@pndc

I've just spent a cheerful hour of my time writing a program on my computer that will tell me instantly what the volume of the mound was. It's a very neat and sexy program with all sorts of pop-up menus and things, and the advantage of doing it the way I have is that on any future occasion on which I need to know the volume of a megapode nest, given its basic dimensions, my computer will give me the answer in less than a second, which is a wonderful saving of time. The downside, I suppose, is that I cannot conceive of any future occasion that I am likely to need to know the volume of a megapode nest, but no matter: the volume of this mound is a little over nine cubic yards. — Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See. I think about this whenever I see people banging on about how they built a whole load of infrastructure to keep their cocaine habit AI coding agent from not going off the rails, instead of just sitting down and writing the code directly. (I swear these people have never heard of standard Unix text-processing tools such as sed, grep, etc, nor have they used an editor more sophisticated than notepad.exe.)

If you don't stop Nazis coming to your bar, you will eventually have a Nazi bar. If you don't stop AI bros committing to your project, you will eventually have a Nazi bar.

@textfiles@digipres.club Would this be the same Internet Archive which recently promoted an advertorial about "ClimateGPT", and is thus complicit in the hardware shortages and insane prices?

How can they call it a 2CV if it doesn't have a thick cloud of soot and unburnt petrol fumes behind it? I bet they don't even preinstall the compulsory CND bumper sticker! https://www.cityam.com/citroen-2cv-returns-as-a-13000-electric-car-and-the-timing-is-no-accident/

@jess@blop.social You could try poking Techmoan?

RE: https://universeodon.com/@UncleDuke1969/116822232922791565 This is also a metaphor for CEOs who want to eliminate their skilled staff.

@mudasobwa@mastodon.social @baldur@toot.cafe If I have to put in as much effort to use an LLM as just writing the code, I may as well cut out the expensive middleman and just write the code.

@fractalolivia@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run Command-line shells are always available unless the system is so locked-down that you cannot be expected to do useful ops work with it. "bash" is sloppy shorthand usage: it's the de facto default on Linux and is extremely common but not universal on other Unix systems, and the meaning is not that you are an expert on bash per se, but know how to use it to drive the various other Unix tools. For people being paid to do ops on Windows rather than Unix, "bash" is merely a nice-to-have, but I would expect them to know their way around PowerShell.

@fractalolivia@infosec.exchange @davidgerard@circumstances.run I've seen what a locked-down mess gets handed down to users after the petty tyrants in corporate infosec have ben at it. But you have to remember POSIWID: if the company is actively preventing you from doing your job by withholding tools, you may be misunderstanding what your job actually is. Could you imagine the finance department not having Excel?

@cstross@wandering.shop @zzt@mas.to @davidgerard@circumstances.run Being obscure with few examples doesn't really prevent it, sadly. What happens is that the smaller corpus makes the output more likely to be a straight copy of the input, and now you can add an increased risk of being sued for wilful (since an attempt has been done to cover one's tracks) copyright infringement to your problems. It's like asking an LLM to "write me a romance novel set in a shop" versus "write me a fantasy horror novel set in the British civil service".

@feorag@wandering.shop Some of us have fantasies of being handed a stout stick and getting a couple of minutes of privacy with certain Tories.

@zzt@mas.to There's even a bit of Scotland known as the "Buckfast Triangle" where it is quite popular, and the life expectancy is fifty-two.

Anyway, Linus apparently thinks it's just fine to be charged hundreds of dollars per month and/or be employed by a large tech company with deep coffers to be able to contribute or make changes to the Linux kernel. This is very much in the spirit of the GPL and not any sort of problem that might come and bite in the long term.

@zzt@mas.to Ah, you've tried that fine British beverage Special Brew?

@cstross@wandering.shop @davidgerard@circumstances.run My penchant for necrocomputing pays off here: I'm stuck on iOS 13 and macOS 12 and don't get nags to upgrade. I'm also keeping an old iPod Classic running thanks to virtual machines, stubbornness, and the occasional waft of a soldering iron, because it's the last good audio player they made.

Token bills are killing IT Industry profits! We left this chatbot prompt blank so you can help. 🏴‍☠️

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267733536588 The item may have some signs of cosmetic wear, but is fully operational and functions as intended. Only if the intended purpose is to burn your house down. More horror pictures behind the link.

@zzt@mas.to They're still making Mother's Pride, apparently, which is the UK version of Wonderbread. It was everywhere in the 70s and 80s, and we're all still trying to forget it is a thing.

