TehPers

@TehPers@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Age Verification Laws Are Multiplying Like a Virus, and Your Linux Computer Might be Next⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey even I use Linux daily.

  Actually, I’m not really sure why “even I” should be shocking. I write code for a living. Surely I should be using Linux once in a while.

  Anyway RHEL is probably the only Linux distro I can think of that costs money and comes with support. The major cloud providers sometimes have their own Linux distros they use as well (looking at you, Amazon) and you can argue they are selling Linux, but not as directly as RHEL does.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Age Verification Laws Are Multiplying Like a Virus, and Your Linux Computer Might be Next⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Red Hat.

  The other distros? No idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Age Verification Laws Are Multiplying Like a Virus, and Your Linux Computer Might be Next⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It also affects subjects like atheism, as the various religious cultures generally do not want people contemplating the idea that there isn’t a god, especially not while they’re young, they want you long indoctrinated into belief before you can explore different ideas.

  This reminds me of a Pakistani person I don’t personally know, but someone I know talks to them.

  In their hometown, people recite verses from the Quran as part of their religious activities. There’s only one problem: the Quran they use is written in Arabic, but everyone there speaks Urdu. People don’t actually know what the passages say, just how to say them.

  So this person asked them once what the passages say. Why do we read the passages in Arabic instead of Urdu? People here don’t know Arabic.

  Anyway, he got belted shortly after that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve suggests further delays for Steam Machine: 'We hope to ship in 2026'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This contradicts, unsurprisingly, Trump telling Anthropic to go fuck itself and the subsequent deal with OpenAI.

  In any case, my comment was being made in jest because Trump’s admin is no stranger to violating policies, procedures, laws, and human rights.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve suggests further delays for Steam Machine: 'We hope to ship in 2026'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  the Trump regime can use Claude to decide which schoolchildren to bomb

  Not true in thr slightest. Trump can’t use Claude to decide which schoolchildren he can bomb.

  He can use ChatGPT to decide which schoolchildren he can bomb.

  (Anthropic was taken out back for saying they only wanted to identify which schoolchildren are there and not tell them which ones to bomb.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft gets tired of “Microslop,” bans the word on its Discord, then locks the server after backlash⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Since the bottom of an article is usually the least visible, I’ll paste this here to make it more visible:

  “The Copilot Discord channel has recently been targeted by spammers attempting to disrupt and overwhelm the space with harmful content not related to Copilot. Initially, this spam consisted of walls of text, so we added temporary filters for select terms to slow this activity. We have since made the decision to temporarily lock down the server while we work to implement stronger safeguards to protect users from this harmful spam and help ensure the server remains a safe, usable space for the community,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Windows Latest.

  Microsoft added that blocking terms such as “Microslop,” along with other phrases in the spam campaign, was not intended as a permanent policy but a short-term mitigation while the company manages to put additional protections in place.

  Whether it’s true or not that the policy was temporary, I guess we’ll see.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Block ditches 4,000 staff, because AI can do their jobs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In some cases, it appears to be the opposite: CEOs want to do mass layoffs, so they blame AI rather than taking accountability themselves. The Amazon layoffs reek of this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VPNs Can’t Make You Anonymous Online. Don’t Be Fooled by Anyone Who Says They Can⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  More complicated Tor, but super cool. It uses garlic routing rather than onion routing to further anonymize packets.

  It’s worth reading into what it is (and especially those two terms) to get a better understanding.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Block ditches 4,000 staff, because AI can do their jobs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Not exactly. Thinking models just inflate the context window to point the model closer to your target. GANs have two models which compete against each other, both training each othet, with the goal of one (or both) of those models being improved over time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Block ditches 4,000 staff, because AI can do their jobs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is unironically what I’ve seen people try to do, except they assume the second AI is correct.

  Unrelated, but this is how GANs work to some extent. GANs train during the back-and-forth though, while LLMs do not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Block ditches 4,000 staff, because AI can do their jobs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Which outputs are accurate, and which ones are inaccurate? How could you tell? What steps did you take to verify accuracy? Was verifying it a manual process?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations | OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Terminator might be a little more popular.

