Dear Stack Overflow, Inc.

Stack Overflow is being inundated with AI-generated garbage. A group of 480+ human moderators is going on strike, because:

Specifically, moderators are no longer allowed to remove AI-generated answers on the basis of being AI-generated, outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances. This results in effectively permitting nearly all AI-generated answers to be freely posted, regardless of established community consensus on such content.

In turn, this allows incorrect information (colloquially referred to as “hallucinations”) and plagiarism to proliferate unchecked on the platform. This destroys trust in the platform, as Stack Overflow, Inc. has previously noted.

It looks like StackOverflow Inc. is saying one thing to the public, and a very different thing to its moderators.

Ubuntu going 100% Snappy in 2024?
According to one Canonical developer: Ubuntu is going all Snap & fully immutable in 24.04. ⌘ Read more

New repository: aquilax/calendars - Go packages for working with different calendars

Organizing projects and defining names in Go
1 points posted by Elton Minetto ⌘ Read more

https://boyter.org/posts/how-to-start-go-project-2023/ golang

What’s going on?
This post is meant for a little reflection because I’ve noticed a few things that I can’t quite place. ⌘ Read more

9 tips to go from attendee to speaker at a tech conference
Here’s what you need to know to write a compelling session proposal and get on stage. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I should have posted the more recent one from May, but the rankings are still pretty similar and Go and scala are tied still!

According to the RedMonk programming language rankings from Jan 2023, Go and Scala are tied at 14th place 😏

1 JavaScript
2 Python
3 Java
4 PHP
5 C#
6 CSS
7 TypeScript
7 C++
9 Ruby
10 C
11 Swift
12 Shell
12 R
14 Go
14 Scala
16 Objective-C
17 Kotlin
18 PowerShell
19 Rust
19 Dart

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Design’s journey towards accessibility
Design can have a significant impact on delivering accessible experiences to our users. It takes a cultural shift, dedicated experts, and permission to make progress over perfection in order to build momentum. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’re starting to see a real shift in our journey to make GitHub a true home for all developers. ⌘ Read more

I’m going to have to take everything offline for a few hours at home since I need to go replace my physical internet box and collect the new one

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I knew from the get go it was going to be an annoying thing to track down, which is was, but that made it take even longer because I avoided trying.

@shreyan@twtxt.net I agree re: AR. Vircadia is neat. I stumbled on it years ago when I randomly started wondering “wonder what’s going on with Second Life and those VR things” and started googling around.

Unfortunately, like so many metaverse efforts, it’s almost devoid of life. Interesting worlds to explore, cool tools to build your own stuff, but almost no people in it. It feels depressing, like an abandoned shopping mall.

@prologic@twtxt.net I think those headsets were not particularly usable for things like web browsing because the resolution was too low, something like 1080p if I recall correctly. A very small screen at that resolution close to your eye is going to look grainy. You’d need 4k at least, I think, before you could realistically have text and stuff like that be zoomable and readable for low vision people. The hardware isn’t quite there yet, and the headsets that can do that kind of resolution are extremely expensive.

But yeah, even so I can imagine the metaverse wouldn’t be very helpful for low vision people as things stand today, even with higher resolution. I’ve played VR games and that was fine, but I’ve never tried to do work of any kind.

I guess where I’m coming from is that even though I’m low vision, I can work effectively on a modern OS because of the accessibility features. I also do a lot of crap like take pictures of things with my smartphone then zoom into the picture to see detail (like words on street signs) that my eyes can’t see normally. That feels very much like rudimentary augmented reality that an appropriately-designed headset could mostly automate. VR/AR/metaverse isn’t there yet, but it seems at least possible for the hardware and software to develop accessibility features that would make it workable for low vision people.

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, dunno about the recency of that line of thought. I suspect though that given his (recent or not) history, if someone directly asked him “do you support rape” he would not say “no”, he’d go on one of these rambling answers about property crime like he did in the video. Maybe I’m mind poisoned by being around academics my whole career, but that way of talking is how an academic gives you an answer they know will be unpopular. PhD = Piled Higher And Deeper, after all right? In other words, if he doesn’t say “no” right away, he’s saying “yes”, except with so many words there’s some uncertainty about whether he actually meant yes. And he damn well knows that, and that’s why I give him no slack.

There are people in academia who believe adult men should be able to have sex with children, legally, too. They use the same manner of talking about it that Peterson uses. We need to stop tolerating this, and draw hard red lines. No, that’s bad, no matter how many words you use to say it. No, don’t express doubts about it, because that provides justification and talking points to the people who actually carry out the acts.

@xuu@txt.sour.is LOL omfg.

This is the absurd logical endpoint of free market fundamentalism. “The market will fix everything!” Including, apparently, encroaching floodwater.

