8

Mastodon is full of people like me, who got into computing through LISP or Unix or some other system that unfurls vast complex structures from interactions of simple rules. It's a delightful intellectual exercise, and a powerful device to express your cleverness and ability into incantations that have immediate time-saving effects.

But when I once tried to explain this feeling to a friend when I was at Uni in the 90s, she looked at my Slackware box that I was gushing about and asked me a question that stuck with me:

"Yeah, but can it do spellcheck?"

I mean, of *course* it could. The whole demo video for Unix in the 80s featured bwk demonstrating how you could write your own spellchecker in a quick shell pipeline! I could probably find all sorts of interactive curses-driven tools to make corrections easier, or drive everything through really plush EMACS macro sets. Why, I could...

No, that wasn't what she was trying to say to me. She was saying "I really don't see computers as an intellectual exercise: they're just a tool I have to use to write my papers, and I *need* it to be reliable and straightforward for me to do that." I was literally going out of my way to make things harder, because I saw a benefit to me in doing this. Most people can't justify that kind of time and attention on something.

So when I got back into cycling a decade ago, I vowed not to learn anything about bicycle mechanics. I can't even change a tyre: I just got the tyres that don't get punctures. I don't need to put a chain back on anything because I got a bike that doesn't lose its chain. I don't have to grease the chain because it's enclosed. If I have a problem, I take the bike to a local bike shop. Don't ask me about gear ratios: I just need it to do spellcheck at the press of a button!

Hormuz must be pretty gay if there's only one Strait

Daily doodle 164, Richeh and brushbuddy

#wha #dailydoodle #dailydrawing #MastoArt #sketchbook #inking

Exactly 3 billion devices run Java. Every time you install Java on your computer some old DVR or something explodes to maintain the balance

Every hobby starts with curiosity and ends with storage problems.

6 years of research: "The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism—the tendency to be self-centered & entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status—& the more they favored return-to-office mandates."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597826000300

An elderly neighbour left a 70 minute butt-dialed voice note on the street chat last night. Its entirely white noise.

This is what WhatsApp's "transcribe" feature thinks it says.

Col. Reviera blinked.
Hull vibrations brought her back to the reality, the ship computer restarted for recalibration.

And by that the wormhole passage was over.

'Contol, this is Col Reviera speaking, do you copy?' she started out of habit.

Instead of all the sci-fi kerfuffle, her mind went into the future and back again as if riding on a merry-go-round horse. And the conductor showed her the future of humanity.

'Control, this message will arrive in 4000 years, and I don't know if you'll be expecting this message by then.

But I'll stay here, I think I want to build a better humanity. Over and out'

2/2
#microfiction

Nothing had prepared Col. Susan Reviera towards any of this, now that she was the first human ever doing this.

'All systems on go! I am entering the hole.' she acknowledged to space control, which in turn waved her good luck.

As Riviera switched quantum gears to turn her one-person-ship into the shimmery wormhole, the expected quakes went through the hull of her spacecraft.

Now would come the gooey tunnel full of strange and colorful lights stream from and to each, she thought. Although most of this came from sci-fi movies.

The strange lights didn't occur.
Also there weren't much of physics roughhousing her ship, only smooth sailing on the inside.

'Uh, this is w-' she interrupted.

1/2

Australia is introducing free daytime power in July. They’ve installed so much #solar that the challenge is to use it effectively. People who can shift their electricity usage to the day (think retirees or people that work from home) can save a lot even if they don’t have solar. Anyone with a battery or two installed could see their power bill for many months go to almost zero.

Batteries are the key to having an economy that can run on solar and wind all the time.

https://lenergy.com.au/free-daytime-electricity-is-coming-heres-how-it-actually-works/

the fact that LLM use is more rampant in software development compared to seemingly any other industry is probably a sign that most programmers don't have moral standards and never did

Bitte unterzeichnet unsere Petition gegen die IFG-Abschaffung!

Das hilft uns dabei, Druck gegenüber der SPD aufzubauen. In den ersten 15 Stunden schon 125.000 Unterschriften!

https://weact.campact.de/petitions/spd-stoppt-den-frontalangriff-auf-die-informationsfreiheit

NO @OpenSCAD NOOOO!!!!

This year was my first time serving on a jury, and it both was and wasn't how I expected it to be. Maybe you'll find my experience interesting. https://belkadan.com/blog/2026/07/What-I-Didnt-Know-About-Jury-Duty/

@whitequark After burying my head in arxiv for a while I've decided LLMs themselves are interesting (but don't exist in a vacuum). When people call them fancy autocomplete, or make a big deal about non-determinism, I think they're directionally correct in noticing the stank around LLMs and avoiding them, but it still comes from a place of either wilful ignorance or uncritically repeating things they heard on the internet. I don't look up to that or aspire to be like that.

To make a more specific point, I'd like people to stop interpreting everything that comes out of a softmax() as a probability density function just because it's non-negative and sums to 1. Next-token prediction is a useful objective for pre-training because it's a way to kickstart the model to learn higher-level representations unsupervised, but the reason it's called pre-training is you *keep going after that.*

If it wasn't for:

* the data theft,
* the vandalism of public internet infrastructure,
* the environmental damage,
* the widespread copyright laundering and "clean room" re-implementation of code that is in the training data,
* the erosion of social norms around contributing to open source,
* their ability to one-shot intelligent people into believing bullshit,
* their corrosive effect on your intellectual abilities,
* the concentration of the means to write code in a handful of US companies,
* the impending financial crisis,

...then I'd support their use. I don't see most of these changing though. The only actually-open-recipe-open-data models I'm aware of are Nemotron, and they underperform given their size and architecture, so perhaps the secret ingredient is crime.

Presenting my new project, QRTUBER

Using constantly updating QRCodes for streamers to sync data to viewers!

Doesn't even have to be sex toys being controlled, could be lights or gamepad state or whatever, but I'm me so that's what we're starting with.

https://youtu.be/vGbTqno3HEY

Aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! 😱😱😱

Src: https://www.tumblr.com/wandringaesthetic/810345386592157696?source=share

live coding on a bench
#pastagang

Windows 10 is now 11 years old, which makes it retrocomputing

who the FUCK didn't tell me about iNaturalist where I can find tons of specific plant and critter pictures with different licensees??

https://www.inaturalist.org/

Edit: oh. be aware some critter pictures are dead critters...