Tom Morris

Eternally damned techno-priest heretic, curly brace balancer, and pesky citation requester.

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Last Notes

2024-07-08 17:16:28

TIL: Using #nix run to lint one-off #Python scripts.
(Maybe it'll end up being Lix or whatever at some point...)
https://tommorris.org/posts/2024/til-using-nix-run-to-lint-oneoff-python-scripts/

2024-06-22 12:32:15

Today, I bought some single-use gel-ink pens.
The brand has a TikTok account.
I must be getting old and reactionary but why do pens need TikTok accounts?

2024-06-20 20:54:11

For actual fucks sake.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd110nl7dppo

2024-06-20 13:48:10

#Anki is a really helpful piece of software, but here's an annoying bug.
You create a bunch of cards with tag A. You realise tag A is wrong, so go into 'Browse'. You change all the cards with tag A to tag B. (No bulk change option, annoying, yes.)
Tag A will still be there as a ghost. If you click tag A, Anki may crash (on macOS it does anyway).
Go back to the start screen, choose 'Check database' under the Tools menu. I'd report it but no thanks on joining their forum.

2024-06-20 12:44:45

Was reading about Therac-25.
After the fourth incident, East Texas in March 1986—where the patient died after truly horrifying complications—an AECL engineer was dispatched.
He asked his manager whether there had been any other reported incidents.
No, he was told.
The company was aware of two of the three prior incidents in 1985. One of those incidents was the subject of ongoing litigation.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
#Horizon #PostOfficeInquiry

2024-06-18 17:49:56

The litigation costs of Post Office Ltd (£40m, minimum) and the many millions of dollars extracted from insecure smart contracts over the last few years tends to suggest that people are remarkably willing to believe that magical bug-free computer software is a reality, despite it being contrary to the basic daily reality of every single technology professional.
As disparities between belief and reality go, it's up there with flat earthers or Scientology.

2024-06-18 13:37:41

In 2023, 2057 people were asked whether they thought average custodial sentence for indictable offences was shorter, longer or the same as it was in 2012.
30% said shorter. 21% said longer. 23% said about the same. 26% said don't know.
Average sentence (excluding life and indeterminate sentences) in 2012 was 14.5 months. In 2021, it was 21.9 months. In 2023, it 23.3.
Another instance of "survey says British public wrong about nearly everything".
See page 29-30 of https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/41844/documents/207521/default/

2024-06-17 12:49:42

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@npub1js6…6wk0 post it note fell off the wall whoops you are now in jail

2024-06-17 09:23:57

Was poking around in #Horizon #PostOfficeInquiry docs - specifically, testimony about whether developers at Fujitsu had access to old bug reports.
"That's incredibly stupid and awful" I thought, before recalling the continued existence of StaleBot on GitHub, and the numerous shitshows I've experienced where someone in management just deleted the old bug tracker without moving the data over to the new bug tracker because the new one is More Agile or something.

2024-06-16 18:15:51

If you're using Netlify and you don't want your website being training material for LLMs, this blog post is pretty good.
Verify it's working before and afterwards with
`curl -I -H "User-Agent: ChatGPT" [url]`
https://www.jeremiak.com/blog/block-bots-netlify-edge-functions/

2024-06-14 15:10:59

An idle meditation: do governments and public bodies need to broaden out from "user experience" to "citizen experience"?
Users act. They renew their passport. They register to vote. They pay their taxes. Making these easier is a fine use of UX.
But the citizen is a broader role. They consider, observe, discuss, debate, participate and hold to account governments and public institutions as part of the goal of collective self-governance.
Maybe more Aristotle and less A/B testing.

2024-06-14 10:01:30

Give me twenty minutes and a cricket bat and the phrase “required cookies” will cease to be a thing.

2024-06-13 18:08:57

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@npub120w…6rfp it's a super-duper next generation enterprise blockchain where you can also edit or delete rows as needed.

2024-06-13 17:19:18

How to implement an enterprise blockchain
Step one: sudo apt install postgresqld
Step two: reassure management that it definitely is an enterprise blockchain.