  It seems the only way to win is not to play.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon blames human employees for an AI coding agent’s mistake | Two minor AWS outages have reportedly occurred as a result of actions by Amazon’s AI tools⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To put some perspective into what our code looks like, there are very few tests (which may or may not pass), no formatter or linter for most of the code, no pipelines to block PRs, no gates whatsoever on PRs, and the code is somewhat typed sometimes (the Python, anyway). Our infrastructure was created ad-hoc, it’s not reproducible, there’s only one environment shared between dev and prod, etc.

  I’ve been in multiple meetings with coworkers and my manager talking about how it is embarassing that this is what we’re shipping. For context, I haven’t been on this project for very long, but multiple projects we’re working on are like this.

  Two years ago, this would have been unacceptable. Our team has worked on and shipped products used by millions of people. Today the management is just chasing the hype, and we can barely get one customer to stay with us.

  The issue lies with the priorities from the top down. They want new stuff. They don’t care if it works, how maintainable it is, or even what the cost is. All they care about is “AI this” and “look at our velocity” and so on. Nobody cares if they’re shipping something that works, or even shipping the right thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon blames human employees for an AI coding agent’s mistake | Two minor AWS outages have reportedly occurred as a result of actions by Amazon’s AI tools⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Colleagues, and the issue is top-down. I’ve raised it as an issue aleeady. My manager can’t do anything about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon blames human employees for an AI coding agent’s mistake | Two minor AWS outages have reportedly occurred as a result of actions by Amazon’s AI tools⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because if I spent my whole day reviewing AI-generated PRs and walking through the codebase with them only for the next PR to be AI-generated unreviewed shit again, I’d never get my job done.

  I’d love to help people learn, but nobody will use anything they learn because they’re just going to ask an LLM to do their task for them anyway.

  This is a people problem, and primarily at a high level. The incentive is to churn out slop rather than do things right, so that’s what people do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon blames human employees for an AI coding agent’s mistake | Two minor AWS outages have reportedly occurred as a result of actions by Amazon’s AI tools⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is what happens to us. People put out a high volume of AI-generated PRs, nobody has time to review them, and the code becomes an amalgamation of mixed paradigms, dependency spaghetti, and partially tested (and horribly tested) code.

  Also, the people putting out the AI-generated PRs are the same people rubber stamping the other PRs, which means PRs merge quickly, but nobody actually does a review.

  The code is a mess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New packaging can warn you when meat has spoiled⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Why would you comment on an article you haven’t read and have no interest in?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New packaging can warn you when meat has spoiled⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And before people ask about sniffing it, the second paragraph:

  People often recognize spoiled meat through a characteristic rotting odor caused by chemical compounds called biogenic amines or BAs. Food quality inspectors quantify these compounds using procedures that involve direct meat sampling and time-consuming laboratory analysis. However, once meat is sealed and distributed for commercial retail, such testing becomes impractical, making spoilage difficult to detect.

  You can’t sniff it through the packaging. Even when opened, your nose isn’t accurate enough to know if something has just started to spoil, or if only a little bit of it has. And not everyone has good (or any) sense of smell.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Infinite scroll is scarcely ever used in a good way

  Just to clarify, we’re only talking about mainstream social media here, right? Those are the only platforms they’re considering here, and more specifically, only TikTok right now.

  “Infinite scroll” is also how you can scroll up in your chat log and see more messages. It’s how you can open logs for a VM online and see logs going further and further back. It’s how you can search for a video on YouTube and keep scrolling down (past the inevitable pile of shit) until you find it.

  On social media platforms, and in particular not in a chat interface, it can be toxic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You can’t really ban dark patterns even though we all agree they suck.

  I think the point I was getting at was that a lot of things dark patterns do are individually things that have the potential for good or bad. Infinite scroll is one example. There’s also modals, sale banners, and so on.

