FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

Note slapped onto a French sidewalk advertisement:
"We want trees, not this sh*t"
Mon mate, everyone, everywhere agrees.

@quirk I think that's not far off, but probably not quite why it's called a stage

In that both the raised platform of a theatrical stage and the adjustable-height/levels of a microscope stage share the same origin.

Which is that "stage" used to be another way of referring to the storey (floor level) of a building, and I imagine the other meanings derived from that.

With a microscope stage being adjustable in height and thus the oldest ones probably having less fine-grained adjustments that modern ones, they may very well have literally had numbered "stages" (floors/elevation) to refer to the different levels.

hey, so random thought, the flat bit on a microscope where you put your slides it called a "stage", is it called that because the the microscope was invented at a time when people still went to the theatre?

@trochee The fundamental and categorical error made in almost all "AI" hype is that there's anything more than a loose correlation between an initial "prompt" and the following states of the Markov chain.

There's no concept of a "program," no theory of how to "operate" the Markov chain, so at most you're picking where to begin the game of Chutes and Ladders.

The fuck that's engineering of any kind.

I'll see your "'software engineering' is not engineering"

and raise you one

"'prompt engineering' is not _even_ software engineering"

@ireneista @trochee I can't think of any other form of engineering where it's ok to develop something, hope that it works without any specific theory as to ensure that it does, run a few tests, and call it good.

If software engineering was actually a form of engineering, we wouldn't have unit and integration tests, we'd have fucking safety proofs attached to everything that interacts with humans.

@trochee Hot take: software engineering is distinguished from other forms of engineering by the absence of a robust ethical code, licensing program, and well-established theory of harm.

We've had quite a few Tacoma Narrows worth of software-based harm, but thanks to the idea of "tech" as an industry, that hasn't translated into the requirement that programs must work correctly, be safe, and developed with ethics being the first and foremost concern.

ok serious offer

would anyone be interested in the domains magicalgirl.online and magicalgirlonline.com

i have been squatting them for 7 years for use in a future project but at this point i think it's safe to say i will never complete that one, so…

(fw if you want to)

I would encourage every Fediverse software project to implement a “dead-man switch" on registrations: if nobody with moderator permissions has been active in the last week, then disable new account creation.

The Fediverse has a significant number of abandoned instances that are used by bad actors to create accounts and send spam.

We implemented this in Mastodon (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/29318) and it has been highly effective.

And this, in 1869, is how Dmitri Mendeleev completed the first periodic table ...

robot girl who can record what she sees but when she sends you the recording it says unregistered hypercam 2 in the corner

As a #developer sometimes you'll see #code comments like this. Often, you'll be the one writing it. #webdev #memes #programming

someone will be like "you cant use Search Engines anymore, you have to go to the specific website where you want to look up stuff" but like. have you seen websites lately. they're all Apps now. they're all like React "Apps", where you have to Sign In and they have a bunch of Animations and banners and notifications and they track your location. and none of them have a good search function, still. and you go onto these websites to find out something, anything, and i can tell you, you won't

the last 3 times i've seen a word and not known what the word means, and wanted to look it up quickly, i've typed it into a search engine (duckduckgo or google) and just got a load of results for a more popular word that isn't the word i looked for. even if i type define:word it still gets replaced with the more common word. i think for one of them i got a patronizing LLM response too. i swear the web has never felt this useless before

@domi god bless RFCs

IP version 4, or as I’ve recently taken upon calling it, the certified IP Classic

Earth is normally portrayed as a Mother, feminine

Mars, the God of War, is typically masculine

Therefore, in this 90 page essay, I submit to you that terraforming Mars is just planetary force feminization.

the swedish word for “swing state” (in the context of american elections etc) is ”vågmästardelstat” — weighingscale-master-part-state. it's so cool. “swing state” will never be that cool

I'm an astronomer currently fighting for regulation and better engineering of satellites (particularly Starlink) so that the night sky isn't ruined for everyone: https://theconversation.com/soon-1-out-of-every-15-points-of-light-in-the-sky-will-be-a-satellite-170427

I also have super cute baby goats!