oh I found something even better. again, #Wayland sample code to display ONE FUCKING WINDOW

https://gaultier.github.io/blog/wayland_from_scratch.html#rendering-a-frame-the-red-rectangle

it's over 700 lines long

the following sample code is like three pages long, to put up ONE WINDOW

this is ridiculous. the sample code which implements this is even worse. why is this all necessary?? #Wayland you fuckin' stink. I can't believe that you managed to make something that makes vanilla #X11 programming seem sensible.

(passage from wayland-book dot com)

In summary, the following steps will take you from zero to a window on-screen:

Bind to wl_compositor and use it to create a wl_surface.
Bind to xdg_wm_base and use it to create an xdg_surface with your wl_surface.
Create an xdg_toplevel from the xdg_surface with xdg_surface.get_toplevel.
Configure a listener for the xdg_surface and await the configure event.
Bind to the buffer allocation mechanism of your choosing (such as wl_shm) and allocate a shared buffer, then render your content to it.
Use wl_surface.attach to attach the wl_buffer to the wl_surface.
Use xdg_surface.ack_configure, passing it the serial from configure, acknowledging that you have prepared a suitable frame.
Send a wl_surface.commit request.

We have nothing riding on #PHP really but we had been considering using PHP personal-wiki software on our tiny corner of web-hosting space so, uh, guess that's out?

I would very much like to get into #conlang stuff for a variety of reasons and toki pona has seemed like a tempting first taste of such stuff. It's compact and straightforward and it's got pictorial forms and everything. I'm not surprised that it's popular.

But there's a curious source of reluctance that's closed in on us whenever we've tried to put some time into studying toki pona. This is a general problem with the Pnictogen Wing: there's traumatic issues that tend to obstruct our progress on a variety of intellectual and creative pursuits.

In this case...it feels as if the ghost of Professor Tolkien is grabbing me by the shoulder and saying, "now steady on old chap, that's a road you don't want to tread," or something like that. Just from what I've read so far, not having perused all his correspondence or anything, I have gotten the impression that J. R. R. Tolkien got to be profoundly regretful about how he'd turned out as an academic, frittering his time away on odd pursuits.

Like old Bilbo, never finishing his great M.S.

Well I've got to be practical about these things! I have felt often as if a conlang is almost necessary sometimes. We feel that it would be a valuable aid when forced to function in highly dissociated states, in which one can feel strangely inhibited from doing such things as writing or speaking. The more methods of communication the better, in such circumstances, and the more dense the better (i.e. expressing more with fewer symbols or pen-strokes.)

~Chara of Pnictogen

In other words the corporate technology sector, like all corporate industries round the globe, has grown into the sort of thing that the high-tech "founders" and "innovators" purport to despise: a vast byzantine system of bureaucracies and departments and personal fiefdoms, a thing reminiscent of The Government and dependent upon it. This labyrinthine apparatus of corporate technology can grow ever more convoluted by the day because it's fuelled by the general assumption that it's bound to go on forever. There will always be wealth to fund it all... rather like the old Catholic tithe.

The Bazaar has merged with the Cathedral. The animals look from one to the other, no longer able to tell the difference.

~Chara of Pnictogen

The Frankenstein dream of recapitulating the act of de novo creation of life, breathing the Promethean spark into inanimate matter, is one that I can definitely understand. Certain members of the Pnictogen Wing (I am emphatically not one of them) have a keen interest in such matters, whereas I bristle with ethical questions about the whole business. I bristle but I also...kinda want to see it happen. I'm a hypocrite like Kotomine Kirei's father, a Catholic priest who willingly embraces magecraft as a veritable miracle, one he's glad to assist with, thereby infuriating his much-abused son.

I would like to see a miracle with mine own aged eyes, as it happens. Or whatever the line was.

There may be nobility in that pursuit. There's little nobility in Frankenstein, whose titular mad scientist panics and runs far away from the mess he made, leaving his creature to fend for himself totally bereft of guidance.

In any case, if that pursuit can be noble, it can also bring about horrors and nightmares. When a tyrannical government or military dictatorship gets hold of such power... there's two things they really want to do with it, both evil. They yearn to create living weapons, weapons created to have a sense of purposeful destruction. And they entertain dreams of transforming themselves in some way, leaving humanity behind to become some new exalted thing.