  What makes a dark pattern dark isn’t the specific, individual tools at use. It’s the sum of those, plus the intent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Doesn’t look like this extends beyond TikTok, or at least mainstream social media as a whole.

  Infinite scroll itself isn’t really a problem. It’s just one of the many tools used to keep users engaged on these platforms specifically by removing an interruption from the experience, but isn’t sufficient on its own to create that unhealthy behavior. It’s also used in healthier ways, like search results, chat logs, and so on.

  The EU attempting to rein in these platforms’ control over its users will be interesting to watch. There are decades of research these companies have done on user psychology to maximize their capture of the user’s attention. Forcing them not to use all the tools they developed might result in people breaking out of the cycle of endlessly scrolling. Or it might just annoy users. I don’t know which will happen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  On the oven, I’ll use the clock to see how long something has been baking for without pulling up my phone. Otherwise, the time it says doesn’t mean much to me.

  I’d rather just see a stopwatch-style function on it. Ovens usually have timers already, but sometimes it’s nice to just manually track it, especially if you have to pull the food out to flip it or something mid-way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than half of gamedev professionals see GenAI as harmful, according to GDC’s latest survey⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As opposed to where? India? China?

  Companies in the US aren’t the only ones pushing AI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than half of gamedev professionals see GenAI as harmful, according to GDC’s latest survey⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like a nice deal. Every job posting I’ve seen here comes from a company that wants you to use an LLM.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than half of gamedev professionals see GenAI as harmful, according to GDC’s latest survey⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Am software engineer. Am required by work to use it lest they lose their ungodly investment into a tool that wastes as much time as it does money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The copyrightability of fonts revisited: Matthew Butterick⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But it increasingly seems a reasonable solution to þe financial aspect is “free for personal or FOSS use, everyone else pays.” Which isn’t quite GPL, but I’m sure þere’s a license for it.

  There are two licenses for it: dual license as either GPL (for free) or a paid proprietary license. Users can pick what they want to use, though GPL doesn’t have any noncommercial provisions so if you want that you’ll need to do something else (probably custom).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LG's new subscription program charges up to £277 per month to rent a TV⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  or even go see a local sports event in person.

  Usually doing this can also get you close to people, even if only spatially. Occasionally it does get you close to people figuratively, though. If there’s nobody in your life that you would want to get dinner with, then I’d recommend the sports event, or something similar to it anyway. You can always invite people you meet there to your next month’s fancy dinner.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LG's new subscription program charges up to £277 per month to rent a TV⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or, hear me out, and I know this is crazy, but you buy a cheap, used TCL for a couple hundred pounds. Then, with the money you’re saving every month, you get a nice dinner with someone you’re close to, or even go see a local sports event in person.

  Ok, I don’t know what they cost in the UK, but they’re sub-$500 new here in the US for a decent size TV. You have to put up with the TCL bullshit, especially if it’s a Roku one, but you were probably getting a smart TV anyway, and they all have this bullshit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BlockchainFX Presale Surges as Investors Hunt Top Crypto Plays for 2026⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  On top of this not linking to anything, it takes a special kind of person to invest into something as volatile as crypto.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think my games should have optional calls to assembly functions for certain CPUs and GPUs if possible.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you want to? Go for it.

  Does your game crawl? Have you identified this code as the bottleneck? Are you certain that asm will give you a meaningful performance increase, and that your issue doesn’t lie with your approach to the problem? Sure, I guess. You said your game runs fine though, so this probably doesn’t apply.

  Is your game fast already? If you don’t want to do it, don’t.

  Writing asm by hand is almost always a waste of time. There are only a few times where it’s actually necessary, and unless you’re writing a bootloader and running your game on bare metal, I can’t imagine why it’d be necessary. But you know your code better than anyone else here, so you should know whether it’s needed or not more than any of us do.

  To begin with, you’re apparently targeting the Z80, which I haven’t seen used for games in the wild… probably in my entire life? Maybe an arcade machine I played on once used it, but I can’t think of any other times. If your targets need custom assembly, then you should already know that. We don’t know your targets.