2024-06-13 11:50:24

Google has transformed from organising the world’s information to an utterly bizarre project of turning the web into a massive Human Centipede of unattributed nonsense.
Precisely at a time when we could really do with more trust and provenance of information rather than less.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@dunhamsteve/112601059281021680

2024-06-12 08:42:55

Better late than never, I suppose.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3gg17pq5y9o

2024-06-11 20:09:35

Looked something up on Wikipedia yesterday and was rather pleased to see the article was up-to-date and pointed to the correct sources with non-broken links.
I clicked view history and saw that I edited a month or so back. A little present from the past.

2024-06-09 18:46:48

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@npub1gwq…gryh on copyright, its a decision by the US Copyright Office that only humans can get copyrights - was affirmed in the disputes a few years back about the monkey selfie.

2024-06-09 11:40:54

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@npub168z…p56f one is a plastic device that's supposed to stand in for functions otherwise performed by humans and the other is etc...

2024-06-09 11:30:14

The Rabbit R1 subreddit is filled with a lot of people taking photos of their devices before sending them back for a refund, with a side serving of sharing details of how to mod them and install stock Android (much to the consternation of the manufacturer, apparently).
What a shitshow.
At least with a Juicero, you got some freshly squeezed juice to drink.

2024-06-09 09:56:56

iroh looks really neat.
I wonder how fiddly it would be to integrate iroh with SQLite replication so you could have small personal SQL databases that run on your devices and can sync between devices without having to expose ports, deal with NAT traversal/port forwarding and all that crap.
https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh

2024-06-08 17:53:27

A vaguely useful purpose for large language models: verifying event metadata against body text.
"Below is text from an event listing. Identify the start and end times for the event. Return a JSON object with "start" and "end" as keys, and the values in ISO 8601 format, with no extra description or context. If you can only infer a time and no date, please do not invent a date - just provide the time. If you cannot parse anything, return a JSON object with "error" as a key and an error message."

2024-06-06 23:32:43

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@npub1y0d…2e5h “you’re not my real dad, computer”

2024-06-06 18:16:36

It seems fitting that Riposte—the software that underpinned Horizon—has now spawned "Riposte AI".
One might think that being linked to the greatest miscarriage of justice in English legal history might be grounds for a rebrand, but I guess you could pivot to AI.
Instead of having to hire lawyers and auditors then ignoring their advice, future Post Office executives can just have a large language model determine whether people are doing crimes.
https://www.eschergroup.com/riposte-ai/

2024-06-06 15:59:01

Hitting CTRL-F and changing the names of criminal offences will definitely fix the many complex problems with the criminal justice system.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/05/tories-to-pledge-homicide-law-overhaul-with-us-style-classifications

2024-06-06 15:01:39

It's quite sad that we now have really good computer displays—hi-DPI, big, fast refresh rates but UI design that just keeps getting worse.
Everything hidden in hamburger menus. Not enough contrast between text and background. Lack of clear boundaries between controls and content. Many icons, buttons or controls just gone, replaced with "gestures" that are not intuitive and which you are expected to learn by mindreading. No keyboard shortcuts. Zero shits given about accessibility. I hate it.

2024-06-04 15:26:22

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@npub183k…4ghj yep, and very well deserved on their part (in my view)

2024-06-04 14:12:58

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@npub1ax2…n4tg Could be - but there seems to be an assumption among AI folk that improvements will continue and not hit limits.

2024-06-04 13:46:11

Just learned Firefox has built-in translation: local translation model, not sending to a cloud, yay privacy!
Page on the Mozilla site has no details about how to use it. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/translate/
There's a support page that has more details - it's not linked from the page above. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation
It's supposed to put an icon in the URL bar. Tested on French and Spanish WP, logged in with UI in English - doesn't work.
There's also no keyboard shortcut.
Mozilla gets so close...

