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When my family gives me crap for using the metric system, this is what I hear:

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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


This entry was edited (4 days ago)
in reply to jgeorge

@jgeorge I’m sorry to hear about what that doctor said to your wife, so i sensitive! Re: losing weight when she expressed her pushback at 1200 kcal
in reply to SpicyBiCutiePie 🌶🇨🇦

@Crissy Well, ex now, for some number of years. But it’s been a consistent story, every woman I have tagged along to a Dr’s appointment with the doctors talk to me like the woman isn’t there at all. They’d ask /me/ health questions about her because they automatically assumed I would tell them the truth and she would lie. I’ve been seen it by female doctors too, which REALLY blew my mind.


One of the hard bits of social media is feeling that the approval of people on the internet is important, and that their disapproval is to be avoided at all costs, even if it means avoiding discussion for fear of having a Wrong Take.

I'm working on myself to change this.


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Rust is indeed woke. It's woke technology that embodies a woke understanding of what it means to be a programming language.

Blog post, by me.

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in reply to Ian Jackson

I agree with this post, and think it's an insightful perspective.

However, I think Rust faces a challenge with complexity. I completely failed to get any of the rest of the team to work on a Rust project I'd developed on leaving my last programming job cos they got stuck learning Rust (before they saw my code!)

Folk found things like co-/contra-variant lifetimes befuddling. I couldn't even convince people they need to know the difference between heap and stack. Not least, management stripped this exact question out of hiring interviews.

Things like async are a mistake, I think. (A mistake I used in my project until I understood why), mainly because of the way they pile on things like pinning. I coped okayish, but the project failed because I was the only compsci degree-er.

I worry that Rust is turning into C++

I don't really think Rust can hope to be inclusive while it require so befuddling concepts. I hold out hopes for maybe Zig (I've not learnt it).

I have no problem with the community.

This entry was edited (5 days ago)
in reply to kæt

Tbh, a less crazy C with arena-based memory allocation, polymorphic types, and better programmer-assist provability on memory management would be ideal, I think. Rust is almost very like that.
in reply to kæt

I do agree that Rust faces a challenge with complexity.

But, I think the problem in the language is much less severe than often imagined. One can write eg Easy Mode Rust - which is still a highly performant and reliable language.

I certainly wouldn't bother novices with lifetime variance; that's advanced stuff which you hardly ever have to worry about (and as ever, either if builds it's fine, or you're an expert doing unsafe). I think "heap vs stack" is another thing novices can ignore.

It doesn't help that there's still a fair amount of perf hacker thinking even in resources for total newbies.

A very real challenge is the way that Rust programs almost never compile first time, which can be deeply offputting to people who've been socialised to be afraid of error messages. I wish we could somehow persuade folks that compiler errors are completely normal and fine, so they feel free to go ahead and experiment.

This entry was edited (5 days ago)
in reply to Ian Jackson

People apparently don't realise that I moderate comments on my blog. They think that if they send a 1000-word screed complaining about "wokeism" that anyone (even me) will read it.

FTR, my practice is to moderate comments vigorously so as to try to maintain the space as both enlightening and pleasant.

This entry was edited (3 days ago)


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


NEW

“We will deport you if we have evidence against you, and deport you if we do not”

On an extraordinary witness statement from the US government - and how it has adopted the logic of the Ducking Stool

By me, at Prospect

prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/l…

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in reply to d a t green

I'm reminded of the WWII internment of the Japanese-Americans:

"He felt that the lack of sabotage efforts only meant that it was being readied for a large-scale effort. "The fact that nothing has happened so far is more or less . . . ominous, in that I feel that in view of the fact that we have had no sporadic attempts at sabotage that there is a control being exercised and when we have it it will be on a mass basis."" en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L…



Given the onerous requirements of the UK online safety act this is a very good way forward. mstdn.party/@pandorablake/1142…


I've spoken at length about my journey to a good solution over on Patreon: patreon.com/posts/open-source-…

Matthew Vernon reshared this.


