CoderKat

@[email protected]

I write bugs and sometimes features! I’m also @CoderKat.

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CoderKat,

No, we are both dreaming butterflies.

CoderKat,

I like the idea of having a regulated, living, backwards compatible standard. Which seems to be what USB-C is now, for phones. The EU has soon to be active regulation that will make it a requirement for many things. Yet, it’s not a single, set in stone standard, but one that’s constantly being expanded (eg, version 3.2 and PD).

Of course, the regulation has to also be living. Eg, at some point, maybe there’ll be a strong enough reason to allow another standard (by no means do I think USB-C will always make sense). And the regulation has to very carefully choose the standard.

That way we get the benefits of standardization (from actually everyone using the same format), but we aren’t unreasonably crippling ourselves to do it.

CoderKat,

In Ruby, 0 and “” is truthy,

What the fuck?

CoderKat,

I badly wish that I could get (competent) home assistants with at least somewhat customizable activation keywords. I understand why it’s not customizable. They build it into the hardware so that it doesn’t have to be truly listening all the time. But I’d love at least some options to buy versions that have different phrases.

For me, I just want something that references some pop culture AI (eg, HAL, Glados, etc). I especially don’t like Google’s approach of saying the freaking company name.

CoderKat,

Huh, I’ve never noticed how much bloat was in ISO 8601. I think when most people refer to it, we’re specifically referring to the date (optionally with time) format that is shared with RFC 3339, namely 2023-11-22T20:00:18-05:00 (etc). And perhaps some fuzziness for what separates date and time.

CoderKat,

We are ridiculously inconsistent in Canada. I’ve seen all 3 of the most popular formats here (2023-11-22, 11/22/2023, and 22/11/2023) in similarish amounts. Government forms seem to be increasingly using RFC 3339 dates, but even they aren’t entirely onboard.

CoderKat,

Yeah. There’s literally nothing you can put on a prompt that will truly work. It’s still a good idea to prompt cause it will reduce how many people approve the prompt, but there is a significant number of people who don’t read prompts at all and just insta-confirm.

At best, I think you could design it so there’s no way for an app to request certain permissions themselves. They’d have to be opted in from the system settings and apps could only tell you how to do it. But that’s a usability nightmare that is quite frustrating for legitimate usages. There’s already some super sensitive permissions that do this. I think the ability to install apps, ability to display over other apps, and password managers for android.

CoderKat,

I think you can actually solve that one with enough C4 :p

CoderKat,

Do custom ROMs still have issues with some apps not allowing them? It’s been an eternity since I tried one and I don’t know if it’s a hard requirement, but at least when I did try it, I had (?) to root my device and my bank apps refused to work after that.

CoderKat,

Same here. Heck, I often even get one day free shipping, which is insane.

CoderKat,

Lol, yesterday it felt like there was at least half a dozen posts about Firefox, mostly claiming that YouTube was slowing them down. Which seemed really bad at first, till I dug into it and saw it was probably an unintended bug with ad handling.

And why were there so many posts? Who wants to see the same post more than once?

CoderKat,

That’s why, when I leave ransom ware outside of offices, I buy the pink ones and put stickers on em.

CoderKat,

Those prices feel so expensive, too. Like, does the news cost more to produce than full length movies and TV shows? Cause all the streaming video apps are far cheaper than 9€ a week. The only thing 9€ is cheap for is if you would have been buying a newspaper daily. Incidentally, newspapers have ads despite being bought, so that might explain why they kept ads in the web version too?

A price like that may have made sense in the pre internet days, when a newspaper was a big chunk of my daily reading due to general lack of alternatives. But these days? I probably only read a single digit number of articles per day about the biggest headlines. And since I get lots of news from social media like Lemmy, it crosses many websites, which is unconductive with subscribing. Plus it feels like a sizable chunk of news articles are just quoting AP or Reuters these days, anyway.

