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  the critiques I've seen of the php patch have little to do with "moral purity" and "feeling icky" and are more about the actual approach to mitigating the problem *including* considering the goals and point of view of people whose job that is, so it's not about making unconsidered demands for human labour either "pick your battles, e.g. complain that AI is hurting artists" it's also hurting programmers and distorting how programming gets done so I'...

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@Pikapods/117410424142500742 the function of AI is to steal your work, charge you for the privilege, and then rent your own stolen work back to you

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  for now until the end of august, I'm running a sale on my programming book "building git" -- get 50% off using code BGAUG2026 https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/

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  a great summary of the current state of de facto ruby governance from @threedaymonk@sonomu.club; I think that if ruby is going to meaningfully remove the influence of the fascists currently in charge of it, it is imperative that gems.coop and the move to fork rails are successful https://po-ru.com/2026/07/29/it-doesnt-matter-whether-matz-is-nice

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  finding doctorow's attempt to separate the intrinsic properties of genAI as a technology from its effects as an economic object somewhat baffling. the economic effects are both directly caused by the capex requirements of the tech itself, and are also the reason wealthy investors want to build it. the economics is the point

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  this story about openai "breaking containment" is such bullshit if you know anything about how computer security is supposed to be done. if a program accesses a remote system it's because you decided to let it do that. LLMs don't have magical powers that can work around "we unplugged the ethernet"

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  somehow I only recently learned that LLMs need the whole conversation fed back to them on each prompt so their i/o cost scales as O(n^2), something that would be considered completely unacceptable in almost any other production network-accessible software

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  one thing that irks me about the "complexity -> consciousness" argument is that computer people do not have a well defined idea of what "complexity" is, it is a "I know it when I see it" thing. whereas we do have a very rigorous formal model of what a computer can do

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  did you think hofstadter's arguments about consciousness arising from self reference were far fetched and poorly argued? you're going to love "the computer has a soul because it got too big"

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  I have been playing "nier replicant" having previously played "nier: automata" and have come to the conclusion that the design brief for "breath of the wild" was "what if nier replicant was good"

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  does anyone know why there might be a ludicrous number of helicopters flying over north london all afternoon

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  an air conditioner is a sandwich

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  finally had someone call one of my open source projects "legacy technology" do I win a prize

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  I am pretty inconsistent about this but I do usually put technically redundant parentheses in anything involving ternaries or bitwise arithmetic because I simply cannot remember their precedence and I think it reads better https://studio8502.ca/@mos_8502/116914686499380319

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  one reason that "AI" is not producing huge shifts in profitability is that, for most businesses, raw production speed of software has not been the bottleneck on generating or increasing revenue for at least as long as I've been working in tech (20 years)

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  related: tools that claim to "improve" your writing are actually *removing variance*. improving the input in a genuinely additive way is physically impossible, so they use a sleight of hand to dress up the removal of signal as an enhancement

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  genAI is basically a bunch of "I fucking love science" dudes thinking they can invent hawking radiation without also having the black hole

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  last couple days to get "building git" for 50% off using code BGAPR2026 https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/

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  thing is, I'm not even opposed to dismantling IP as a concept, and I'm not wild about wielding it to oppose AI, because the same argument is used to shut down the internet archive

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@hynek/116476031032569096 this is what I mean when I say genAI has got people deciding to act stupid on purpose. things like "prompt injection" are just things we previously recognised as glaring categories errors, but suddenly we can't recognise very obviously terrible ideas because they're wrapped up in the bullshit machine

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  RE: https://thepit.social/@peter/116376227720432462 this is about where I am, it's like a ton of people decided to forget how anything works and become helpless on purpose

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  @perfectlynormal thank you :)

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  I also just wish I wrote more. there's a bunch of reasons I don't but I'm please to be posting something that isn't about genAI amid the sea of "all everyone talks about is genAI"

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  handshake meme between Édith Piaf and Tony Hoare: "I regret nothing"

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  every pro-genAI argument to me just looks like refusing to take your own work seriously

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  vim's spell checker is unhappy with "endiannesses" yes hello welcome to binary data processing, we describe bit/byte order using a term from gulliver's travels about the orientation of eggs. I wish I was making this up

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/116415821939972420 if bluesky were decentralised it would be decentralised

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  thought I would check if https://mastodon.social/@Taweret@timeloop.cafe/116432749108676529 is genuine and it's actually even worse

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  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@SecureOwl/116404712213309413 one organisation doing this would be silly. dozens of organisations doing it to the point it's a common pattern is a nightmare how can so many companies decide to route people's emails to the same random *unregistered* domain instead of deleting their address

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  RE: https://lingo.lol/@thedansimonson/116156498254821672 this is also why LLMs are not "another layer of abstraction". do you need to read the asm output of your compiler every time it runs? no, and having to do so would substantially reduce the value of said compiler