Yes

#catsofmastodon #haha #Funny

The recent post criticising Free Software advocates for advocating user-modifiable software and then being annoyed at LLMs annoys me and the reason is best illustrated by this analogy:

Public-transport advocates spend years advocating for a connected public-transport infrastructure, where it’s easy to take a small combination of busses, metros, trams, and trains to get from anywhere to anywhere. The network would be efficient and operated as a non-profit-making public good, making individual movement cheap (or, ideally, free). They work with municipalities to build out some of this infrastructure, persuade national governments to invest in the longer routes, and so on.

Someone comes along with a massive subsidy for a handful of private taxi companies to hire a bunch of drivers and give free (paid for by investors) ride to everyone. The drivers are immigrants who don’t speak the language very well, which is great for the taxi companies because they are easy to exploit (they are, in fact, underpaid and put in dangerous situations routinely). The owners of the taxis are pocketing a load of investor money for every ride though.

When you get in one of these taxis, there’s a 90% chance they’ll take you where you want, a 9% chance they’ll take you somewhere nearby, and a 1% chance they’ll just drop you off in a dangerous part of town. A bunch of people are mugged and a few more murdered as a result of this, but the companies aren’t liable. The investors behind this tell everyone ‘don’t bother learning to drive, there’s no point, our taxis will take you anywhere, for much less money!’. At the same time, ridership on existing public transport drops off, leading to calls to cut its funding and there are mass redundancies for bus drivers and so on. The taxis are all diesel and heavily polluting, leading to worse air quality everywhere they go. To make sure that they can pick people up easily, the ones not actively giving rides are constantly circulating, placing huge strain on road infrastructure and further increasing pollution.

And then someone says to those public-transport advocates: ‘this is what you wanted, why are you unhappy just because it’s not delivered in the way you imagined?’

One of the things I’ve noticed moving from C (and Objective-C) to languages like C++ and Rust, with richer static type systems is that it changes what most of the code is for.

When I write C code, almost all of my code is to do the thing. When I write the same in C++, I can usually do the thing in about half as much code. But I don’t write half as much code. The other half of the code is making sure that’s if the code doesn’t do the thing, it probably won’t compile. If I have a field that needs accessing with a lock held, I’ll write an accessor that takes a lock guard to prove lock ownership, and a wrapper that acquires the lock and returns the lock guard and a reference to the field. This compiles down to the same code as the C version (except maybe in debug builds, where I’d assert that the lock guard is really for the right lock), but now it’s harder to get wrong. Especially when I come back to the code in two years and don’t remember to read the comment telling me the locks I need to hold to access the code.

This is why I’m excited by Verus for Rust: it gives me a very rich set of tools for ensuring that my code is going to do the right thing. But it’s a big mindset shift from ‘code exists to do the thing’ to ‘doing the thing is the easy part, most of the code exists to make sure you’re not doing the wrong thing’. And I suspect that’s both why it’s hard for people to switch from C and why few people who do ever want to go back.

I have a joke about trickle down economics, but 99 percent of you won’t get it.

Worship before the feral druid cat ...

If you're an audio engineer, or in networking, this might be the carpet from hell

Unless you want #microslop to steal your code to make more #slop :

don't forget to disable
"Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" @ https://github.com/settings/copilot/features

#aislop #copilot #microsoft #github

My stance on #LLM :

1. There _might_ be some useful use cases with this technology that could be worth exploring.

2. However, it is glaringly obvious that, as of now, their main purpose is to power the mother of all investments bubbles.

3. Which leads us to the present trillion dollar business case for "we must build energy- and water-wasting data centers everywhere so that we can scrape every single website a thousand times a month for new training data!"

4. Thus, there is currently pretty much no ethical way of using LLMs.

5. Any ethical exploration of LLM use cases will thus have to wait until the bubble has burst, the investors have moved on to the next scam, and we can sort through the rubble to check what is left.

OH: “What is it about DNS that people find so difficult? It’s just cache invalidation and naming things.”

Fun post pointed out by Werner Koch on the GPG "post-quantum defaults" thread:

https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2026-March/039449.html

"""
Quantum Cryptography, while intellectually neat, does not present a
practical attack that we need protection against at this time.
Kleptographic Standards on the other hand are very much a practical
attack that we need to protect against at this time.

When a standards body tells you that you should cast aside well-studied
cryptographic algorithms which have earned their trust through dozens of
years of examination, testing, and motivated attackers, for the sake of
protection against Quantum Crypto? The attack you should be protecting
against isn’t Quantum Crypto.
"""

#cryptography #QuantumCryptography #security

“I am the algorithm..” I whisper to myself as I tap Boost.

Time for a new #Introduction post!

Hi everyone!
I'm Eliza, a lesbian OC artist from Belgium. I mainly do illustrations and comics of my babies Celdervinn and Mihoko.

You can also hire me for your very own commission ✨ https://vgen.co/artbyeliza (or email)

I'd be grateful for your repost ❤️

#NewHere #Lesbian #OC #OriginalCharacter #OriginalArt #Illustration #Commission #CommissionsOpen #FediArt #MastoArt #Painting #Sapphic #Yuri #GL #Medieval #SwordLesbian #Knights #Fantasy #FantasyArt

hey i have an idea for the oil crisis

what if we pool our resources to build very large fuel efficient vehicles of some kind that we all share- like a library that moves. a public resource.

we could call it… free public transgender surgeries

Dr John Hammond didn't think it was possible to transition from female to male and that's what lead directly to the catastrophic events of Jurassic Park.

The moral of the story is trans rights or else get eaten by dinosaurs.

Here's to all the kids who were born with non-default settings; to all you who put the effort in to figure yourselves out.

You're amazing and deserve to be celebrated.

I'm glad you're here 💝

My washing machine doesn’t need Wi-Fi.
It's a feature that I would regret.
I just need a way to wash my pants.
Not show them to the Internet.

My oven doesn't need Wi-Fi.
I'd value that least of all.
It's already shielded from getting too hot.
It doesn't need another firewall.

My fridge does not need Wi-Fi.
That is just not useful for me.
I want a place to chill my food.
Not chat via TCP/IP.