@zzt@mas.to Oh, there's much worse booze in the UK, but that's perhaps the one with the most misleading name. I'd say the most infamous British booze is probably Wreck-the-Hoose-Juice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckfast_Tonic_Wine

LinkedIn gleefully tells me "You’d be a top applicant" for a gig at PostNL. If the public face of the organisation is representative, one only needs to bother to turn up for work perhaps twice a week, and then throw the job in the bin, or leave it in the office and tell customers to finish the job themselves. I don't know that I could manage to be good enough for these exacting standards.

@RogerBW@discordian.social @davidgerard@circumstances.run @zzt@mas.to So it's really £500 for the bike and £10k for delivery?

@RogerBW@discordian.social @davidgerard@circumstances.run @zzt@mas.to Sir Clive's nephew Grant Sinclair picked up the reins and now makes a modern version of the C5, but sadly did not get his uncle's memo about cost-cutting to get the price point down and one of his contraptions costs a cool £10,000, plus an extra £500 for delivery. I didn't know Royal Mail was charging so much for stamps these days!

@mudasobwa@mastodon.social @baldur@toot.cafe You know that some of us actually know what we're doing and churning out code is relatively easy, right? Using an LLM is coding, just in an imprecise language that takes more effort to describe the desired results. There is a real problem in that programming can be a bit gatekeepy and this is something which really needs to be solved, but LLMs are the wrong answer.

@servo@floss.social I downloaded it to give it a try, but it sadly told me to go and buy a new computer. (Specifically, it requires a newer version of macOS than will install on my machine.)

@davidgerard@circumstances.run Translations: Dat kan niet!: "Go fuck yourself." helaas: "And the horse you came in on." Further context: https://stuffdutchpeoplelike.com/2011/08/09/dat-kan-niet/

@davidgerard@circumstances.run Dat kan helaas niet!

@davidgerard@circumstances.run Realistically, you're looking at about $100 unless there's something special that makes it worth more. Are you that cheap?

@davidgerard@circumstances.run "Filthy fiat only."

@marjolica@social.linux.pizza Ah, I see you've been to my local dive bar then?

@bebadefabo@mastodon.social @aburtch@shakedown.social Punishing children for writing with their left hand was still a thing into at least the 1970s, i.e. easily within living memory. Ironically, trans folk were mostly left alone to get on with their lives back then, and this current moral panic is new.

@rrwo@infosec.exchange Does it even matter if something is not "actively maintained"? It could mean that it's just finished, and anything else would be just tinkering for the sake of it.

@alice@lgbtqia.space You could make a copyright claim, but note that in the first instance OVH is likely to just doxx you by sending your complaint direct to the abuser, so perhaps give your lawyer's postal address instead of your home address. The legal process for copyright claim against a Canadian host differs from the USA's DMCA but I doubt OVH are bright enough to tell the difference.

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange How is 100kg of exuberant muscle and fur not a massive puddle of sweat in this weather!?

@jess@blop.social The trick I saw from Big Clive is to 3D-print letters and then run LED tape through it. ISTR he even published some OpenSCAD programs where you just feed in the text and other parameters and out pops an STL.

@jess@blop.social I assume the light screens are extremely blue and have aged badly?

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @whitequark@social.treehouse.systems As a second data point, I also find FreeBSD package installation and upgrades are slower than the equivalent operations on Debian.

@Jokk_Wolfhard@mastodon.social @rysiek@mstdn.social @mullvadnet@mastodon.online Hey, look, a zero-follower freshly-created sockpuppet account!

@RnDanger@infosec.exchange @zzt@mas.to Yeah, but in Glasgow the rest of the local cuisine will wreck your cardiovascular system well before the caffeinated rocket fuel gets a look in. See, for example, the Munchy Box..

I'm fascinated that Andy Burnham has a ten year plan. Does he seriously expect to still be in power in 2036? There's just the minor detail of the next general election, to be held no later than August 2029, which is by no means a foregone conclusion. It's going to be a three-horse race between Reform, Tories and the Greens, with Labour's contribution being the source of the suspiciously-cheap lasagne in the racecourse canteen. Given how well his predecessors went, he shouldn't even bother measuring-up for curtains in Number 10 because he'll be gone before they're delivered.

@jess@blop.social Are you sure it's not a £20 note stuffed in there?

In which a bunch of preppers decide that they do want the power of the state after all: https://blog.meshcore.io/2026/07/04/help-us-save-meshcore

@servo@floss.social Intriguingly, if I run it from a shell (Servo.app/Contents/MacOS/servoshell) rather than the Finder, then it seems to work. So the requirement for a newer version seems to be a mere misconfiguration in the XCode build settings rather than a need for something in newer APIs.

@me_@sueden.social @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange Not every task needs 2GHz of compute and gigabytes of RAM.