I do have to say though, after spending awhile looking at houses, that there are a crapton of homes for sale for very high prices (>$1 million) in coastal areas NASA is more or less telling us will be underwater in the next few decades. I don’t get how a house that’s going to be underwater soon is worth $1 million, but then I’m never been a free market fundamentalist either so 🤷 Maybe they’re all watertight.

I wish I could turn into a bear so I could go to my cave and sleep for three months

Reduce Go Binary Size
Always a hot-topic in Go circles is binary size of applications. In this post we will show you how you can reduce the binary size produced from go build for leaner, slimer builds. 1 points posted by Edd Turtle ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Maybe so, but that’s not because of the people who are objecting to Jordan Peterson, that’s for sure. You really need to read the articles I’ve posted before going there. Really.

@prologic@twtxt.net Because they are rightwing assholes with a huge platform and they are literally HURTING PEOPLE. People get attacked because of things people like Shapiro and Peterson say. This is not just idle chitchat over coffee. They are saying things like it’s OK to rape women (and NO I am not going to dig out the videos where they say that –that’s up to YOU to do, do your own homework before defending these ghouls).

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ve read half, skimmed the others. Mostly I was going for scale–look at all those headlines. These are horrible people who say horrible things on a regular basis.

Do they legitimately believe that end users will encounter videos of gruesome murders, live streams of school shootings, etc etc etc, and be like “oh, tee hee hee, that’s not what I want to see! I’d better block that!” and go about their business as usual?

No, they can’t possibly be that foolish. They are going to be doing some amount of content moderation. Just not of Nazis, fascists, or far right reactionaries. Which to me means they want that content on there.

I’ve seen BlueSky referred to as BS (as in Blue Sky, but you know…), which seems apt.

CEO is a cryptocurrency fool, as is Jack Dorsey, so I don’t expect much from it. Then again I’m old and refuse to join any new hotness so take my curmudgeonly opinions with a grain of salt.

I read somewhere or another that the “decentralization” is only going to be there so that they can push content moderation onto users. They will happily welcome Nazis and fascists, leaving it up to end users to block those instances.

I wonder how they plan to handle the 4chan-level stuff, since that will surely come.

College Knowledge
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College Knowledge
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**RT by @mind_booster: 🧰 5 changes to fix the EC’s #RightToRepair proposal 🛠️

1️⃣ No contractual overrides
2️⃣ No digital locks
3️⃣ Go beyond just fixing things
4️⃣ Don’t limit who can repair
5️⃣ Broaden the scope of what can be repaired

Blog 👉 https://www.knowledgerights21.org/news-story/still-time-to-repair-the-commission-proposal-on-the-right-to-repair/
Response 👉 https://kr21.info/r2r**
🧰 5 changes to fix the EC’s #RightToRepair proposal 🛠️

1️⃣ No contractual ov … ⌘ Read more

I am going to try to install the twtxt Yellow extension from Søren - https://lien.sus.fr/iaxgN

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

There is (I assure you there will be, don’t know what it is yet…) a price to be paid for this convenience.

Exactly prologic, and that’s why I’m negative about these sorts of things. I’m almost 50, I’ve been around this tech hype cycle a bunch of times. Look at what happened with Facebook. When it first appeared, people loved it and signed up and shared incredibly detailed information about themselves on it. Facebook made it very easy and convenient for almost anyone, even people who had limited understanding of the internet or computers, to get connected with their friends and family. And now here we are today, where 80% of people in surveys say they don’t trust Facebook with their private data, where they think Facebook commits crimes and should be broken up or at least taken to task in a big way, etc etc etc. Facebook has been fined many billions of dollars and faces endless federal lawsuits in the US alone for its horrible practices. Yet Facebook is still exploitative. It’s a societal cancer.

All signs suggest this generative AI stuff is going to go exactly the same way. That is the inevitable course of these things in the present climate, because the tech sector is largely run by sociopathic billionaires, because the tech sector is not regulated in any meaningful way, and because the tech press / tech media has no scruples. Some new tech thing generates hype, people get excited and sign up to use it, then when the people who own the tech think they have a critical mass of users, they clamp everything down and start doing whatever it is they wanted to do from the start. They’ll break laws, steal your shit, cause mass suffering, who knows what. They won’t stop until they are stopped by mass protest from us, and the government action that follows.

That’s a huge price to pay for a little bit of convenience, a price we pay and continue to pay for decades. We all know better by now. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? It doesn’t make sense. It’s insane.

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

(1) You go to the store and buy a microwave pizza. You go home, put it in the microwave, heat it up. Maybe it’s not quite the way you like it, so you put some red pepper on it, maybe some oregano.

Are you a pizza chef? No. Do we know what your cooking is like? Also no.

