Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

People predicting the death of information online through the use of ChatGPT-powered falsehood-generators as if I'm not spending my days slogging through an eternal stream of human-generated-and-curated plausible falsehoods.

Bad news: we don't need an AI; we already Mechanical Turk'd this problem by building a system to let everyone put stuff on the Internet. 😉

The Lemony Snicket Limit is the value asymptotically approached by summing a (finite) series of unfortunate events.

The theorem that you will never reach the Lemony Snicket Limit by summing a finite series of unfortunate events is the Lemmany Snicket.

@lauren The series of unfortunate events that would require a plane cruising at 35,000 feet to hit a weather balloon bumping along at 60,000 feet approaches Lemony Snicket's Limit.

@developers The valentine demo bugged out in MacOSX [Version 109.0.5414.119 (Official Build) (x86_64)], but I look forward to it as soon as it's debugged.

This will be great to have!

@jaykuo If only there were some way to avoid that terrible fate.

(... it's not taking money from Donald Trump. Not taking money from Donald Trump is how you avoid that terrible fate.)

@rauschma That's how we used to do them. Financially, it does not scale. You end up seeing only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the Web, less than now.

"Yeah welcome to the club pal." #chatgpt #bing

@3psboyd Sorry about the whole "Killing traditional journalism and replacing it with rampant ignorance and also memes" part.

... Our bad. :(

@leak There is a reason that naming things is one of the two hard problems in software engineering, alongside (as you note also ;) ) cache eviction and off-by-one errors.

Y'know... Linux kinda sucks as a development environment.

I'm working on a project that just upgraded one of its dependencies to glibc_2_32. But my development machine is a tiny laptop running Ubuntu LTS 20.04.

It looks like the simplest way to keep up with this project is going to be the plunk down $2,000 on a new laptop because Lord knows I am 0 for every attempt on upgrading the version of Linux on a laptop without losing half of the functionality in the laptop hardware (sleep, sleep on lid close, power management, all that stuff).

I use Linux for the flexibility. Take that away and it's a really crummy user experience---badly-tuned and ill considered for the way pieces of software interact with each other. And in this case, the flexibility just isn't there.

Windows, meanwhile, maintains backward compatibility nearly to the Reagan administration.

I'd been away from #cplusplus for long enough to forget how *bad* it is at discoverability.

Most languages that came after learned the lesson about using well-defined (if verbose) module naming to point to the origin of something, and if a client (module importer) wants to rename a module for convenience it may but if it doesn't the pattern is standardized. The best (read: my favorite) languages went ahead and glued module access to the filesystem organization so you can guess, easily, what file a given module loads; while you can sometimes play games with that, it gives you a starting point.

C++ is a billion years old and benefits from none of those learnings. The namespaces are completely disjoint from the filesystem. Literally any file included *from any file you include* can dump new symbols into your context. That was fine for, like, eight-file projects, but on modern thousand-file projects it's nightmare-time unless your team develops a rule for keeping sane, therefore every team does and every team's rules are different.

Good bloodly luck figuring out where a macro like TEST_CASE is defined if the project creators didn't document their thought process.

@jaykuo Not anyone *would* spend that kind of money.

... But the patriarch of the family that's been playing the villain in an Indiana Jones movie full time? That guy *definitely* would.

@starshine In the US, more track just means more freight trains clogging up the system because it'll always be more maringal-dollar valuable to keep people in one place and deliver goods to them than to facilitate mobility.

... and that's before we get into the sticky questions like "Who's neighborhood are we bulldozing to put this train line in?"

#superbowl

Someone should let Google know that "We are the arbiters of history" is probably not the vibe they want to broadcast right now. #superbowl

@lauren I don't know, I've played a lot of Kerbal Space program and if there's one thing that taught me, it's sometimes you need to wrap up your long stellar voyage with a parachute and no way to get home. ;)

@seanmcbeth @davidgerard Software was worse because it mostly relied on guesswork and self-reporting.

Certainly doable without it, but so is driving a car with manual transmission.