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When there's, like, one or two guys out there, y'know, if you're completely honest. 👀

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Courtesy of @kæt I’m reading about Indra’s Net, which is interesting to use as a metaphorical way of looking at the complexity (and futility?) of causes and effects in relational networks. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra'…
@kæt


Just heard mention of the Celtic Sea on the Shipping Forecast. I never knew it was a thing.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Yeah. The original UNIX philosophy was "small single-purpose tools that do one thing brilliantly and can be connected like Lego bricks"; systemd pours a pint of cyanoacrylate glue into the toy box.
mastodon.social/@LinuxAndYarn/…


@jimcarroll I'm not getting into Vim vs Emacs, Gnome vs KDE, Debian vs Rhel vs Arch or any of their siblings and children fighting amongst themselves.

But systemd is the most cursed, bastardized, overcomplicated and overcompensating crock that has ever been forced upon Linux users. (AI is still a choice, after all.)


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in reply to Wilfried Klaebe

@wonka @quixoticgeek @leeloo @hector I haven't tried reFind since my first successfull Hackintosh, about 15 years ago. Aside from Hacks, I tend to avoid UEFI if at all possible. I guess it's time to take another look...

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Some of you have been eagerly awaiting part 2 of my test date with Jack. HERE IT IS!

The conclusion: love yourself before you start #dating. You'll know you're ready to #date when you can accept rejection with a shrug and 'your loss!'.

(pls share if you like it!)

girlonthenet.com/blog/love-you…

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

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in reply to Girl on the Net

That's a lovely piece.

(JHR's internalised transphobia) "But!"
(JHR) "No. I'm sure you think you mean well, but no. The core message is still correct."



I applied for a job a few weeks ago and got an invitation back from them to do an "matrix reasoning test": a sort of IQ type thing where you had to figure out which shape went in the gap. I think I failed pretty comprehensively and then ran out of time.


You know what sort of chat you’re having when you describe someone’s sense of self as “kinda ergative-absolutive aligned” and get a reply considering “if Descartes were from Cumberland”…

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


It occurs to me that Ken Thompson's classic lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust" has a LOT to say about code generation using LLMs.

The Thompson self-propagating UNIX hack that he described was a lot like a prompt injection attack (the right parsed input could trigger an unexpected output via opaque-to-programmer intermediate steps).

cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers…
mastodon.social/@gmh/114132067…


Something that strikes me is that news disinformation is a relatively minor threat here; there's enough news around for fact-checking AI-boosted propaganda.

I think a bigger threat is AI-boosted unsafe programming. Too many people rely on Copilot or GPT to write their code for them, perform no sanity-checking, and put it into workplace production. If you pollute a LLM with backdoored code, how many people will roll it out?

The phrase 'Word macros for the 21st Century' springs to mind.


in reply to Charlie Stross

An LLM is a machine that turns untrusted inputs into trusted outputs.
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source
Charlie Stross
@ShiitakeToast @graydon @bsdphk Yeah, going to prison for 11 years can also wreck a career. I DO NOT CARE. If you fuck people over for money, especially lots of money, you are a criminal and you might wear a $3000 suit but you're no different from a street mugger and deserve to be treated the same. If lifetime median earnings are on the order of $5M, then stealing > $5M through "white collar crime" is tantamount to stealing lives.



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Watching a waterwheel quietly turn in the sunshine, is definitely a welcome relaxing activity in these crazy times. #cornwall

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From a 1943 article. "Standard contracts in particular could thus become effective instruments in the hands of powerful industrial and commercial overlords enabling them to impose a new feudal order of their own making upon a vast host of vassals."

Well.



Cambridge doesn’t operate on the basis of teaching you how to do things; it just assumes you can and looks and says “how sad” if you e.g. turn out to have no idea how to write an essay.

(Thing I just wrote in DMs, and thought worth grousing about in public.)

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in reply to xanna

@xanna The OU does it better in that they actually seem to realise people do not spring fully formed into degree courses able to write essays.


Important discovery yesterday. My tutor pronounces EULA like the noise the Martians make in War of the Worlds.