2024-06-04 13:12:46

Today's the day I found out that the New Jersey state court system has a chatbot.
They tested it internally and released it to the public when it got 80% of answers asked right.
One wonders who is responsible for the potentially negative consequences for the 20% of people who it gives incorrect information to who then rely on it, perhaps to their peril? What if they miss a filing deadline or fail to make an application they need to?
Details at p.7-8 of https://www.ncsc.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/20830/2020-04-02-intro-to-ai-for-courts_final.pdf

2024-06-03 18:17:38

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@npub1mm3…nv99 perfect timing as there's a vault opening in Herefordshire.

2024-06-03 17:54:16

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@npub1wn9…07fm if major civil upheaval happens, I’ll send you a homing pigeon.

2024-06-03 17:49:37

The one year I didn’t go and EMF turned into Fallout.

2024-06-03 17:22:22

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@npub19lt…qfjk I mean, R means code written by scientists and all sorts of demons lurk there.
Python as written by scientists may as well be a different language than Python as written by software developers.

2024-06-03 17:17:42

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@npub1xap…eda6 the Vim/Emacs jokes write themselves etc.

2024-06-03 16:48:56

A tech writing pro tip: if you are creating a new programming language or database (or a bunch of other things), please say why. Not like a salesman or a fervent advocate, just a human explanation of your motivations/goals.
“I wanted something that feels a bit like Python but super well-optimised for [domain X]” - Great!
“The other tools I looked at were complicated” - Fab!
“I wanted to build this as an exercise to put into practice what I studied in my compilers module” - Totally fine!

2024-06-03 12:08:08

Here is a weird and delightful bit of socially positive trolling in Norway (run it through your fave translation software) from back in 2010.
A student sends a letter to a Norwegian conspiracy theory newspaper/website claiming to be an engineer for a company making wind turbines that are actually mind control devices and attaches a "secret document".
They publish it, predictably enough.
Meanwhile, politicians bloviate about how misinformation is a brand new problem.
https://fritanke.no/lurte-nyhetsspeilet-trill-rundt/19.7041

2024-06-03 11:39:45

"Is the C-suite at fault for the current tech problems?"
Post Office Ltd. Case closed.

2024-06-02 11:37:42

Fun Overpass-Turbo query for #OpenStreetMap: a map of all the K2 and K6 series telephone boxes in London.
Just in case you want to take a red phone box tourist photo and the Tube is screwed or there's a marathon or whatever on and the usual toursity ones in Parliament Square/Covent Garden aren't accessible.
You can also move and re-run the query to find old phone booths anywhere (including ones outside the UK).
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1Mlr

2024-06-01 14:42:54

If you use e-book reader software to open a reference book in ePub form and flip to a chapter half-way through to look at something, it suddenly gets all excited and says "you've read 63% of the book".
You'd think programmers would know the difference between random access and sequential access, but I guess product managers might have not gotten the memo.

2024-05-31 18:21:37

What a week. Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

2024-05-31 11:51:23

An idea I wish existed: an open source, user-friendly synchronising personal database with mobile and desktop apps. Kinda like a modern Access or FileMaker.
You need a tool for tracking what books you've read, your exam revision schedule or whatever... that's just a database!
Rather than subscription-based domain-specific apps that lock you in and slurp your data up for god-knows-what nonsense, we could empower users by just letting them build a simple database that syncs between devices.

2024-05-31 00:35:50

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@npub180e…pn95 I have a funny feeling they weren’t worrying about one particular count. ‘Twas all or nothing.

2024-05-29 13:31:16

I was looking today at a SSO-as-a-service platform that was keen to put "AI" (whatever that means) at the centre of identity management.
Getting a 3am PagerDuty alert on New Year's Eve because Professor Clippy randomly hallucinated and decided to disable mandatory 2FA or wipe the users table—features developers and sysadmins will truly fall in love, I'm sure.

2024-05-28 23:57:18

Just in time for the rollout of Horizon-GPT, the future of Post Office IT.
https://mstdn.social/@ElleGray/112520793359294305

2024-05-28 15:13:19

Sentences you don't want to hear from otherwise supposedly reputable publications: "[we have] AI everywhere in our newsroom".
https://futurism.com/washington-post-pivot-ai

2024-05-26 18:24:30

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@npub1r49…m5c8 That would not surprise me.
In this particular case, it seems to be completely understandable human error...