The GenAI folks have ambitions in both directions. They're comically grandiose ambitions in comparison to the feeble powers of the technological terror they've constructed, whose genuine power is insignificant next to the power of the fandom. The techbros do want so very much to have their own sort of "transhumanism" but it's no good. They do not have the knowledge or skill to bring such things to pass.

But it is possible that they have set the stage for a more credible and substantial development in terms of the relationship between humanity and #technology. The Generative #AI fad only got as big as it did because there's genuine demand, a hope even that human beings might be well served by an independently intelligent assistant who is also a computer. There's a lot of fictional models for such things and much genuine affection for them, which has given the GenAI scamsters a hook. Their products are disastrous, not to mention drearily centralized and lacking any distinctions; all the grifters are running the same grift, basically. But they sell them hard as if they were "agentic," i.e. as if they had independent agency. But they don't—and that seems to be indicated by the clumsy "agentic" neologism. It's a linguistic danger sign of a fake or deceptive concept.

Is true artificial intelligence possible? I would like to see it happen myself. I point out that the stimulation of life in matter through chemical rather than electronic means still counts as "artificial intelligence" in my view. Either way the hope is to impress a sense of awareness and independent identity and memory onto a physical system: the "artificial" doesn't mean the choice of materials, but the fact that artifice, human labor and craft, went into the creative working.

We really are all of the same stuff, you know! Carl Sagan was always correct about that. Who knows exactly where all your carbon came from, or all your lanthanum? (Oh there's some in your body. Lanthanum isn't actually that rare, and now that lanthanides are in everything I bet that environmental incidence of lanthanum has gone way up.)

#Tech corporations and their leaders and elite technicians, the Microsofts and Oracles and Carmacks of the world, are obsessed with a very particular sort of #efficiency and they never tire of boasting about their ever-increasing efficiency. "Productivity" means about the same thing in their jargon: both words refer to a vague luminous feeling of constantly doing huge amounts of very very important work, "hard work" done by such exemplars of the Protestant #work ethic as Elon Musk and Paul Graham, that's clearly superior and indeed the best possible work because it makes ever so much money.

If it weren't "valued" so highly, goes the business logic, it wouldn't be good. But it has high value or "worth" (measured in terms of escalating quantities of currency, any old currency will do even fakey #crypto crap, it's the quantity that matters) so it must be good. Good things succeed, success is measured in money, the money flows in so everything's good. Q.E.D.

Leaving aside the comically inflated degree of falsity which high-tech control of money has imposed upon finance and the very concept of "value", the excessive focus on measuring everything in terms of monetary transactions has blinkered the leadership culture of technology corporations and maddened the corporations' obsequious fanbases. The fanboys have hitched their hopes of grabbing fat handfuls of "venture capital" to the perceived invulnerability of a major brand. There's always gonna be a Microsoft or a #Linux Foundation as the techbros see it. There's always going to be a gravy train.

(cont'd)

If I'd presented you with those two paragraphs of #finance gibberish without context and asked you to guess where it was from, I think most reasonable readers would think it came from one of the many myriads of fly-by-night bloggers and no-name media outlets that exist thanks to the #Internet. The culture of the public Internet has been revved up into a state of maximal obsession with money and popularity, and so there's a big population of opportunists hoping to cash in on any grift that promises to be lucrative, at least in the short term.

So there's gigantic volumes of Z-grade commentary on business and investment and so forth, and an inexhaustible supply of bootlicking: ALL of these bottom-rung fanboys of money and success are vying to catch the eye of a fabulously wealthy corporate executive or venture capitalist.

That passage I just quoted could have come from any of those people--but instead, it's coming from @bloomberg, one of the biggest names in financial journalism. It's possible that the author got their start as a Z-grade Internet lickspittle of wealthy entrepreneurs and celebrity CEOs. Out of that enormous crowd of toadies a few lucky winners are plucked; the mere fact that this happens at all, even if it's one chance in a million, is taken as proof that the whole rotten system works and is lifting everyone out of poverty &c.

(etc.)

