Ethan Black @golemwire@librem.one
Hello there!
I boost a lot of posts, but I have a few things to say every now and then.
I am largely fine with boosting posts from people I disagree with even on significant, dividing issues. I usually don't, however, if they actively advocate for these ideas... so it goes :/
#Christian #coding #HaikuOS #Linux #privacy #FOSS #Fediverse #SmashBros #SSBU #LegendOfZelda
#fedi22
Note: social.librem.one doesn't support DMs
Joined Jul 2022
Pinned post
Mass surveillance promotes the Single Point of Failure that is totalitarianism.
Pinned post
Don't be satisfied with your vision for the future. Be satisfied with completing it.
So, don't be happy with saying "I'm going to do this project"; that's just a plan and an intention. If you're satisfied just with "someday I will" then you won't do it. #advice #workEthic #gamedev #creativity
Pinned post
Just a heads-up, my college has some restrictions on what I can say here :) it probably wouldn't've been an issue anyway, I don't really want to dig at an organization while I'm a member of it, but it is worth noting, as a believer in free speech....
Pinned post
"Too often we attack cultural challenges with a spirit of misplaced certainty. We feel like we know what’s wrong, and we know how to fix it, and when we know we’re right, opposition is frustrating at best and infuriating at worst. The more certain we are, the more likely we are to view opponents not just as wrong, but evil. Do they not want to solve our crises?" - David French
Remember that by far, most people aren't out with the intent to destroy good.
Something to think about
#culture
Thanks Microsoft for just rebooting my computer (#VM in this case), closing my windows and ending my session, without my consent *_*
Not Windows 11, actually. I was feeling pretty good about Windows 10, looking back, but now I'm remembering some things less than fondly.
#Microsoft #Windows #Windows10 #MSCopilot #platformDecay #crapification
Wow. (For the website name and the fact about the ROM size of #SuperMarioBros) https://www.suppermariobroth.com/post/189519267315/the-size-of-the-super-mario-bros-rom-is-around-31
It also means I get the grab hand instead of the four arrows when I drag a window. Takes me back.
After watching and getting into the #AnimatorVsAnimation YouTube series, I've had to change my mouse cursor theme from the typical (canonical for Linux at this point) #Adwaita theme to the white #DMZ #DMZTheme . Time to slap some stick-figure enemies around with this extension of my hand.
An #airport just required me to give them an email in order to use their wifi, and I entered "user@0.0.0.0". We'll see how that goes for them....
The TOS had said they could use the email for marketing :/
(Yes, I thought about doing something along the lines of "root@localhost", but I was nice to them instead :) )
Special non-paywalled link (or whatever, looks like you need to sign in to NYT otherwise?) from the X post at https://x.com/seanmdav/status/1911770390545772727
(I don't know if I would jump to the conclusion about it being a "scam"; though, pharma makes lots of money and where lots of money is made, have some health skepticism)
As someone who has been diagnosed with #ADHD: as far as I am concerned, ADHD is a choice combined with a predisposition. I get distracted with school because I find other things more interesting, and I have a predisposition (or maybe made a choice when I was young) to think a lot
Realistically, you could build a whole wiki on an individual's life.
Ethan Black
boosted
Ethan Black
boosted
Ethan Black
boosted
Ethan Black
boosted
For todays #vgmwednesday, here’s Toad’s Factory from #MarioKartWii. It returns in #MarioKartWorld too!
Ethan Black
boosted
Ethan Black
boosted
I block trackers, not ads. It’s not my problem that almost all ads rely on trackers to be played out.
Ethan Black
boosted
Ethan Black
boosted
The reason I get so annoyed about people pitching LLMs as a way to 'democratise programming' or as end-user programming tools is that they solve the wrong problem.
The hard part of programming is not writing code. It's unambiguously expressing your problem and desired solution. Imagine if LLMs were perfect programmers. All you have to do is write a requirements document and they turn it into a working program. Amazing, right? Well, not if you've ever seen what most people write in a requirements document or seen the output when a team of good programmers works from a requirements document.
The most popular end-user programming language in the world (and, by extension, the most popular programming language), with over a billion users, is the Calc language that is embedded in Excel. It is not popular because it's a good language. Calc is a terrible programming language by pretty much any metric. It's popular because Excel (which is also a terrible spreadsheet, but that's a different rant) is basically a visual debugger and a reactive programming environment. Every temporary value in an Excel program is inspectable and it's trivial to write additional debug expressions that are automatically updated when the values that they're observing change.
Much as I detest it as a spreadsheet, Excel is probably the best debugger that I have ever used, including Lisp and Smalltalk.
The thing that makes end-user programming easy in Excel is not that it's easy to write code, it's that it's easy to see what the code is doing and understand why it's doing the wrong thing. If you replace this with an LLM that generates Python, and the Python program is wrong, how does a normal non-Python-programming human debug it? They try asking the LLM, but it doesn't actually understand the Python so it will often send them down odd rabbit holes. In contrast, every intermediate step in an Excel / Calc program is visible. Every single intermediate value is introspectable. Adding extra sanity checks (such as 'does money leaving the account equal the money paid to suppliers?') is trivial.
If you want to democratise programming, build better debuggers, don't build tools that rapidly generate code that's hard to debug.
Ethan Black
boosted
So a younger version of Pauline is in #DonkeyKongBananza for the #Switch2? Interesting…
Ethan Black
boosted
Alpha 7 will be the last COSMIC alpha release. Then on to Beta!
Hello there!
I boost a lot of posts, but I have a few things to say every now and then.
I am largely fine with boosting posts from people I disagree with even on significant, dividing issues. I usually don't, however, if they actively advocate for these ideas... so it goes :/
#Christian #coding #HaikuOS #Linux #privacy #FOSS #Fediverse #SmashBros #SSBU #LegendOfZelda
#fedi22
Note: social.librem.one doesn't support DMs
Joined Jul 2022
