FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

Help: My [1851W] dolls [21D, 28D, 30D, 25D] have unionized

i may be plural lul

unbothered. moisturized (with rye). happy. in his lane. focused. flourishing.

this new RFC 9564 is comedy gold: "Faster Than Light Speed Protocol (FLIP)" - this uses LLMs to predict what packets <would> be sent, thus obviating the need to actually send them. The Acknowledgements section is just... <chef's kiss>. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9564.html #rfc9564

Apparently, they lost a guy.

it's funny that multiple jobs have been like "nah you don't have enough experience for a java developer job, we'd only hire you for doing CI/devops"

when I've got a codebase here from when I worked for the government. it's all in java. I wrote 90% of this. it's 55,000 lines.

Why is that? "Passively reading someone else's code just doesn't engage my brain in the same way. It's harder to do properly":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773780355708764665

There's a name for this phenomenon: "automation blindness." Humans are just not equipped for eternal vigilance. We get good at spotting patterns that occur frequently - so good that we miss the anomalies.

18/

That's the good kind of automation, and we all benefit from it. But it only takes a small twist to turn this good automation into a *nightmare*. I'm speaking here of the *reverse-centaur*: automation in which the computer is in charge, bossing a human around so it can get its job done.

13/

I like having an automated system that does the robotically perfect trick of never forgetting something important.

There's a name for this in automation circles: a "centaur." I'm the human head, and I've fused with a powerful robot body that supports me, doing things that humans are innately bad at.

12/

Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

1/

I think we're approaching this collective brainstorming all wrong. We're not going to solve the xz problem by throwing pennies at burnt out over worked hobby maintainers or by making them jump through extra bureaucratic hoops in the name of security theater. There's only one reasonable solution here and it's to turn maintaining critical open source projects into REALITY TELEVISION.

if you try to play a dvd in vlc in the united states, the mc double def dp (disk protector) pops up and starts rapping about how you're circumventing technological protection measures and you should actually have paid for cyberlink powerdvd you despicable little pirate you