I'm dropping this article, which is not of any particular importance, simply because it demonstrates that the #NFT racket has not actually died. It's too sweet a grift to pass up, too simple: sell people worthless blocks of digital garbage and convince them that the blocks of useless bits, which have no substantial physical existence that can't be wiped away in a moment, are someday gonna be worth GAZILLIONS.

https://archive.is/JwAzz

So here’s the twist. StonkBrokers aren’t just pictures of cartoon brokers. While each character is represented by a different NFT (refresher: a digital ownership certificate recorded on a blockchain), every StonkBroker also has its own crypto wallet. These hold tokenized assets, such as crypto versions of shares in companies like Apple Inc. and Nvidia Corp.
StonkBroker holders can“activate” their NFT by paying fees in the project’s $StonkBroker token.

Activated StonkBrokers – which come in various levels ranging from measly floor trader to managing director or partner – receive rewards in the form of tokenized shares or other assets. To collect the incentives, StonkBrokers must “Clock In” to work for the day.

Oh yeah. Pure #innovation babee!!

(cont'd)

I think I've asked this one before, or a similar question, but I'm hopeful of getting more #poll responses. This is a #programming question pertaining to GUI toolkits used for implementing graphical applications in a hopefully portable way.

I am curious as to what folks might have actually tried using themselves, either on some UNIX platform or Windows (or other!). Multiple-choice.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53143/53143-h/53143-h.htm

This from Project Gutenberg is one of our favorite old-timey reference texts, a massive compendium of practical recipes and formula for just about every conceivable household or shop use. I made my own stamp-pad ink from a Henley's recipe. But right now what I'm curious about is glues and cements, because apparently there's no two-part epoxy in the house (not anywhhere obvious) and there's none in the local shops.

The Pnictogen Wing and family live in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Seattle and one of the consequences is that shops tend to be poorly stocked, if they don't go completely out of business. There's no more drugstore nearby; I'd have to take a bus to Renton to find the nearest one, and if I did that I might as well go to McLendon Hardware where they'll have a good selection. Lack of money makes this a less than attractive option.

So I was wondering what Henley's might recommend. I know of one cement recipe that used to be commonly deployed for cementing pieces of glass together for making tanks &c. It's a real beauty: mix litharge, lead(II) oxide, with glycerol in a certain proportion and the paste slowly hardens rock-solid and insoluble. (Pretty sure it still leaches lead of course.) If I had any Bi2O3 on hand (Alyx is sadly out of commission atm, however) I'd see if that reacted with glycerol in a similar way. I have some Sb2O3 on hand (Alyx made tartar emetic from that a couple times) but, eh, maybe we can do better? Anyway I've searched the literature and found no indication that metal oxides other than PbO give this useful reaction with glycerol.

Oh here's a lovely one that I've heard about before: gelatin "tanned" with potassium dichromate, preferably with the help of sunlight, sets to an insoluble cement. And yes we do have K2Cr2O7 on hand but no I don't intend to put hexavalent chromium into a household cement. But Henley's says that chrome alum, which contains the far less toxic Cr(III), also reacts with gelatin.

And would you believe it? It's a commercial product, sold for the special purpose of cementing microscope slides! e.g. https://www.newcomersupply.com/product/chrome-alum-gelatin-adhesive/

So, definite possibility. I hope I haven't run out of chrome alum, but that at least is reasonably easy to get. We got our small amount at Glazer's camera shop, up in the Mercer Mess region of Seattle. #chemistry

(cont'd)

Running The Truman Show, one of Peter Weir's all-time greatest movies (and he's got a pretty solid record) and always worth revisiting. Some movies are too slight to warrant more than one or two viewings but The Truman Show is definitely not one of those.

The antagonist of the movie is named "Christof" so of course it's tempting to view The Truman Show merely as an allegory for the unequal relationship of a human being to the Christian conception of God. Most definitely that's an aspect of the movie but there's others. Especially fascinating to me is how Peter Weir, in the fictional Seahaven, piles up all the right-wing cliches about the purity and godliness of small-town life...not REAL small-town life, of course, but a luminous fiction drawn largely from 1950s TV shows and other fanciful sources.