Always feels a little bit of a privilege to play a part in someone’s transition. I’m at a solicitor’s helping witness a young trans man’s deed poll.


Enematopoeia - a word that sounds like it used to be full of shit.


Working in University IT, I'm sure there never used to be such a constant drip-drip pressure to make things more shit.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Elite on the Apple II contains code by Ian Bell and David Braben.

No surprises there.

But did you know it also contains code by Steve Wozniak, Randy Wigginton and Rob Northen?

Find out why in my latest deep dive.

elite.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/…

#retrocomputing #retrogaming #8bit #apple #elite

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Some days severance (as in the TV show) seems very tempting.


(Via the OU Contract Law module). Are terms and conditions better with 1990s computer music?

youtu.be/glqZ7pfZ--8



Things I say to therapists that I then have to unpick in my own head after I've said them, number 772 in a series. "She is a disbeliever in her own power, yet afraid of it."


I just had an appointment with my endocrinologist, which went very differently to what I was expecting. In particular, she prescribed me testosterone. Now, I know cis women have it too, but the idea of deliberately giving myself my nemesis is quite squicky.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


There are no mature students at Starfleet Academy. Nobody ever decides to retrain as a science officer. It seems like there are almost no mid-career changes in the Federation ever. People make a choice in their teens and are stuck with it for the rest of their life.

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in reply to Charles ☭ but you can call me the fediverse bloke

Or, more likely, retraining for a different role doesn't require going back to the academy, but rather a learning on the job style track.
in reply to Mark Rotteveel

@mrotteveel

That works for people switching within Star Fleet, but what if I were a yoga instructor with some sort of injury and decided to retrain as a therapist and became an expert on idk, space station agoaphobia? That would be moving from a civilian role to something at least Star Fleet adjacent.

... I guess there's the TNG bartender....

in reply to Charles ☭ but you can call me the fediverse bloke

They end up in the Red Shirts section and quickly get destroyed.

The fleet thinking is 'mature students have good wide range of experience therefore should survive unfamiliar conditions'. Unfortunately, lack of O2 is not something you can get used to by experience.


in reply to dee, love and enby

Love to see it (the note, not the tesla, just in case anyone was at all confused) -Jm
in reply to dee, love and enby

What a great idea!!!
we have also stopelon.eu
...but while I wait...


When shopping online, usually for clothes, I've seen the "Klarna" etc. buttons at checkout that allow people to buy now and pay later. It's obviously a form of unsecured credit, familiar enough. What I didn't realise until my OU course pointed it out is that these things come with no credit or affordability checks, making it very easy for people to land in significant debt.




Can't quite believe that an acquaintance of mine thinks people vote Reform because they're "concerned about government finances". I mean granted he's probably one of the the most middle class cis het white men I know but come on.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

I'm so pleased Reform have settled on a reason to vote for them now: I used to get terribly confused about whether it was about states rights or ethics in games journalism.

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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


I strongly dislike the fact that we now basically have to reevaluate all domains under management, and the infrastructure that depends on the associated DNS records, in light of this new insider threat from an asshole with a sharpie.

Especially given how eager US tech companies are to comply with whatever these fuckers come up with next.

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Why is there not a cereal called Brekekekex? It could come in little frog shapes and have knob jokes on the packet.


The Equality Act has a number of flaws, but I have a soft spot for a part of it. After the evening where it first actually occurred to me I could be trans, I found myself musing that having “proposed to undergo a process […] for the purposes of reassigning […] sex” I had acquired the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. It didn’t change anything practically but the way that was worded made me feel a little bit seen by whoever drafted the 2010 Act. A tiny legislative hug.



I was thinking over/into my beer just now. I want there to be a website for trans eggs. Is there one? Not just useful information, but actually something much closer to advertising. There's this narrative that shapes being trans as undesirable, faulty, at best a disorder to be treated and pitied.

But being trans is amazing, and I think we should be shouting about it to as many people who need to hear as we can reach.

Sion [main] reshared this.