Mind you, I’m also Canadian. We have a fully publically funded news service (the CBC) that isn’t paywalled and generally high quality.

CoderKat,

Yeah. I worry every day that there’ll be an article on the front page that says Israel actually did nuke Gaza. It’s a very real concern given how things are going.

CoderKat,

“We are acting with full transparency whilst maintaining the safety of our troops and operational readiness.”

Uh huh. Yup. Sure you are.

Who’s better known for their “full transparency” than the IDF?

CoderKat,

Yeah, I make hella good lasagna and have never used a white sauce in it. It’s always been a red sauce. Just a ton of cheeses like you say (“some” is an understatement lol).

CoderKat,

While I think the rich are one of the most influential sources of it, I’m not convinced they’re the only or even the majority. Like, of the rich stopped using bigotry to divide people, would people stop being bigoted? I don’t think so at all. I think there’s something wrong with humanity that makes it easy for bigotry to evolve even in the absence of power and perhaps worse, for people to want to be bigoted.

CoderKat,

Strength is EAT MY DAMN FRUIT SALAD OR I’LL SMASH YOUR FACE IN.

ajsadauskas, to technology
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Elon's "extremely hardcore" toxic work culture means people are forced to take Adderall without a prescription to meet their workload. Just ask SpaceX employees.

"Some SpaceX workers resorted to taking Adderall to keep up with the pace of work at the company's launch facility, and others found themselves falling asleep in the bathroom during long workweeks, a recent Reuters investigation found.

"Travis Carson, a former SpaceX worker at the company's facility in Brownsville, Texas, told Reuters some workers took Adderall — a stimulant designed to help people with ADHD improve their focus and concentration levels — without a prescription to keep up with the pace of work."

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-workers-took-adderall-slept-bathroom-iv-treatments-deadlines-report-2023-11

What a nightmare!

#X @technology

CoderKat,

Same. It’s frustrating that my legitimate prescription has to jump through so many hurdles and face skepticism because of its usefulness as a recreational drug (or occupational, I guess?).

Is there any way to reverse degrowth of the niche communities on Lemmy?

Like others, I came over when Reddit was banning 3rd party apps. Many communities were being started and I wanted to help. So I chose one community to form here and try and grow. And we did! There was a time a short while in the little KC Chiefs community was in the top 100 communities on Lemmy world. I knew that wouldn’t last...

CoderKat,

The sorting algorithm changes are what I’ve been waiting for forever. A bit disappointed it’s taking so long. I basically never see many communities I’m subbed to. I miss having a local city community. It has me constantly thinking of just dealing with Reddit’s bullshit, cause if it’s not big news or memes, Lemmy ain’t cutting it.

CoderKat,

But are they? Generally in tech, it’s really hard to gauge people’s performance and most companies are conservative with firing people for performance reasons. So you could coast by on mediocre performance. You team won’t be happy with you, but you probably will keep your job simply because you’re given the benefit of doubt. Tech is one of those areas where someone can actually be 10x as effective as another person, because so much of the job can be spent on stuff like debugging and dealing with weird issues, where one person might spend all day on an issue that another person can resolve in minutes.

There’s also something to be said about the fact that companies are usually paying for your time, not output. Contractors are the ones who are paid for output, not employees. It’s also straight up expected in tech that you’re looking for ways to automate some tasks so they don’t have to be done anymore. It’s not like some mindless office job where you’re expected to do X reports per day. There’s a never ending list of bugs to fix and features requested. You’re generally paid to find ways to increase productivity, not merely do the same thing over and over.

At any rate, tech is usually also paid well enough for it. There’s still massive income disparity between regular workers and C-suite, but at least the pay is always well, well above living wages, stock options are commonly given to regular workers, and high performers often are rewarded for doing better than average. IMO, tech jobs aren’t really an area to focus on the kinda mindset you have, since it does so much better than most (not perfect, but still far better). Most jobs don’t get anything close to what tech jobs offer to regular employees.