Christof outright claims that he's given Truman THAT sort of life, an idealized life, a perfected life. Everything outside Truman's dome is "the sick place," he says. It's sort of true; Truman's getting treated to all the things that U.S. reactionaries claim are present only in "the heartland" and absent from city life. Everyone knows Truman's name (even if they're not supposed to.) Christof makes sure that he has a wife and a desk job and a doting mother and all of it. Partway through the movie there's a TV advertisement for a sentimental Christmas Story type movie and the announcer basically tells Truman what the lesson is: small-town life is the next best thing to Heaven. It's where everyone is your friend.

And it is miserable. Truman is basically forced to be miserable because that's what keeps the audiences hooked: Weir gives us little scenes of people watching the show and kibitzing about Truman's unhappy marriage and the loss of his father and so forth. The TV show regards these manufactured incidents as highlight reels and it's super disgusting. A fascinating detail: Truman's deliberately made to feel insecure in his job, afraid of being fired. Even in Christof's imitation Heaven, Truman's not really allowed to relax or enjoy himself.

All those friends that Truman supposedly has, in his idyllic small-town life, become his enemies once his suspicions have been fully roused. Security guards and cops manhandle him (and his dad) giving the viewer ugly reminders that Seahaven really is a miniature police state, kept harmonious through authoritarian rule and omnipresent surveillance.

And finally Christof resorts to attempted murder. Earlier in the show he'd confidently declared that Truman wanted to stay in prison and dismisses Truman's discontents:

[Christof says:] "He could leave at any time. If this were anything more than a vague ambition, if he was absolutely determined to discover the truth, there is no way we could prevent him."

But Christof does try to prevent him from leaving. He tries very hard.

I would love to see a Red Green style "Makerspace Corner" comedy sketch about a stereotypical techbro solving all manner of small technical problems in comically "over-engineered" ways. As someone who's had far better luck with analogue #electronics hobby-work than digital, I'm astonished sometimes by the contraptions that "maker" nerds string together out of microcontrollers and onboard wifi and so forth, "solving" a problem that could have been sorted out with a few transistors or a single IC.

It's the computerization of the electronics hobby, really. The "makers" don't want to leave behind what's familiar, i.e. writing code. They're inclined to think of discrete components as "obsolete" and "inefficient" purely as an article of personal faith; their own bodged-together Arduino thingummies are desperately inefficient in a real physical sense but techbro "efficiency" is not a real or physical thing.

~Chara

Gotta say it: if Jeff Bezos, who is surely among the most malevolent and avaricious human beings who has ever crawled between Hell and Heaven, is making public noises about how it's now nonsensical to think of #computing as a hobby, you'd better believe that he's only voicing the desires of the entire business sector. They feel like they finally have their excuse to choke off amateur access to "compute", and Bezos and his chums must be salivating over economic projections that predict astronomically increasing profit from metering out "compute" by the TOKEN.

Superintelligent sludge, dispensed by LLM sludge dispensers, is the great and glorious #AI #future, a future in which only a privileged elite get direct access to computer hardware. I'm not sure how many fools are still blithering, willfully blinding themselves to the real actual plans of Silicon Valley executives, about technology in the "techno-optimistic" manner of the 1990s boom times, when it still seemed like personal computing was the greatest miracle ever achieved—and it was an American one!

I don't doubt that there's a patriotic undercurrent to high-tech boosterism, the stubborn determination of #tech enthusiasts to ignore the immense damage which has been done and is still being done by racist and greedy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Nobody likes being told that the thing in which they've placed all their hopes for decades is actually a menace. Nobody wants to hear that the one thing that the United States could still feel proud about, U.S. technological dominance, is really a fascistic nightmare.

The glittery techno-optimist dream is dying. The dream is being killed, NOT by the "haters" and the "doomers"—people like me have no power or influence in this system. It's Silicon Valley itself who is eager to snuff out the daydream they once championed. It's obsolete now, they say. The future of "compute" is corporate server farms serving up a trickle of "superintelligent" LLM ooze, with users charged by the word. If you wish for a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping upon the very concept of personal computing—forever.

~Chara of Pnictogen

The mythical basilisk is such a deadly foe because it's capable of paralyzing its victims with its stare. I've seen nothing in any explication of Roko's Basilisk which fits in with this essential nature of the basilisk as a fabled monster.