(2) You create a prompt for StableDiffusion to make a picture of an elephant. What pops out isn’t quite to your liking. You adjust the prompt, tweak it a bunch, till the elephant looks pretty cool.

Are you an artist? No. Do we know what your art is like? Also no.

The elephant is “fake art” in a similar sense to how a microwave pizza is “fake pizza”. That’s what I meant by that word. The microwave pizza is a sort of “simulation of pizza”, in this sense. The generated elephant picture is a simulation of art, in a similar sense, though it’s even worse than that and is probably more of a simulacrum of art since you can’t “consume” an AI-generated image the way you “consume” art.

Man wakes from 2 year coma to find Gentoo stage 2 install still going
“It cut my total time spent waiting for this Gentoo install to complete by almost half!” ⌘ Read more

ChatGPT and Elasticsearch: OpenAI meets private data | Elastic Blog

Terrifying. Elasticsearch is celebrating that they’re going to send your private data to OpenAI? No way.

Escape Speed
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Escape Speed
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@prologic@twtxt.net yeah. I’d add “Big Data” to that hype list, and I’m sure there are a bunch more that I’m forgetting.

On the topic of a GPU cluster, the optimal design is going to depend a lot on what workloads you intend to run on it. The weakest link in these things is the data transfer rate, but that won’t matter too much for compute-heavy workloads. If your workloads are going to involve a lot of data, though, you’d be better off with a smaller number of high-VRAM cards than with a larger number of interconnected cards. I guess that’s hardware engineering 101 stuff, but still…

On LinkedIn I see a lot of posts aimed at software developers along the lines of “If you’re not using these AI tools (X,Y,Z) you’re going to be left behind.”

Two things about that:

1. No you’re not. If you have good soft skills (good communication, show up on time, general time management) then you’re already in excellent shape. No AI can do that stuff, and for that alone no AI can replace people
   
2. This rhetoric is coming directly from the billionaires who are laying off tech people by the 100s of thousands as part of the class war they’ve been conducting against all working people since the 1940s. They want you to believe that you have to scramble and claw over one another to learn the “AI” that they’re forcing onto the world, so that you stop honing the skills that matter (see #1) and are easier to obsolete later. Don’t fall for it. It’s far from clear how this will shake out once governments get off their asses and start regulating this stuff, by the way–most of these “AI” tools are blatantly breaking copyright and other IP laws, and some day that’ll catch up with them.
   

That said, it is helpful to know thy enemy.

Sam Whited: Concord and Spring Road Linear Parks
In my earlier review of Rose Garden and Jonquil public parks I mentioned
the Mountain-to-River Trail
(M2R), a mixed-use bicycle
and walking trail that connects the two parks.

The two parks I’m going to review today are also connected by the M2R trail in
addition to the [Concord Road Trail](https://blog.samwhited.com/cate … ⌘ Read more

💭 While some people like to jump between blogging software all the time, or go back to Hugo from a custom one, I don’t really miss Hugo after switching to GoBlog in 2020, but enjoy having my own system quite a bit. Not that Hugo, WordPress, etc. are bad blogging systems, but I really enjoy being able to quickly code a fix without having to research docs, StackOverflow, or the source on GitHub. And when I have an idea for a new feature, it would often not be easy to implement in the existing systems. ⌘ Read more

TestArticle_11Apr23
security patching  going on ⌘ Read more

Excelize 2.7.1 Released - Go language API for spreadsheets (Excel) files. #Golang #Excelize href=”https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?q=%23Excel”>#Excel**
1 points posted by xuri ⌘ Read more

@chunkimo@twtxt.net lol. go walrus!!

Show: testcerts - Go package with an easy-to-use suite of functions for generating test certificates
1 points posted by madflojo ⌘ Read more

Socket Options and Go: multiple listeners, one port
1 points posted by madflojo ⌘ Read more

e-scooters go like the clappers

not the greatest idea whilst searching for a job, but fuck it. Now I also feel like going for a walk, so win I guess

How to use Go httptrace package
1 points posted by 0x13a ⌘ Read more

Qualifications
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Qualifications
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**Now that @JoeSondow’s bot games like @EmojiSnakeGame are no longer going be free to play, I can only hope he will soon have mastodon versions of it running, and I will no longer have a reason to open twitter’s app often.

And no, paying for a verified account is not on the table.**
Now that @JoeSondow’s bot games like @EmojiSnakeGame are no longer going be free to play, I can only hope he will soon have mastod … ⌘ Read more

Dahlias go viral as social media makes these classic blooms cool again
From their humble origins as a cottage garden staple, dahlias are experiencing a resurgence in popularity thanks to the power of social media — and James Bond. ⌘ Read more

❤️ 🎶: Time to Go by DooRi