CoderKat,

Yeah, this is google lens. It’s meant for translating via the camera, so it doesn’t try to line up the text as most pictures wouldn’t be perfectly aligned. But note that you can copy the translated text, which is better for readability and searchability. I tried it out on your original text and it did a great job. Even got the line breaks perfect.

Dozens of health organizations pledge ‘full support’ for federal ban on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars (www.cnn.com)

Eighty national public health groups, including the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Preventative Medicine, placed a full-page ad in Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post in support of a federal ban on menthol in cigarettes and all...

CoderKat,

Yeah, it’s unfortunate. I understand it. The flavours do make smoking more enticing to young people, who might not limit themselves to one cigar a month like you do. But it does suck to ban something outright just because some people will misuse it. Mind you, nicotine is addictive, which is a pretty critical facet to this (though I don’t think anyone starts smoking without knowing this risk).

I dislike smoking in general and do want things that are good for society as a whole. But the logic of banning stuff like this seems similar to, say, banning fast food because some people will overeat (or more extreme, having calorie rationing so that people can’t overeat on any kind of food). It’s admittedly always a balancing act for how much danger is acceptable before we just ban it for everyone. Some bans using this logic are very reasonable, some aren’t, and many are extremely debatable.

I think I currently prefer the sin tax approach, especially since that best accomodates occasional usage. A hefty tax makes the dangerous thing less accessible to impressionable young people and helps pay for the social cost (though IIRC, smokers actually cost society less because they die younger, reducing the many medical costs of old age). Price influences people’s choices, too. If healthy food is cheaper than unhealthy food, that encourages buying healthy stuff. But even sin taxes are imperfect, especially in a vacuum. They can make the cost of living higher for a vulnerable population. They need to be planned carefully.

It's not your imagination: Companies are more willing to raise their prices now — and it's because we let them (www.cbc.ca)

Supply chains, worker wages and the price of energy has been blamed for the current bout of high inflation. But central bankers around the world are starting to clue in to something consumers have been aware of for a while — corporations just aren't afraid to raise their prices anymore.

CoderKat,

It can be a vicious cycle. Someone raises price for whatever reason. Their competitors see that and think “well, if it works for them, it’ll work for us”. Their suppliers see the price rise and want a share of it, so raise theirs too. New players entering the market will likely set prices based off competition, even if the competition has actually set inflated prices. Eventually even companies that wouldn’t want to raise prices arbitrarily has to because it’s now inflation and their costs have risen.

Even without direct colusion, many companies still end up all following each other.

CoderKat,

He also initially threatened legal action against her, for unclear reasons. Like, he’s shared some racist Photoshop, gets called out for it, and his first response is to… Threaten to sue the model who simply made public comments about it?

Guy is a real piece of shit. He can walk back on stuff all he wants, but the first thing he did speaks volumes about what kinda person he is.

CoderKat,

The video also calls out that one of the challenges in moving off of fandom is SEO. The fandom sites often are above the new sites even when the fandom site becomes a pile of unmaintained, vandalized garbage. This suggests that vandalism actually helps fandom.

The best thing we can do is not visit the sites and don’t link to them, instead using and linking to their new sites.

Israeli Military Warns Al Jazeera Correspondent in Gaza to Leave Home or Die (www.democracynow.org)

Al Jazeera is condemning threats by the Israeli army against the family of its Gaza correspondent Youmna ElSayed. On Monday, ElSayed’s husband received a call from Israeli forces warning family members to immediately leave their home or be killed in a bombardment. The threat comes just days after an Israeli strike killed 12...

CoderKat,

Just regular ol’ terrorist behavior. Like, literally the definition of terrorism.

CoderKat,

That was great! I tried watching someone’s playthrough before, but got bored and couldn’t finish. The hilariousness of this one is great.

CoderKat,

Wow, you hate Monica so much she doesn’t even appear in the list? I’d put Monica above Phoebe, personally. And Ross is by far the worst.

