⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ @falken@qoto.org

Planning to do a #Tusky bugfix release tomorrow.
So far we got:
- Media description input too small on some devices
- hashtags at end of post sometimes duplicated

Anything else that is obviously broken in Tusky 27.0?

This year's winter flu incidence looks to be rising to be in line with the worse levels in the last few years....

Which suggests that restricting the scope of this year's flu vaccinations & requiring younger people to pay for the vaccine privately may have actually been a false economy, especially if it compounds the ongoing NHS crisis

#NHS #flu #austerity

Hello fellow hackers, i more or less inherated the stock of a electronic company. It's more or less stuff from the 90s and 00s. If you need ICs like, eproms (thousands! 27c series), a bunchload of flash, optocoppler, 74er and 40er logic, all sort of drivers, mcu (h8, zilog, pic), cplds... Feel free to ask, it's for free (for shipping) and the more the better :-) i will make a post on my page for more details - this will took some time, i'm ill right now. On the Picture you see around 20% #38c3

Hi. am currently debugging on a simple set of routines to use the PC (8250) serial port in programmed I/O (PIO) mode. These will be used by FujiCom to implement the FujiNet RS232 protocol for device drivers and BIOS interfaces. (This is why they are not interrupt driven)

It is mostly working, but receiving characters is problematic. Can anyone help and try to get this set of routines up to snuff? There are routines to read and write characters to the serial port.

Code here: https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-rs232/tree/main/PCOM

YESTERDAY

Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly,
There's not half the files there used to be,
And there's a milestone
hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.

I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.

Now all my data's gone
and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.

Yesterday,
The need for back-ups seemed so far away.
I knew my data was all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.

#filk #beatles

Happy 2025! 🎉 New Year, New projects. Some cool stuff is on the way - stay tuned!!

👀 Study Finds Consumers Are Actively Turned Off by Products That Use AI
—@Futurism

"When AI is mentioned, it tends to lower emotional trust, which in turn decreases purchase intentions," said lead author and Washington State University clinical assistant profess of marketing Mesut Cicek in a statement. "We found emotional trust plays a critical role in how consumers perceive AI-powered products."

https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-consumers-turned-off-products-ai

#ai #aihype #marketing

"Nothing is stranger to man than his own image."

#OTD in 1921.

World premiere of the science fiction play R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti) by the Czech writer Karel Čapek in a theater in Hradec Králové. It introduced the word "robot" to the English language and to science fiction as a whole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.

R.U.R. at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/59112

#books #literature #theatre

Terry Nation's Blake's 7 started 47 years ago today on BBC1.

"A group of convicts and outcasts fight a guerrilla war against the totalitarian Terran Federation from a highly advanced alien spaceship."

Quoting @zlevymd.bsky.social‬:

"United Healthcare just denied a claim on one of my patients in the ICU with:

-- a brain hemorrhage
-- in a coma
-- on a ventilator
-- in heart failure

...because I haven't proven to them that caring for her in the hospital was "medically necessary".

Tear it all down."

https://bsky.app/profile/zlevymd.bsky.social/post/3lem5xtijek2c

Trump will be sentenced Jan. 10 in New York case, days before his inauguration
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/03/nx-s1-5247762/trump-sentencing?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into U.S. News @u-s-news-npr

Okay I am now at the local comfort food dumpling place and I am drinking tea and reading gay manga on my tablet. This rules. The physical universe is great. This is so much better than arguing about Linux on social media

“the remote investigative actions taken by Elon Musk in Wednesday’s Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas are a warning and a reminder that Tesla owners do not actually own their Teslas, and that cars, broadly speaking, are increasingly spying on their owners and the people around them.”
https://www.404media.co/elon-musk-uses-cybertruck-explosion-to-show-tesla-can-remotely-unlock-and-monitor-vehicles/

Edit: sold, thanks for the interest!

Hey Amiga fans of the fediverse: would anyone be interested in buying a rare Amiga OS 4.0 developer prerelease disc? Hoping to find someone who'd really appreciate it before just posting it on eBay.

My Doctors surgery has gone so automated that things are now 100% useless.

They text my land line number, Which has an answering machine. Which then only records the last half of the message, so I don't know who or what it was for.

And I can only respond to the web address, no number given, which includes a 25 digit ID code which of course has ben read out and saved in the message. Chances of me typing this in correctly, zero.

If i ring them, they will have no idea what its about.

Congratulations to Elon Musk for making cars so bad that no-one can tell if a carbomb has just happened or if the car just did that.

@newtontalk @paulguyot @morgant - Follow up with more pics.
Got my Dev account sorted and installed Einstein on my iPad-- new rabbit-hole achieved for 2025 --not sure if I should thank you again or run away! Now to install it on all the iOS devices I can find.

#newton #einstein

What a year!

A lot of the current hype around LLMs revolves around one core idea, which I blame on Star Trek:

Wouldn't it be cool if we could use natural language to control things?

The problem is that this is, at the fundamental level, a terrible idea.

There's a reason that mathematics doesn't use English. There's a reason that every professional field comes with its own flavour of jargon. There's a reason that contracts are written in legalese, not plain natural language. Natural language is really bad at being unambiguous.

When I was a small child, I thought that a mature civilisation would evolve two languages. A language of poetry, that was rich in metaphor and delighted in ambiguity, and a language of science that required more detail and actively avoided ambiguity. The latter would have no homophones, no homonyms, unambiguous grammar, and so on.

Programming languages, including the ad-hoc programming languages that we refer to as 'user interfaces' are all attempts to build languages like the latter. They allow the user to unambiguously express intent so that it can be carried out. Natural languages are not designed and end up being examples of the former.

When I interact with a tool, I want it to do what I tell it. If I am willing to restrict my use of natural language to a clear and unambiguous subset, I have defined a language that is easy for deterministic parsers to understand with a fraction of the energy requirement of a language model. If I am not, then I am expressing myself ambiguously and no amount of processing can possibly remove the ambiguity that is intrinsic in the source, except a complete, fully synchronised, model of my own mind that knows what I meant (and not what some other person saying the same thing at the same time might have meant).

The hard part of programming is not writing things in some language's syntax, it's expressing the problem in a way that lacks ambiguity. LLMs don't help here, they pick an arbitrary, nondeterministic, option for the ambiguous cases. In C, compilers do this for undefined behaviour and it is widely regarded as a disaster. LLMs are built entirely out of undefined behaviour.

There are use cases where getting it wrong is fine. Choosing a radio station or album to listen to while driving, for example. It is far better to sometimes listen to the wrong thing than to take your attention away from the road and interact with a richer UI for ten seconds. In situations where your hands are unavailable (for example, controlling non-critical equipment while performing surgery, or cooking), a natural-language interface is better than no interface. It's rarely, if ever, the best.