expr
@expr@programming.dev
- Comment on Wednesday it is, my dudes. 3 weeks ago:
How is that pronounced? wow-wow-rohn?
- Comment on Jack Black is what happens when the class clown doesn't become depressed and instead becomes even more of a clown 4 weeks ago:
Robin Williams killed himself due to early onset dementia from brain disease: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Williams#Death.
- Comment on The Signal 1 month ago:
A synopsis for a great fucking movie.
- Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane? 2 months ago:
Sure, perhaps it’s possible that I saw an unusually high amount of apologists, but I’m saying that it happened enough times and consistently enough that it prompted me to block them before I even knew anything about them, which I think at least says something. I won’t claim to know what the majority opinion there is, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it’s an abnormal amount.
- Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane? 2 months ago:
Answer me this: are they or are they not consistently in support of Russia/China? Because I’ve seen it a lot from them (and blocked the instance soon after joining Lemmy when I noticed the pattern).
Is it just some big joke that went over my head?
- Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane? 2 months ago:
I dunno, I ended up blocking the instance way before I knew about their reputation (like, when I first joined Lemmy) because all of the users their kept posting the most unhinged shit.
I have definitely seen blatant apologism for China/Russia from them.
FWIW, I’m much further left than your average Democrat (I consider myself a leftist/anarchist). I personally don’t consider what I’ve seen from them to be very “left”, just authoritarian.
- Comment on NASA Ping 3 months ago:
Yeah wtf, 100ms is great.
300ms is the average reaction time in humans. Less than 100ms reaction time would be insane and I’m pretty sure it’s something no one has actually achieved.
- Comment on Meta Reportedly Unhappy With How Much Money Its VR Division Burns 3 months ago:
Yeah. Anduril has tried to hire me multiple times as well as well as a number of people I know (their software is written in Haskell, which is a somewhat niche skill set).
Every time I’ve told them absolutely not.
- Comment on CrowdStrike downtime apparently caused by update that replaced a file with 42kb of zeroes 3 months ago:
That’s certainly what we do in my workplace. Shocked that they don’t.
- Comment on CrowdStrike downtime apparently caused by update that replaced a file with 42kb of zeroes 3 months ago:
Thank God someone else said it. I was constantly in an existential battle with IT at my last job when they were constantly forcing updates, many of which did actually break systems we rely on because Apple loves introducing breaking changes in OS updates (like completely fucking up how dynamic libraries work).
Updates should be vetted. It’s a pain in the ass to do because companies never provide an easy way to rollback, but this really should be standard practice.
- Comment on Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else” 4 months ago:
Glad you got fired. Vaccines should always be mandatory save for legitimate, doctor-validated medical exemptions.
Anti-vaxxers are fucking stupid and should either be educated properly or, if they still refuse to do their civic duty after being de-programmed of misinformation, punished. You are only allowed to participate in society if you take the necessary steps that you are morally and ethically obligated to do in order to protect it from preventable, transmissible disease. We had eradicated polio until stupid motherfuckers like yourself decided that it would be a good idea to forgo the standard polio vaccine schedule that we’re had for decades. Now, we saw the first case in 30 years in 2022 because someone selfishly thought that their personal beliefs were more important than the health and livelihood of everyone else.
- Comment on The 1950s were wild... 4 months ago:
As someone that has recently taken an infant and and family CPR class for my son who started solid foods a few months ago, this is pretty similar to how they teach it today and I’m pretty sure it would have the same effect. You can’t perform a heimlich on a baby or very small child for a variety of reasons. This method or something similar to it is both safer and more effective, since it lets gravity help dislodge the food.
- Comment on Google patches its fifth zero-day vulnerability of the year in Chrome 6 months ago:
Given that this vulnerability was due to a use-after-free, definitely the language. Such a thing is impossible in memory-safe languages (Rust being the most obvious comparison).
- Comment on Why data centers want to have their own nuclear reactors 6 months ago:
I know it’s a joke, but just wanted to say that Uranium used for fuel is not something you can actually use for weaponry directly. It requires enrichment to increase the concentration of U-235 to weapons-grade levels.
- Comment on Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico 6 months ago:
Sure yeah, but like, I work remote and will always work remote (I live in a city with a pretty mediocre tech scene). On top of that, I work in a non-mainstream programming language (Haskell). So it’s hard to envision what I could actually do.
- Comment on Google lays off hundreds of 'Core' employees, moves some positions to India and Mexico 6 months ago:
Generally agree with your points, even though I"m honestly not sure what a union would look like like in practice.
But I just wanted to say that this job is definitely harder than plumbing. I usually do my own plumbing and it’s not really that bad. It’s not my favorite thing to do and can sometimes be a pain in the ass, but it’s way less taxing imo.
Teaching kids is hard as fuck though and good teachers are priceless. Honestly quality caregiving of any sort is massively underrated.
- Comment on ChatGPT provides false information about people, and OpenAI can’t correct it 6 months ago:
You do not understand how these things actually work. I mean, fair enough, most people don’t. But it’s a bit foolhardy to propose changes to how something works without understanding how it works now.
There is no “database”. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology. It is entirely impossible to query a model to determine if something is “present” or not (the question doesn’t even make sense in that context).