CoderKat,

Especially with many audiences. On your own or with a romantic partner it’s not nearly as bad, but watching a sex scene with pretty much anyone else feels so awkward, which pulls you out of the scene.

CoderKat,

I wonder how many of those are still the case now? When he first took over, that was absolutely huge deal, since it’s extremely difficult to find another job as a visa worker. But it’s not impossible and Twitter employees would have very strong resumes. It’s been so long that I suspect many of those who wanted to leave could have found another company willing to sponsor by now.

There’s definitely Musk fanboys in the company. There’s no shortage of people, especially the “tech bro” type, who somehow still adore Musk.

CoderKat,

Yeah, over time, I’ve come to care a lot less for movies. For most things, I’d rather have a TV show so that there’s more time to get invested in characters and do world building. Plus more bite sized viewing sessions.

Modern TV has such high production values that movies have lost their biggest competitive edge. Plus showrunners have more options for how to perform the show. No longer do shows need to be bloated with far too many episodes. Public opinion has also changed, so they don’t even try to get away with bullshit like clip episodes anymore (mind you, those were mostly for sitcoms in the first place). Streaming has also made shows more accessible than ever.

CoderKat,

I wonder how much of a discount OP can get when they send their machine back?

CoderKat,

I do think there’s some use for AI in its current form (especially AI art as a tool for developing other works, like movies and video games), but I find it bizarre just how much investors value the current form of AI.

As cool as I find AI art, I’m not yet sure about it’s commercial viability, given the serious legal issues it’s facing. So why do investors, who are supposed to care about commercial viability, value it so much?

And for generative text, I have an even more negative stance. My understanding is that the cost to train and run those AIs is ludicrous. Sure, some companies will use it to make blog spam articles or replace their basic support staff with it, but is that really gonna make it profitable?

And I emphasized “current form” because the current AI is basically just predictive text. It’s severely limited and this is extremely evident if you try to ask even basic math problems. It’s not capable of actual intelligence, which is what has me very skeptical of it on the long term. Maybe these companies will come up with a new, better form of AI. Or maybe they won’t. But it doesn’t seem like “just increase the size of the model” is sustainable nor will frankly get closer to strong(ish?) AI.

CoderKat,

Especially where image generation is concerned, the infancy part can’t be understated. It’s growing so, so fast. A year ago, people would be dismissing AI art as “you can always tell”, it largely couldn’t do hands, and text was right out. But current cutting edge models can semi-reliably generate imperceptible works, needing only some fairly trivial manual curation to pick the best output. There’s also some models that are now able to do basic text. Just comparing a couple of years worth of progress side by side makes it very clear that it’s advancing rapidly and there’s no signs yet that it’s plateaued.

The big barrier to image generation, though, is profit. The images that it creates are useful, but current understanding is that they can’t be copyrighted and there’s ongoing legal challenges that make it very murky. I don’t think these companies can stay in business from regular people who’ll pay for some tokens to generate art. They need to be usable by commercial companies, and the legal issues will scare many of those away, at least for now.

CoderKat,

As a dev, I honestly can’t understand that. I probably use regex a dozen times a day. Basic regex is so easy and useful, but describing exactly what you want is so iffy for an AI. The basics of regex are also so easy. It’s not like most people are trying to, say, parse an email address with regex. Most usage is basic, like “extract this consistent pattern from this text” or “remove this (simple) parameter from this function”. It takes me seconds to come up with a working regex in most cases.

CoderKat,

Yeah, I learn so much from code reviews and they’ve saved me so much time from dumb mistakes I missed. I’ve also caught no shortage of bugs in other people’s code that saved us all a stressful headache. It’s just vastly easier to fix a bug before it merges than once it breaks a bunch of people.

CoderKat,

Implying we’d ever get off this planet before wiping ourselves out. :/

CoderKat,

files.catbox.moe/g9ulrf.jpg

It’s likely a kbin bug (or an app if you used one to make the comment), since the slashes are there even on the website directly.

