Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

@pfish.zone so much of the maintainer community right now is handwringing about "but if we ban LLM use, how will we tell?" and I am exasperated because the answer is not some sophisticated word-probability detection machine, it is "they will be blindingly obvious about it, and if they manage to not be obvious for a second, they will brag about it, they can't stop themselves"

Luigi is a hero we need more of.

Oh this is an excellent resource for those wanting to avoid slopped projects!

https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware

#NoAI

@dbattistella I don't believe that publicly traded for-profit companies are capable of this. I think the very fact that such a company is incentivized to perpetually extract wealth from workers and customers and give it to 3rd party share holders who contribute nothing to wealth generation beyond a one-time contribution of capital is what makes these companies grow into vile monsters over time. They are exploitative by design, and this is the dominant form of company in our economy.

It's possible to break this mold. Cooperatives are democratically controlled, and often the workers and/or customers are the shareholders, with equal shares. This changes the incentive structure from an exploitative one to, you guessed it, a cooperative one. If we could only make this the dominant form of company in our economy, we would live in a very different world where "don't be evil" was the natural order of things.

The man who wrote "Don't be evil" said he chose it specifically so it would be hard to remove. Paul Buchheit, the engineer who later built Gmail, suggested the phrase at a Google corporate values meeting on July 19, 2001.

Then in early 2018, internal documents leaked showing that Google had signed a Pentagon contract to build AI to analyze drone footage. By April, over 3,000 Google employees had signed a letter to Sundar Pichai demanding the contract be cancelled.

The letter specifically cited "Don't be evil" as the standard the company was failing to meet. Dozens of engineers resigned in protest.

Sometime between late April and early May, the slogan disappeared from the code of conduct's preface.

#Google #AI #Tech

-25zn is quickly becoming my favorite #ed (1) command. ;)

please help

i need linux mint compatible screan reader

please boost
i dont know where to look rn or whats good

yeah 3.4.1 was the last version of rsync. no living human knows what happened after that. a mystery.

If you feel like you need to use llm codegen, consider using drugs instead, they are better for you and people around you...

A recent discussion about ranges in ed(1) & vi(1) led to detailing the difference between using a comma and using a semicolon when separating the beginning/end of a range.

To clearly demonstrate the difference, create a file with 20 sequential numbers in it:

$ jot 20 > data.txt # or use seq 20

and open it to line 10:

$ ed data.txt
51
10

If you use a semicolon like

?5?;/8/n

it will search backwards from the current line (line 10) for the line containing "5" (line 5) and then from line 5 search forward to the next line containing "8" (line "8") line and print/number those 4 lines.

If instead you're on line 10 and you use a comma like

?5?,/8/n

it will search backwards for the line containing "5" (line 5), then search forwards for "8" from your starting location (line 10), landing on "18", and print/number those 14 lines.

I actually worked at the same place as Andrew Tridgell, over a quarter-century ago. I got to know a few of the OzLabs folks during their immediate post-IBM years, and always had the highest respect for them in that way where you feel acute impostor syndrome when they're in the room.

Tridge almost walked backwards into implementing the Windows SMB protocol (he was just debugging some funny NetBIOS extensions IIRC). But his paper on the #rsync algorithm was groundbreaking, and actually writing the tool to implement it was brilliant. It's become one of those tools like #curl that just forms one of the major structural supports of the modern Internet. I still remember the day that the SSH transport became the default, and I remember being able to thank him in person when he came to the San Francisco office (although IIRC by that point he'd handed control of rsync over to mbp).

I remember at my next job he came to a summit of folks working on print driver/spooler software. When he pointed out that some problems were effectively a cache-consistency algorithm, we all kind of put our fingers to our temples and said "Oh wow, you're SO right!" He was always insightful and sharp, while being gentle and approachable.

I write in the past tense because I haven't crossed paths with him in two decades, and only know what I see him put out. A friend of mine in Australia noted that he hasn't posted to the Canberra LUG list since 2020, thanking someone for congratulating him on receiving the Medal of the Order of Australia. He's very much alive, but from what little I see I grow concerned for him.

In 2024 he took over maintenance of rsync once more. The 3.3.0 release was the last one from the previous maintainer, and Tridge is currently working on 3.4.x releases.

Well... Tridge and #Claude, it seems: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345332213390

The issue tracker for rsync has recently lit up with regressions, showing features that worked reliably for almost 30 years are suddenly coming crashing down in 3.4.2 and 3.4.3. People are scrambling to find ways to pin rsync to known-good versions. The considerate, incisive mind I briefly knew is letting the stochastic parrots do his work for him, and it just seems so astonishingly *unlike* the person I met back in the day.

I am still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope all is well for him, but I will not cast aspersions on his goals or his abilities. No, instead I draw this conclusion:

If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.

That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.

No one.

Dear Garden. For June’s patreon postcard

#deer #furryart #furry #digitalart

I have acquired the most 1982 object possible

Remember how TV shows back in the day would have the most ridiculous hacking scenes? NCIS and the two people on one keyboard. Bones and the computer hacked by a photograph they took of a bone? How we'd laugh and make memes and talk shit about the writers?

The real world just had people moaning about being hacked by a print statement in a test harness.

TV shows are going to have to up their game.