Life is Tetris @tetrislife@qoto.org

@andrewrk It would be tricky to get the legal wording right to ban ALL forms of advertising.

You could ban certain forms of advertising, e.g. São Paulo's "clean city law":

> Lei Cidade Limpa (Portuguese for clean city law) is a law of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, put into law by proclamation in 2006 that prohibits advertising such as that of outdoor posters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

@andrewrk hard to tell whether that 🌈 🌞 is sarcastic or not. "Any form of paid and/or third-party advertising would become illegal. Full stop." To that, I ask: what's payment?

I'd say the power of online advertising is a symptom of the internet's structural problems: wide, reliable, reach requires monetary investment because of the client-server model.

I reckon a P2P model would go a long way towards defanging adtech.

@carnage4life

#TrumpTariffs #TrumpeanTradeWars

I have been thinking, "... buy on bad news..." The old adage holds still true and might be amended with, "...in particular, if you know when the markets are going to turn around!" It's not that it hasn't happened before, e. g.the 2020 congressional insider trading scandal:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_trading_scandal

If you control all branches of government, even easier to not get caught.

👉What I mean to ask, is there any way to track big investors' behavior?👈

The reason I get so annoyed about people pitching LLMs as a way to 'democratise programming' or as end-user programming tools is that they solve the wrong problem.

The hard part of programming is not writing code. It's unambiguously expressing your problem and desired solution. Imagine if LLMs were perfect programmers. All you have to do is write a requirements document and they turn it into a working program. Amazing, right? Well, not if you've ever seen what most people write in a requirements document or seen the output when a team of good programmers works from a requirements document.

The most popular end-user programming language in the world (and, by extension, the most popular programming language), with over a billion users, is the Calc language that is embedded in Excel. It is not popular because it's a good language. Calc is a terrible programming language by pretty much any metric. It's popular because Excel (which is also a terrible spreadsheet, but that's a different rant) is basically a visual debugger and a reactive programming environment. Every temporary value in an Excel program is inspectable and it's trivial to write additional debug expressions that are automatically updated when the values that they're observing change.

Much as I detest it as a spreadsheet, Excel is probably the best debugger that I have ever used, including Lisp and Smalltalk.

The thing that makes end-user programming easy in Excel is not that it's easy to write code, it's that it's easy to see what the code is doing and understand why it's doing the wrong thing. If you replace this with an LLM that generates Python, and the Python program is wrong, how does a normal non-Python-programming human debug it? They try asking the LLM, but it doesn't actually understand the Python so it will often send them down odd rabbit holes. In contrast, every intermediate step in an Excel / Calc program is visible. Every single intermediate value is introspectable. Adding extra sanity checks (such as 'does money leaving the account equal the money paid to suppliers?') is trivial.

If you want to democratise programming, build better debuggers, don't build tools that rapidly generate code that's hard to debug.

Pondering if I dare to put #Fortran into my CV.

I can do some Fortran, partly because it keeps coming up in all sorts of #retrocomputing contexts, but, even with Ratfor enhancements, I don't consider it a well-designed or pleasant language, and I'm not sure I can see myself working at a place that deals in new Fortran code now that nice, human-friendly languages such as NumPy and APL have been invented. Besides, 21st century Fortran is a really weird language that doesn't even know what it wants to be when it grows up.

Dear fans of messenger comparison sports,

How does it factor in that on #deltachat there are many apps that can be used in a chat without requiring a login or even a privacy policy ... And the apps all work like cryptpad but automatically and without requiring any server side hosting?

Editing documents and checklists and calendars are all safely end-to-end encrypted without a server and anyone can write new #webxdc apps permission free.

Which other cross-platform messenger offers this?

new blog post: against proof of waste
https://blog.lx.oliva.nom.br/2025-03-28-against-proof-of-waste.en.html

As web servers get overwhelmed by LLM bots, some operators are resorting to programs that demand visiting web clients to perform some relatively expensive computation to be granted access to the website. This is called Proof of Work, but when that computation doesn't yield any useful results, it might as well be called Proof of Waste. Why not get clients to compute something useful and valuable, so that LLM scrapers become an essentially infinite supply of computing power, and our servers pay for themselves and for the creative works we put in them?

About a year ago, my parents made the switch to Linux on their home machines because they really hated Win 10... Today I got a call from my mother to help her out with something, but I did not expect that "something" will be figuring out a sed pattern for a shell script she wrote to bulk rename files.

When I asked her why she didn't use some GUI program she said "I was an accountant in the DOS era, this makes more sense to me than a ribbon menu in Excel".

Miyazaki is right. The latest version of OpenAI‘s image generation technology has resulted in a flood of users sharing images on social media that have been transformed in the style of Studio Ghibli, the legendary Japanese animation studio.

@fristi @ejabberd Makes sense to block them out if you can but say you *need* to interact with some Meta service (as sadly some people use those services exclusively…): Would you rather do it by proxy through software you control and where the amount of data shared can be limited, or through software that they control?

If you use the words "just" or "simply" in your documentation I will hunt you down

one of the worst parts of our modern scam culture is how it's designed to make you feel guilty when you fall for it

you heard an interesting fact that was actually propaganda? Your fault. Fell for an image? Your fault. Got scammed money wise? Your fault

but that in itself is the biggest scam of all

@alsutton in practice you'd as a non oem would already have to wait until the aosp sync dropped for a new Android version right? I understand this is closing things further but it doesn't change that much I think?