A model is, to greatly simplify things, a function (like in math) that will compute a response based on the input given. What this computation does is entirely opaque (including to the creators). It’s what we we call a “black box”. In order to create said function, we start from a completely random mapping of inputs to outputs (we’ll call them weights from now on) as well as training data, iteratively feed training data to this function and measure how close its output is to what we expect, adjusting the weights (which are just numbers) based on how close it is. This is a gross simplification of the complexity involved (and doesn’t even touch on the structure of the model’s network itself), but it should give you a good idea.
It’s applied statistics: we’re effectively creating a probability distribution over natural language itself, where we predict the next word based on how frequently we’ve seen words in a particular arrangement. This is old technology (dates back to the 90s) that has hit the mainstream due to increases in computing power (training models is very computationally expensive) and massive increases in the size of dataset used in training.
Source: senior software engineer with a computer science degree and multiple graduate-level courses on natural language processing and deep learning
Btw, I have serious issues with both capitalism itself and machine learning as it is applied by corporations, so don’t take what I’m saying to mean that I’m in any way an apologist for them. But it’s important to direct our criticisms of the system as precisely as possible.
- Comment on ChatGPT provides false information about people, and OpenAI can’t correct it 6 months ago:
It’s got nothing to do with capitalism. It’s fundamentally a matter of people using it for things it’s not actually good at, because ultimately it’s just statistics. The words generated are based on a probability distribution derived from its (huge) training dataset. It has no understanding or knowledge. It’s mimicry.
It’s why it’s incredibly stupid to try using it for the things people are trying to use it for, like as a source of information. It’s a model of language, yet people act like it has actual insight or understanding.
- Comment on Fake job interviews target developers with new Python backdoor 6 months ago:
- Is pretty standard in the industry for people with experience. I haven’t actually applied to any jobs myself in a while. Job hunting for me is sifting through the recruiter messages that hit my inbox.
- Comment on Fake job interviews target developers with new Python backdoor 6 months ago:
In my experience, your average software developer has absolutely terrible security hygiene. It’s why you see countless instances of private keys copy/pasted into public GitHub repos or the seemingly daily occurrences of massive data breaches.
My undergrad in CS (which I should point out, is still by far the most common major for software engineers) did not require a security course, and I’m fairly confident that this is pretty typical. To be honest, I wouldn’t have trusted any of my CS professors to know the first thing about security. It’s a completely different field and something that generally requires a lot of practical experience. The closest we ever got was an explanation of asymmetric vs. symmetric encryption. There was certainly no discussion of even basic things like how to properly manage secrets or authn best practices.
Everything I know now as a senior software engineer about software security has come from experience on the job. I’ve been very fortunate to work at some places that take it very seriously (including a government contractor writing cybersecurity software for the Department of Defense) and learned a lot there. But a lot of shops don’t have a culture that promotes good security hygiene, and it shows in the litany of insecure software out in the wild today.
- Comment on Explain yourselves, comp sci. 6 months ago:
It’s not a terrible name, since it’s derived from the mathematical construct of vectors as
n-tuples. In the case of vectors in programming,nrelates to the size of the underlying array, and the tuple consists of the elements of the vector. - Comment on It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office. 6 months ago:
Technically “to eat” is the Infinitive form of the verb, and using infinitives as nouns isn’t all that unusual in many languages.
- Comment on The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines 6 months ago:
It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. I remember losing hundreds of hours of progress on games due to memory card corruption. Or game cartridges/CDs no longer working, requiring you to buy a new copy. Or consoles getting straight-up bricked.
Hell, a ton of people have memories of blowing into N64/SNES cartridges to get them to work since they had notoriously unreliable connectors. But even though it was something that didn’t work great, everybody has fond memories of doing it since there wasn’t this amalgamation of voices from every direction telling you to be upset about it and clamoring for retribution. If something was broken, you got frustrated about it, complained to your friends, and then moved on with your life since there wasn’t anything else you could do.
- Comment on German state gov. ditching Windows for Linux, 30K workers migrating 6 months ago:
Indeed, hopefully Microsoft won’t attempt to sabotage the project again: techrights.org/o/…/misinformation-about-munich/.
- Comment on When historians are trying to credit the invention of generative AI, they may have to hunt down that one social media post that started the "use only auto-complete to finish this sentence" trend. 6 months ago:
No, this technology has been around for many decades, since the early days of computing. It is nothing new. The only thing that has changed is the volume of data and computing power.
- Comment on Elon Musk's X pushed a fake headline about Iran attacking Israel. X's AI chatbot Grok made it up. 7 months ago:
In case you’re not familiar, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok.
It’s somewhat common slang in hacker culture, which of course Elon is shitting all over as usual. It’s especially ironic since the meaning of the word roughly means “deep or profound understanding”, which their AI has anything but.
- Comment on USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update 7 months ago:
Corporate IT never goes for it, unfortunately.
My experience thus far is that the intersection of IT professionals and people who know how to administrate Linux systems well is a really small set of people. Not enough sysadmins these days.
- Comment on Experimental Video Game Made Purely With AI Failed Because Tech Was 'Unable to Replace Talent' 7 months ago:
Also not going to happen. It’s massively overrated.
- Comment on Pulsar, the best code editor 8 months ago:
Vim doesn’t take any thought for me, it’s all muscle memory.
- Comment on Give me Options or give me death 8 months ago:
…you don’t accept them. Basically every programming language accepts some kind of
-werrorflag to turn warnings into errors. Warnings for development builds, errors for production builds. This has been a solved problem for a very long time. Not only is it assinine to force them to be errors always, it’s semantically incorrect. Errors should be things that prevent the code from functioning in some capacity.