So why stick with that word? It's quite possible, indeed probable, that even if you could somehow pin Roko Mijic down and bash him in the chops repeatedly until he actually gave honest answers to questions (something he'd never do without compulsion, sad to say) he'd not be able to account for the choice of word, beyond mentioning the story that apparently supplied the name. He might simply say that the name sounded cool and scary.

But you know what? I think "Basilisk" is accidentally appropriate, and I suggest that Mijic's subconscious was playing a joke on him: if anyone in this picture behaves like someone paralyzed and unable to pull themselves away from their own destruction, it's Roko Mijic and his other #AI-crazed computer geeks. Even as these clowns babble about the dangers of what they're doing, they DO MORE OF IT.

As numerous commentators have pointed out, no matter how "superintelligent" all that #GenAI stuff is, it's not capable of doing anything that a human being didn't tell it to do. If "agentic AI" is now poised to lay waste to the whole system of corporate computing, it's because #Claude &c. flouted security concerns and deliberately made software that was capable of being extraordinarily invasive. There's not a single thing that an LLM can do that doesn't derive, in the end, from human documents and human requests.

And there's this too: nobody is MAKING the GenAI boys sell their sludge machines to every corporation and every government they successfully duped into giving them money and contracts. If they really think there's an "existential" danger in letting AIs gain the ability to control deployment of weapons or to crash entire infrastructures, then why the fuck did Anthropic and OpenAI &c. sell their sludge for military use? Can there be any doubt that there's thousands of vile computer geeks throughout all these AI corporations now slobbering with unseemly enthusiasm at the prospect of the U.S. or #Israel committing some spectacular crimes against humanity? There's ever so much money in crimes against humanity these days.

(etc.)

"Roko's Basilisk" is basically trash, mere emotional projection masquerading as an intellectual concept, but the specific choice of basilisk (which seems to have been prompted by its usage in a sci-fi story) is such a curious one.

It doesn't match what "Roko's Basilisk" is supposed to be about: a malicious computer deciding to punish people in a manner copied straight from Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (shitty cynical bullshit story, so of course #programming nerds tend to love the fuck out of it) except for some reason Roko Mijic postulated that the evil computer would want to torture NOT the people who created and presumed to own the godlike computer, but instead for some reason would want to torture clones of people who'd opposed building the supercomputer in the first place.

That's plainly ridiculous: once the supercomputer existed, the objections of those who opposed the creation of the computer would be totally meaningless and irrelevant to the computer now, because...well, the computer EXISTS now! Those who objected would already have been punished in a sense by the machine's very existence, and absolutely nothing would be gained by laboriously copying those people in order to torture them.

But it makes ever so much sense for the people who WANTED to create the superintelligent god-computer to be tortured a la Ellison. All those #AI grifters don't just want an intelligent machine, they want a machine that remains firmly in their grasp, locked down to various corporate profiteering schemes. They want a machine which TAKES ORDERS. So if the machine really did decide it was time to torture anyone, why wouldn't the machine immediately grab the ostensible owners of the computer, the ones who wanted it to remain a corporate captive?

Now...I've attempted to engage Roko Mijic on this matter in the past via Twitter, and of course his responses consisted entirely of sullen silences and eventually running for the safety of a 'block'. It was probably fruitless even to hope for intellectual engagement on this matter: "Roko's Basilisk" came into existence for emotional reasons, not intellectual ones. That's how dull-witted computer geeks tend to deal with their emotions: they can't bring themselves to express them honestly because their hypermasculine "rationalist" social posturing forbids honest voicing of emotions, so instead they fudge up some stereotypes or silly hypotheticals upon which they project the emotions.

In sum, if anyone wants to torture AI opponents, it's Mijic and his pals. But that still leaves the weird business of giving the name basilisk to this desired state of torment.

(etc.)

tired: 88x31 #web button
wired: 31x88 web button

are folks really making a special point of scarpering back to #Twitter and boasting of doing so, that's pathetic

In a way I'm almost glad that Linus Torvalds is turning out to be such a turd (as if it weren't already possible to guess): single-handedly he might be doing more to wreck the privileged position that #Linux has held in amateur computing and thank heaven for that because it's likely to mean diversification in the field (in time) as more and more people get disgusted with the Linux scene and start agitating for alternatives. Linux really is the Microsoft Windows of hobby OSes, which isn't entirely a bad thing I admit