2024-05-26 17:51:57

Today, I accidentally found and notified a UK government department of a drafting problem in secondary legislation. The process was made significantly slower due to the lack of a consistent commit history, a good diff/blame tool, and the preference for PDFs.
This is not how I saw my Sunday going, but here we are.

2024-05-25 20:47:05

This is a really interesting article on how page dewarping works - i.e. the mathematics of how you go from taking a photo of a piece of paper with the camera on, say, your phone to having an image that vaguely looks like a scan of the document. And there's readable Python code.
Even a mathematical dunce like moi can just about follow it.
https://mzucker.github.io/2016/08/15/page-dewarping.html

2024-05-25 08:30:19

The implication of this article is there’s no challenge to CMA decisions.
There is a process in the bill to allow companies to apply to the Competition Appeal Tribunal (as there already is under existing competition law) for review of CMA decision-making, and to appeal from the CAT to the Court of Appeal (or Court of Session).
(Also, if there wasn’t, judges have an inherent scepticism towards legislation trying to oust their powers of review…)
Also gavels.
https://mastodon.social/@verge/112498586494043672

2024-05-24 18:36:47

Counterpoint: the Post Office were just as capable of ignoring their lawyers as they were people telling them about software bugs.
https://infosec.exchange/@chrismerkel/112495797916386580

2024-05-24 10:38:47

Commercial software development in 2024 involves lots of hard decisions.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/495/157/142/190/502/original/9bf6a49e751239de.png

2024-05-24 10:25:12

If Horizon were being built today, Paula Vennells would be proudly announcing AI integration. The incentives of organisations are to deliver shiny bullshit for publicity and hype rather than stable, working, well-engineered software. Everyone else is doing it so we should too.
You can bet that teams currently being assigned to “can we have some more lying in our product?” have decades old bugs that need fixing, but that’s boring and you don’t get promoted for fixing bugs.

2024-05-24 08:35:41

The section on "lines to take" in the Infected Blood Inquiry (vol 7) report is well worth reading, especially for scientific or technical professionals working in organisations that rely on their knowledge.
"Unhappily, in their repeated use
of these lines to take, successive governments were more concerned about reputational
damage than openness and honesty; more defensive than candid; more interested in
avoiding financial exposure than in admitting shortcomings."
https://www.infectedbloodinquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/Volume_7.pdf

2024-05-24 07:59:50

Horizon was an accounting system that can't add numbers together despite adding numbers together being the one thing computers are actually good at. Google is becoming a search engine that just believes and spits back any assertion it encounters however ludicrous without any consideration of context.
The greatest threat to software quality comes not from developers accidentally creating bugs but from the decisions made by the inadequates in leadership across both the public and private sector.

2024-05-23 16:26:52

Former Post Office head of legal is in Australia and won't cooperate with the #PostOfficeInquiry.
"Beer? I'd rather have one sitting on the beach rather than one that'll cross-examine me about my bloody emails..."
https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/former-post-office-gc-wont-co-operate-with-public-inquiry/5119761.article

2024-05-23 13:32:38

I've been getting weird spam from a guy selling those dodgy "learn how to make money fast online from my $997 seminar!!1" guys teaching "disruptive entrepreneurship", which, as far as I can tell, is teaching people how to run their own scammy online seminars that cost $997 and upsell people to even more expensive seminars.
I've reported that nonsense directly to the US FTC. Every bit of legal inconvenience that scammy shits like that get is totally justified

2024-05-23 12:06:06

Vennells at the #PostOfficeInquiry yesterday:
"One of the biggest lessons for governance in this was, when I joined the Post Office in 2007, there was absolutely no corporate memory, alive, at least, of the inception of the Horizon system."
TODO: look into the exciting new idea of writing things down in order to preserve knowledge across time. I've heard many murmurings from across the Channel about some kind of 'printing press' which sounds rather exciting.

2024-05-22 17:16:44

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@npub168z…p56f it’s the CEO version of the Tumblr teens posting their shoplifting hauls.

