spicy noodles

This is a bit of me-thing, but yeah, I’m annoyed that YouTube is the way it is. It’s non-trivial to embed videos from there without violating the GDPR, so embedded videos are basically not a thing these days on general-purpose social media.

And personally, I also want to avoid the tracking from clicking through to a YouTube video and Google encourages long-ass videos, so I always hesitate before clicking through. Also, people without ad blockers go through a completely different circle of hell before a video starts.

Basically, I miss the days when memes could just be short videos. Where everyone could see on the embed that, oh, it’s a 30 second video, I can watch that. And then they’d just click play, without leaving the page.

I do understand that likely no one would care to provide the bandwidth for dumb meme videos on PeerTube either. But yeah, I just dream of that being a thing.

I mean, so far, all of them require tons of humanly produced data.

Discriminative AI (deep learning et al) requires humans to label data for hours on end, per use-case.
And generative AI (LLMs et al) require just insane amounts of human works to copy from, albeit not necessarily limited to individual use-cases.

I guess, what I’m saying is that the ratio of how much labor humans (involuntarily) invested into AIs, compared to the labor these AIs actually perform, is likely a lot higher than 70%.

🦀

I enjoy this:

return a.or(b);

But yeah, that requires an Option type rather than null pointers…

Normally, I would reply to the guy, because, you know, he’s a human being, but there’s so many replies, I doubt, he can actually read all of them and potentially someone else has already made that point.

Anyways, I feel like something he kind of misses here is that many of us do it from a heartfelt place. Like, we’re all techies. We’ve all used commercial software to a point where we’ve grown so frustrated with it that we decided it is a waste of time.

So, it’s not us saying “Why don’t you go and just have more time/money?”.
Rather, it’s us saying “This thing is wasting your time? Here is a solution that I felt wasted less time in the long run.”.

Yes, sometimes that does miss the mark, because not every complaint is looking for a solution. Or because we may be frustrated with restrictions of commercial software, which are not a problem for less techy people. Or even because we’re embedded in this tech world and are hoping to make it a better place, which someone just quickly visiting may not care about.

But other times, I do just happen to know a lot about technology and a non-techy genuinely did not know about the solution I suggested and is actually really appreciative of me bringing it up. It does happen. And it’s not easy to discern who would appreciate a suggestion and who won’t.

I quite like the star-button on Mastodon for this. Just pings the comment author that you appreciated their comment. So, it’s not an indication to some algorithm that this comment is incredibly relevant for everyone, because well, some comments just aren’t.

The rainbow not enough for you? 🙃

No, not at all. It’s a joke post, abusing the in-memory representation of the Option type to construct numbers. When nesting the Option type, it turns into a densely packed bit vector…

And if I understand the purpose of Fin correctly, you’re picking on the one ‘peasant language’ that actually has something like that built-in.
In Rust, you can specify the type of an array as e.g [u8; 3]. Which is an array containing values of type u8 (unsigned 8-bit integer) with a fixed, compile-time-guaranteed length of 3. So, [u8; 3] could be used to represent an RGB color, for example.
It is an array, not a set, but well, close enough.

This person (unintentionally) tested it: https://lemmy.kde.social/post/375713

F-Droid has the most up-to-date versions (v0.3.16 and v1.4.5). Both of these just haven’t seen a release in a while, although the FlorisBoard developer seems to have recently returned.

Somewhat tangential, but USB-C docking stations, as useful as it is to have everything in one cable, it can also be annoying.

At the office, I often just want to charge my laptop with them, but they also give me a wired internet connection, which, thanks to corporate networking shitfuckery, doesn’t work. So, every time I plug in, I have to disable that wired connection.

Also, recently a colleague had problems getting her headset working when she was plugged into certain docks, ultimately due to a bug in the OS.
Like, alright, that should be fixed in the OS, but that USB-C dock doesn’t even have a speaker attached to it. It’s completely useless that it shows up as an audio device.
And even after we found a workaround to fix her headset, she will now have to switch over her audio device every time she plugs into a dock.

So, basically it’s now one step to plug in the cable, but potentially multiple steps to undo half of what you unwillingly plugged in…

Apparently, “Theorems for free!” is a paper that talks about an extensive ability to reason about parts of programs, if you follow some rather basic rules.

However, lots of popular programming languages throw this ability out the window, because they do not want to enforce those basic rules.
Most languages, for example, allow for rather uncontrolled side effects and to be able to reason as a programmer, you have to make the assumption that no one else abused side effects.

The instanceof is rather referring to dynamic typing, though, as e.g. employed by Python and JS, which makes it difficult to make any assumptions at all.

So, in statically typed languages, when you’re implementing a function, you can declare that a given parameter is a number or a string etc. and the compiler will enforce that for you. In dynamically typed languages, you have to assume that anyone calling your function is using it correctly, which is a difficult assumption to make after a refactoring in a larger codebase.

All in all, such different levels of rigorosity can be fine, but the larger your codebase grows, the more you do want such rules to be enforced, so you can just ignore the rest of the codebase.

They got bought out and the new owner laid off 50% of the staff: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/oct/17/bandcamp-lays-off-half-its-staff-after-buyout-by-songtradr

One of those things is telemetry — whatever that means to Mozilla

You can type about:telemetry into the URL bar to see what it sends.

These images always look so fucking creepy…

Why compete, if you can buy your competitors?

Alright, yeah. I do even feel the same about copyrighted music. But lots of people want to listen to their favorite artists and will accept rather much pain to do so…

YouTube has lots of competitors in the field of video content: Netflix et al, Twitch, TikTok, DailyMotion, Vimeo, PeerTube etc.

But they have a monopoly on specific content. If you search for a tutorial on how to take apart your specific toaster model, you’ll probably only find that on YouTube. Or if you’ve watched a specific video creator for years and they only upload to YouTube. Or even if your colleague sends you a link to some dumb YouTube video, then you’re not going to ask them for the title, so you can throw it into SepiaSearch.

If you’re part of a younger generation, it’s just not really an option to not use YouTube…

Because they have a monopoly.