CoderKat,

I really preferred it on the right, too. It was the default on my Galaxy. But I have a Pixel for work and it doesn’t seem to let you choose which side the back button is on. I can’t stand to have an inconsistency.

CoderKat,

My best guess is that they hope some agriculture or GMO company might have a use for it. Basically crops + future theme. Maybe they were trying to stand out from the likely vastly more common corn + person in lab coat?

CoderKat,

It’s interesting how universal the use of colour was. I grew up in a smaller province most people don’t know (or at least can’t spell). The phone books were made by a crown corp that was pretty much just for the province. Yet, same colour schemes. Outside of the book was yellow. White pages for people, yellow for businesses.

York University threatens to revoke student unions' status over Israel-Hamas statements (toronto.ctvnews.ca)

The university’s statement, released to the public on Friday, addressed the “serious and ongoing harms caused by [the groups’] statement,” which declares “solidarity with the Palestinian people” against “the settler-colonial apartheid state of so-called Israel.”...

CoderKat,

Why would “something is complicated” mean you can’t have a stance on it? By all means, you should be extra careful with complicated issues, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have an opinion or that there aren’t parts that are more clear cut.

Eg, your comment reads to me like you’re conflating Palestine (the largely unrecognized country) and Hamas (the terrorist group). Your Al Qaeda comment certainly reads that way. These groups and the vast majority of people support Palestine, not Hamas. So it’s like sympathizing with Iraq because they got invaded after 9/11.

And the why now is pretty obvious. Because big things are happening now. Yeah, this isn’t the first time Israel and Palestine have faced conflict, but it’s a big time and people are afraid that Israel is going to put a complete end to Palestine this time around. If you don’t speak up now, when will you?

CoderKat,

But if the gamer girl can’t perfectly pass a True Gamer’s exam of 125 extremely specific questions, then they are a fake gamer and the PC will burst into flames. /s

CoderKat,

I’m curious, were they ever that stereotypical “shh” environment that movies claimed they were? Because no public library in my lifetime was ever like that (just smaller school libraries), but I can’t go back very far. Most libraries I’ve been to have multiple areas or floors, some which are quiet and others which are allowed to be noisy.

CoderKat,

The well made, expert reaction videos are fun. Like Legal Eagle reacting to videos to judge their legal accuracy. He also made a meta reaction video where he explained why some reaction channels were breaking the law and how to do it properly. Insider has a series of videos where they get an expert on a subject to react to movie clips (like a former bank robber reacting to heist movies or a marine biologist reacting to shark movies).

But I don’t get the low quality stuff, where someone isn’t an expert, doesn’t provide meaningful commentary, etc. Some “reaction” videos are basically just stealing content and the only thing that seems interesting about them is the original content. The “reactor” adds nothing and just stole views from the original.

CoderKat,

No Man’s Sky. Game was a disaster when it came out. For most games, a bad launch would have ended the game. But with NMS, the devs kept at it and constantly added new content over many years. I believe it’s still actively developed.

That’s what got me to play it. I only played it maybe half a year ago. I wouldn’t have bothered if not for the fact that people were mentioning how much the game had improved. I wrote the game off after the bad press when it launched, but fortunately I was wrong and they did make something good out of it.

CoderKat,

Casters often feel at a massive disadvantage for casual fights. For a boss fight, casters are often the strongest, since you’ll blow all your spell slots. But for smaller fights, you want to preserve your spell slots and cantrips simply cannot keep up with martials. I mean, a single attack roll for a spell cantrip vs getting 2-3 attack roles that also do more damage total? Heck, my strongest martials can usually do at least double the damage of a spell caster’s cantrips.

Though at the same time, when I can blow the spell slot, no martial can outdo the AoE damage of reliable ol’ fireball or the likes. Just I can’t justify using my spell slots on a small number of weak enemies.

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