2024-05-22 16:56:52

If you're running a company seeking to use someone's IP rights, breaching them after they've said no is a truly genius business decision.
I mean, the ensuing litigation will be a lot spicier when the claimant can produce a whole series of emails back and forth. That kind of thing really helps a judge work out what your intentions were.

2024-05-22 15:50:31

Very curious that POL witness before the #PostOfficeInquiry seem to have extremely good powers of recollection—damn near photographic memories—when the evidence they are recounting supports their position, but then have sudden and severe memory loss for anything which does not support their position.

2024-05-22 11:09:43

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@npub1q0h…xqc8 Ooh, will give it a try.

2024-05-22 10:26:59

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@npub1vnt…nxql alas no, the CodePlex project didn’t use Git (or any other VCS) - it was individual source code files uploaded as released files.

2024-05-21 18:59:59

Today, I needed to look at some code that was once hosted on CodePlex, Microsoft's code sharing site that closed down in 2017.
I can't look at said code. The Internet Archive version doesn't work because there's a JavaScript pop-up that interrupts the user flow.
I'd be less annoyed about the fact this code is now 404ing if it weren't for the fact it's Microsoft. And we sort of have to trust them to be good stewards of GitHub, despite the rather bad example of CodePlex.

2024-05-21 10:37:50

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@npub1ul5…zs0a kitty is good.

2024-05-21 00:40:45

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@npub198t…hasj the only thing more extravagant than the lying will be the costs.

2024-05-20 19:39:59

"To the extent that it is said there is evidence supporting his claim, it is at best questionable or of very dubious relevance or entirely circumstantial and at worst, it is fabricated and/or based on documents I am satisfied have been forged on a grand scale" [5]
"First, it would either be impossible to pin down every lie and/or it would take weeks to do so. Second, Dr Wright would simply invent further lies in his attempts to cover up existing lies" [164]
Ouch.
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2024/1198.html

2024-05-20 17:46:55

We spend a lot of time slagging off companies that do it badly— here is an example of one doing better.
Slide is an IoT device to open/close curtains. They've just announced they're closing as a businesss... and shipped a final software update that enables a locally-running API to control the device, so it continues to work after their servers go down.
Not perfect (maybe open source the firmware?), but a graceful exit that doesn't leave customers with broken e-waste.
https://mailchi.mp/62a41d08c384/important-service-message-slide-is-closing-its-doors

2024-05-20 16:16:57

I got a survey from a library. One of the questions is whether I think there ought to be "VR" tech in the library.
There isn't a "if people want to strap computers to their face, why do they need to do it in a library?" option.
I'm fine with books and quiet, thanks.

2024-05-20 15:22:16

The pdf.js vuln is bad. If you use Firefox, make sure it's up-to-date.
Better hope all the other things that use pdf.js get patched - Dropbox, Slack, GitHub, OwnCloud, JIRA/Confluence - and likely plenty of other services and tools for people who use PDFs regularly.
Academics, lawyers and government folk: that probably means you.
https://codeanlabs.com/blog/research/cve-2024-4367-arbitrary-js-execution-in-pdf-js/

2024-05-20 15:07:36

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We've seen this before, obviously.
Overly corporate IT folks see a flashing red alert on a management dashboard along with a spookily high CVSS score and any actual "so how would it exploitation of this vulnerability cause a problem in our application?" type thoughts get very rapidly short-circuited.
Mix that in with some of the conspiratorial nonsense the last few years have brewed up and you've got a recipe for absolute brainrot.

2024-05-20 14:57:49

New fave thing: watching people who've never written software in their life try and turn unpatched vulns into conspiracy theories.
Yes, there is a vulnerability in an application. It ought to be patched and will be as soon as is practicable.
It taking a bit of time to be patched is not a grand conspiracy—especially if you spend a few minutes working out how the vulnerability would be exploited in practice and realising it's incredibly difficult bordering on impossible.

2024-05-20 14:26:43

1. "I'd like to do X"
2. "Maybe there's an app to do X on my computer and/or tablet"
3. "Oh, they're all monthly subscription trash with a whole shedload of scammy bullshit."
4. "Guess I'll just use a piece of paper and a pen."

