CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@megatronicthronbanks We can blame her for everything.

@ainmosni All the bad shit, really.

@craignicol @otfrom The Wizard of Oz got a lot of playtime that day.

I often wonder who's been worse for the UK overall, Thatcher or the parade of self serving kleptocrats of more recent years. Farage and Johnson caused untold damage between them, and Farage may yet cause much more, but, honestly, they're just natural byproducts of Thatcher's project. She was the root cause, and all these sneering clowns who followed her are just minor characters in her play. She may be dead but the wounds she left us still bleed.

Let's make today the day when we grab a stake and check on her grave, just to be sure.

Good morning and a very happy Thatcher Day to you all! It's been 13 years today and she's still dead.

@inthehands @timbray I'd like to believe a better world is possible.

@timbray OK, but the name of that conference made me really nervous for a moment. I guess it must have had that name since crypto used to mean cryptography.

You know, it isn't even that tools like this are useless. There are absolutely things they could be good at. I've personally seen Claude find stupid little bugs you'd spend an hour figuring out and hating yourself for afterwards with great efficiency. I tried the first iteration of Copilot, back when it was just an aggressive autocomplete, and while I had to stop using it because it was overconfidently trying to finish my programs for me without being asked, it was great for filling in boilerplate and maybe even a couple lines of real code for the basic stuff. We have models nowadays that are actually trained to find bugs and security issues in code rather than having the entire internets thrown at them to produce something Altman & Amodei can sell to the gullible as AGI.

But there's the problem. The technology has been around for a while, we have a good idea of what it's good for and, more importantly, what it's not. "Our revolutionary expert system for finding bugs in your code" isn't nearly as marketable to the general public, and the CEO class especially, as "our revolutionary PhD level sentient AI that will solve all the world's problems if you only give us another couple trillion dollars, and also wants to be your girlfriend." And so we get Claude and ChatGPT and RAM shortages and AI psychosis and accelerated climate change instead of smaller, focused models that are actually good at their specialist subjects. Because those don't produce as much shareholder value.

People keep assuring me that LLMs writing code is a revolution, that as long as we maintain sound engineering practices and tight code review they're actually extruding code fit for purpose in a fraction of the time it would take a human.

And every damned time, every damned time any of that code surfaces, like Anthropic's flagship offering just did, somehow it's exactly the pile of steaming technical debt and fifteen year old Stack Overflow snippets we were assured your careful oversight made sure it isn't.

Can someone please explain this to me? Is everyone but you simply prompting it wrong?

It's a good thing programmers aren't susceptible to hubris in any way, or this would have been so much worse.

@otfrom He makes a picture perfect Mark Antony.

I don't want to put undue pressure on any country in particular, but I'd like you to please be aware that it's the Ides of March tomorrow.

@macbraughton It's not bad.

@listrophy If so, only because I've zoomed out so far it may accidentally seem to be isometric.

Actually, since Timberborn is moddable with Harmony, I could absolutely write a mod that provides full Home Assistant integration, so Timberborn simply appears as a device in HAss with all the in-game automations automatically registered as sensors.

I'm sure I'll think of a practical use case for it eventually.

So, uh… I could use this to tell my Home Assistant to trigger the fire alarm if the beavers' reservoir dam goes dry.

You may deliver your Jurassic Park quotes now.

The devs certainly went all in with the new automation system.

What do you know, the beavers built a dam.

Welp, I guess the weekend's starting early, and may possibly extend a fair bit into next week.

On Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1062090/Timberborn/

For all you sick "I don't play games in early access" psychopaths who haven't been enjoying this gorgeous beaver colony builder since 2021 already, please be aware that Timberborn just dropped 1.0.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_-WFpaPgXDE