kibiz0r @ kibiz0r @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

It’s funny (or depressing), because the original concept of agile is very well aligned with an open source/inner source philosophy.

The whole premise of a sprint is supposed to be that you move quickly and with purpose for a short period of time, and then you stop and refactor and work on your tools or whatever other “non value-add” stuff tends to be neglected by conventional deliverable-focused processes.

The term “sprint” is supposed to make it clear that it’s not a sustainable 100%-of-the-time every-single-day pace. It’s one mode of many.

Buuuut that’s not how it turned out, is it?

I’ve never understood the argument that you shouldn’t complain about the environment you interact with because other people interact with worse environments.

Like, okay, that’s good to keep in mind with respect to privilege and assumptions and such, but like…

I can’t deliver a first-hand account of someone else’s life, and I can’t identify the possible solutions to their problems as well as I can for my own — let alone access their world as well as my own, to try to fix some of the problems.

I think on some level the people who say “focus on those other people’s problems” know that those other problems are less accessible.

It’s not that they want you to do better activism. It’s that they want you to do none.

Witcher 4 devs adjusting to Unreal Engine after years of REDengine:

Brian Eno is pretty cool.

So what counts as dictating my life?

The government prohibiting me from firing my gun in the air, or my neighbor’s falling bullets prohibiting me from leaving my porch?

I’m always suspect of those who assume there is only “freedom to do” and not also “freedom from being done-to”.

They tend to think they will never be on the receiving end of someone else’s “freedom”.

Pretty much, yeah.

Taking over the Democratic Party vs starting a new party is kinda like addressing climate change on Earth vs terraforming Mars.

The former sounds painful and bureaucratic while the latter sounds exciting and innovative.

But if you can’t fix the party or planet you’ve got, which has like 80% of the hard work done already, what hope do you have of doing a new thing from scratch?

Welllll… everything in software development is trade-offs.

It’s honestly pretty rare that one solution is unequivocally “better” than another, across every dimension you might care about (which includes non-technical things).

The kinds of egregious defects you might think of as brazen incompetence or laziness are more often the result of everyone (technical and non-technical alike) refusing the actively pursue one side of a trade-off and hoping that the devs can just “nerd harder”.

Technical constraints as in the case of the N64 example can actually help avoid the “just nerd harder” fallacy, because they prompt serious discussions about what you can and can’t compromise on.

Ironically, when we sit here as users and complain about games not being optimized in this way or that, we’re also refusing to engage in a conversation about trade-offs and insisting that devs just “nerd harder”.

Edit: That’s not to provide any excuses for the blatant financialization of the industry which prompts the whole “don’t trade off anything, just have them nerd harder” mindset… but to warn yall that even if the market wasn’t ruled by greedy suits, we would probably still be feeling like old games managed to do more with less, cuz well… trading away 500MB of bundle size so you can get better logging of resource management in production wasn’t really an option.

Crispy can also mean you’re contemplating the nature of Mario’s 8-bit existence

And CRISPR

Recently had a password that was acceptable for the account creation page on the website but too long for the login screen in the mobile app.

Took me a while to figure out that pasting into that field was just quietly dropping characters.

First thought: Damn, that’s crazy they went ahead and did it to get the footage even though they knew how bad it was.

Then: Well, I guess the fishermen were gonna do it no matter what, huh?

Wait, aren’t the fishermen worried that this footage could ruin their livelihood?

Wait… Maybe they believe that the legality of this practice already has ruined their livelihood, and they want it to stop but can’t compete unless regulation forces everyone to stop…

Also the people who do the tagging and feedback for training tend to be underpaid third-world workers.

At first, I thought “remove this imposter” was a quote from ACB and I was like “Damn, she really woke up to this whole thing, huh?”

500 games on 10 CD-ROMs 👌

(485 of them are shareware demos you can only play for 15 minutes at a time, but still)

Another day, another speculative execution vulnerability.

I don’t believe the common refrain that AI is only a problem because of capitalism. People already disinform, make mistakes, take irresponsible shortcuts, and spam even when there is no monetary incentive to do so.

I also don’t believe that AI is “just a tool”, fundamentally neutral and void of any political predisposition. This has been discussed at length academically. But it’s also something we know well in our idiom: “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” When you have AI, genuine communication looks like raw material. And the ability to place generated output alongside the original… looks like a goal.

Culture — the ability to have a very long-term ongoing conversation that continues across many generations, about how we ought to live — is by far the defining feature of our species. It’s not only the source of our abilities, but also the source of our morality.

Despite a very long series of authors warning us, we have allowed a pocket of our society to adopt the belief that ability is morality. “The fact that we can, means we should.”

We’re witnessing the early stages of the information equivalent of Kessler Syndrome. It’s not that some bad actors who were always present will be using a new tool. It’s that any public conversation broad enough to be culturally significant will be so full of AI debris that it will be almost impossible for humans to find each other.

The worst part is that this will be (or is) largely invisible. We won’t know that we’re wasting hours of our lives reading and replying to bots, tugging on a steering wheel, trying to guide humanity’s future, not realizing the autopilot is discarding our inputs. It’s not a dead internet that worries me, but an undead internet. A shambling corpse that moves in vain, unaware of its own demise.

As they say, you could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

You do have a right to a lawyer for an extended interview, but only as a US citizen. If they allege you’re a non-citizen, I’m not sure what your recourse is then.

For a glorious second, the entire world was able to communicate as one.

Then we catalogued every accessible reservoir of culture and knowledge, mined them bare, and refilled them with slop.

A global collective consciousness, hollowed out, replaced with static. No signal. Only noise.

1. Fuck AI
2. This judge’s point is absolutely true:

   "You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products," Chhabria said. "You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you don't even have to pay a license to that person."

3. AI apologists’ response to that will invariably be “but it’s sampling from millions of people at once, not just that one person”, which always sounds like the fractions-of-a-penny scene
4. Fuck copyright
5. A ruling against fair use for AI will almost certainly deal collateral damage to perfectly innocuous scraping projects like linguistic analysis. Even despite their acknowledgement of the issue:

   To prevent both harms, the Copyright Office expects that some AI training will be deemed fair use, such as training viewed as transformative, because resulting models don't compete with creative works. Those uses threaten no market harm but rather solve a societal need, such as language models translating texts, moderating content, or correcting grammar. Or in the case of audio models, technology that helps producers clean up unwanted distortion might be fair use, where models that generate songs in the style of popular artists might not, the office opined.

6. We really need to regulate against AI — right now — but doing it through copyright might be worse than not doing it at all