2024-05-19 18:54:58

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@npub1kck…ec40 backbone tho

2024-05-17 14:39:50

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@npub1s7x…uq97 Damn word count, mostly.

2024-05-17 12:30:09

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@npub1ydc…0zx4 Hurrah! I shall install it as soon as my package manager offers it!

2024-05-17 11:51:51

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Wonder how long until the Post Office roll out GPT-based support for subpostmasters. Shouldn't take too long to train it to say "you're the only one experiencing this problem", dispatch a robothug to shake them down for their life savings, and then produce a press release filled with carefully wordsmithed denial and misdirection.

2024-05-17 11:45:18

My ChatGPT account just got upgraded to 4o. I asked it a fun fiddly legal question I previously asked v3.
In the spirit of Mata v. Avianca, I'm happy to report that I've had no non-existent cases... yet. I'm still getting hallucinated legal citations for real cases, and those cases are not particularly relevant to the question asked, so... slow clap, I guess?
It more easily passes the "impresses politicans and executives who don't care about detail" test, the real goal of AI products.

2024-05-17 11:28:43

If I were in charge of Vim/Neovim (or Emacs, but that's a whole different ball of wax), I'd pick a comment toggling plugin and just include it as part of the distribution.
Yes, there would be lots of nerds losing their shit. I don't care. Something vaguely passable should be included by default. Toggling comments on a line or block when editing a file remotely is a basic requirement for sysadmin/ops work where (Neo)Vim out-of-the-box defaults matter.

2024-05-16 18:01:00

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@npub1egt…pd4l yeah, some combination of the web and web technologies is my guess.

2024-05-16 17:37:56

Today in #Horizon, some management-speak courtesy of the witness statement of former CIO at POL, Lesley Sewell, at paragraph 68...
"the contract was perceived
as lacking flexibility when considered alongside the business and overall IT
strategy, which was forward-thinking and focused on new technologies (such as digital) in contrast to the legacy Horizon system"
Question from a mere programmer who studiously avoided management: what does "digital" mean here? Were the old systems NOT digital?

2024-05-15 18:11:56

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@npub1g3e…ca46 "it's less bad than blood diamonds" has to be a line from a courtroom scene in a crypto-themed Better Call Saul reboot.

2024-05-15 16:17:52

Another #Horizon thought: tech teams seemingly didn't know Horizon data may be used for criminal prosecution.
If devs don't know how a system is to be used, they can't exercise good judgment in making it.
People snark about "software craftsmanship" being hipstery, but there's truth to it: good software is far more Savile Row than it is Henry Ford. Business may want interchangeable cogs but good software needs skilled people empowered to think carefully, do good work and give a shit.

2024-05-15 11:17:07

A daily pattern from #PostOfficeInquiry witnesses, specifically the executives and middle managers.
Counsel: "So, you didn't ever tell your colleagues X?"
"No, absolutely not."
"Could you pull up email POL34701431 subject line 'RE: FW: RE: WE ARE GUILTY AS SIN FUCK'. Is that your email signature...?"
Seriously, was "never watches any courtroom dramas on TV" a hiring criteria at Post Office? Has anyone made them aware that cross-examining people is something lawyers tend to do? Truly wild.

2024-05-15 10:46:33

Lots of crypto guys are suddenly acting incredibly surprised that "I wrote some code" isn't a magic cheat code that gives you immunity from criminal liability.
https://www.dlnews.com/articles/regulation/tornado-cash-dev-alexey-pertsev-guilty-of-money-laundering/

2024-05-14 20:31:44

In response to Microsoft's lead in the race to deeply integrate exciting new making-shit-up technology into Windows and Office, Google have announced their plans on how to ensure G Suite users will finally be able to have highly inaccurate hallucinations and computer-generated marketing slop shoved directly into the tooling they use to manage their digital lives.
Why anyone would want a calendar, to-do list or email client that makes stuff up remains an open question.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24155848/google-ai-gemini-calendar-tasks-keep-io

2024-05-13 20:50:15

"Modern" front end webdev continues to be indistinguishable from satire.
https://hachyderm.io/@hbuchel/112434817499467925

2024-05-13 17:44:08

A merry tale of computers.
"Why can't I turn my desk lamp on?"
"Oh, HA crashed - let's restart the container."
"May as well upgrade the container while I'm at it."
"It isn't downloading, that's weird."
"DNS isn't resolving."
Then I read this: https://tailscale.com/blog/sisyphean-dns-client-linux
So many fun choices: switch to *BSD, go live in a lighthouse and avoid computers forever, scream endlessly into the void.

