rrix2

Joined 9 years ago

Karma
1,547
Submissions
537
Member since
Feb 23
https://arcology.garden https://thelionsrear.com https://keybase.io/rrix https://notes.whatthefuck.computer
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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
It's one thing to write publicly and assume it'll be read by bots, but:

> Everything I write. Everything everybody writes is now food for LLMs.

This is the part of all this AI bullishness I find so incredible and disconcerting. Millions of people are sharing everything they write, their journals, their idle search queries, their medical diagnoses, their idle thoughts, the things they say to their friends and loved ones, etc. with glorified US defense contractors, plugging their Obsidian and Google Drive and chat groups in to an inference server that processes all of it...

Like, do you think OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta can't or won't just hang a Palantir or Clickhouse off the side of their frontend database with all your chat history and tool calls in it even as they claim to not use your chats for further training? Who's going to be the first to feed chat history in to a tool like Flock's Investigate tool? Whose going to be swept up in the next NSA Prism? Will it be me for voicing this concern on the clearnet?

Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
one thing this doesn't touch on that I am curious about is how was browsing history, etc, correlated to the GDID?
Comment · 4 months ago
and so it was that the tail continued to wag the dog....
Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 5 months ago
I have a 4U with noctua fans and the loudest part of my rack is the harddisks
Comment · 7 months ago
It's not easy, though. Most of my day job is spent trying to get html interactives on an e-learning platform to work reliably with iOS's ridiculous nonstandard interaction rules around when media is allowed to play. It's worse than working with the 20 year old jsp+servlet system that serves the interactives and business logic. no other browser behaves like iOS safari and to debug and develop against it you need an ios and macos device sitting on your desk. Firefox and Firefox on Android are a breeze but a rounding-error in our usage metrics, even accounting for our development. Apple desparately hobbles the web platform to collect IAP taxes.
Comment · 8 months ago
My first personal computer was a Palm and my earliest programming experiences came with reading these docs, how fun. For a young person whose parents' custody arrangement led to almost every night of sleep under a different roof, a wifi enabled OS with a great applicaton library that was always with me was really powerful and ended up being quite impactful on the arc of my life.

By high school I was writing apps that followed this hig with a fold up keyboard, designing the ui and compiling code on board the device. PalmOS 4 and 5 could be tricked out to be a whole computer, capable of working offline for a week and also could get you up all night on IRC and ebooks. it's hard to imagine using my smartphone offline for a week now....

and most of the apps implemented this hig and were straightforward to use because it was the defeult builtin toolkit largely the same its entire life, progressively enhanced GUIs from 1bit 160x160 to full color 320x480 responsive design... nowadays I'm building a Material3 app in my evenings and i know some day google is gonna make a material4 so that my app looks scuffed up

Comment · 8 months ago
Comment · 8 months ago
it's becoming ever more clear to me that i'll have at least two devices: one running software i trust, one running software corporates trust, with a very narrow pipeline connecting the two, if it all. my demon-haunted device can stay offline in my bag and get hotspot'd in to my trustworthy device as necessary.

not happy about it, but i don't see a path forward that lets one participate in the wider ecosystem and maintain their own sovereignty and sanity.

Comment · 9 months ago
Many of the flock cameras in my city were disabled by bashing in the solar panels or damaging the camera lens. Unfortunately, flock's contract is such that the city pays for repairs/replacement
Comment · 10 months ago
The local credit union in Eugene had installed Flock cams at the entrances to all their branches. They took em down after only a few of our community members began protests out front a few branches and emailing with the CU's leadership before our city terminated our contract and removed the cams
Comment · 10 months ago
I've been asking for little tutorials or implementation plans for things, and demanding that the model not write any code itself. Following the advice of Geoffrey Litt.[1] I find reviewing code written by my coworkers to be difficult when i'm being paid for it, surely i'm not gonna review thousands of lines of auto-generated code and the comprehensive tests required to trust them in my free time...!

So I've been learning kotlin & android development in the evenings and i find this style of thing to be so much more effective as a dev practice than claude code and a better learning practice than following dev.to tutorials. I've been coding for almost 20 years and find most tutorial or documentation stuff either targeted to someone who has hardly programmed at all, or just plain old API docs.

Asking the langlemangler to generate a dev plan, focusing on idiomatic implementation details and design questions rather than lines of code, and to let me fill in the algorithm implementations, it's been nice. I'll use the jetbrains AI autocomplete stuff for little things or ask it to refactor a stinky function but mostly I just follow the implementation plan so that the shape of the whole system is in my head.

Here's an example:

> i have scaffolded out a new project, an implementation of a library i've written multiple times in the last decade in multiple languages, but with a language i haven't written and with new design requirements specified in the documentation. i want you to write up an implementation plan, an in-depth tutorial for implementing the requirements in a Kotlin Multi Platform library. > i am still learning kotlin but have been programming for 20 years. you don't need to baby me, but don't assume i know best practices and proper idioms for kotlin. make sure to include background context, best practices, idioms, and rationale for the design choices and separation of concerns.

This produced a 3kb markdown file that i've been following while I develop this project.

[1]: https://x.com/geoffreylitt/status/1991909304085987366

Comment · 11 months ago
I recently bodged together a board that would drive FastLED programs parameterized by the control voltages that come off a eurorack, it was really neat and straightforward because you have some really good clock sources to sync to

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