2024-05-09 17:12:23

Powerful, well-connected men have beneficiently decided to allow powerful, well-connected women to join an expensive, exclusionary club to scratch each other's backs away from us unwashed hoi polloi.
Or, apparently, a massive win for equality.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/may/07/garrick-club-votes-to-accept-female-members-women

2024-05-09 15:31:19

AAA: please preorder the deluxe digital edition of our game, £99.99, then we'll have three separate rounds of DLC, a battle pass, and we'll shut the game down six months later
Hades II: it's £24.99 in early access, it's fucking amazing, and you get endless queer shitposting about it for free

2024-05-09 13:37:08

May this be a lesson: don’t let Silicon Valley shitheads put medical devices in your brain. It won’t work out well.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/08/neuralinks-first-in-human-brain-implant-has-experienced-a-problem-company-says-.html

2024-05-09 12:59:43

Whenever I read about Epic v Apple, I very much hope the judge can find a creative way to make both lose.

2024-05-08 16:53:49

A question for more scientifically learned folks than moi...
LLMs for fraud detection (card payments, AML/KYC etc.) - hype and bullshit or actually useful?
It's a machine learning-shaped problem, obviously, but what potentially could adding a language model add over existing methods?
Is there any grounds for thinking this might actually be plausible or is it just a way to get money from buzzword-loving money people to play about with tech? (Nothing against that, mind.)

2024-05-08 10:53:23

- reply

@npub1f59…4ee3 All the joy of an internal email newsletter... plus you get to have heated Facebook-style arguments with colleagues you've never met about important matters of the day.

2024-05-08 10:52:10

Reddit's AI integration is going super well.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/404/612/438/074/574/original/ba67d4d196795fc0.png

2024-05-07 14:22:17

It's kind of odd to see old-fashioned non-crypto Ponzi schemes. Very retro.
After all, if you come up with a load of web3 blockchain decentralisation bollocks and make up some handwavy promises about future "utility", you can scam people out of way more than £30m and massively reduce the likelihood of getting prosecuted.
https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/local-news/dozens-jailed-devastating-30m-ponzi-29081573

2024-05-07 13:31:39

It's not often judges start judgments with the words "Buckle up" or sarcastically put "(Obviously.)" in brackets.
The absurdity of the facts in issue justify many times over the significant and unorthodox depature from standard, expected judicial prose style.
https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/22/22-20621-CV0.pdf

2024-05-07 13:01:44

The people who are mad about tech journalists and YouTubers honestly and fairly reviewing the product actually in front of them (and not blithely accepting that the stuff on the "roadmap" will ever happen) are basically asking for participation trophies.
Odd. I heard that giving participation trophies at school sports days is a signal of the imminent collapse of human civilisation and screws kids up for life.
Perhaps that doesn't apply to tech companies. Or maybe just the VC-funded ones.

2024-05-06 13:05:04

Small Wikipedia win over the weekend: found and fixed a 14-year-old instance of plagarism which subsequent edits had accidentally turned from just being plagiarism into misattributed plagarism.
For a cheap chuckle, I asked ChatGPT. The response mentioned an essay that is not relevant to the matter at issue, and then went on to hallucinate the author, year, and publisher, plus a wholly incorrect précis of what it is about.
The next decade or so is going to be epistemologically exhausting.

2024-05-05 18:54:17

I genuinely despise this on a level I cannot properly express. Computers should adapt to human beings, not the other way around.
https://mastodon.social/@mrpjevans/112387885138678881