CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@david_chisnall Lord Rizz has been up to all sorts of business.

@david_chisnall Very interesting musings. I now feel like reading both handmaids an rereading 1984. I read it when I was 14 and don't remember much.

@david_chisnall hey. Cats have a concept of consequences. We just ignore them

@ltratt If you can't take the time required to be an MP off from your job, you can't do the job of MP. It isn't a part-time gig. I wouldn't want someone taking a full patient load as a dentist and being an MP, they'll do at least one of them badly. If you have some requirement to retain certification, you can do some pro bono work to meet the minimum until you return, but you can't take payment.

@david_chisnall reminds me of the classic: all software sucks, all hardware sucks. If you don't understand how something sucks you don't understand it well enough

Civic duty: Accomplished.

@kim_harding I wish people would stop boosting this. It's a complete non-story.There are two different policies that browsers have:Load passwords once, decrypt them, have them in memory.Load passwords on demand, decrypt them, and have them in memory.In both approaches, the passwords are encrypted on disk, the key for decrypting them is in memory. An attacker who has the ability to dump memory to get the passwords in the first approach also has the ability to dump memory and get the decryption key in the latter approach. There is no threat model that the second approach depends on that the first does not.

@krig @lobsters It has a file that enables people to use Copilot. Microsoft employees are actively pushed to use it, but that doesn't mean that the project is vibe coded (it was not - I reviewed some of the code and it was quite painstakingly written by a human who spent a long time understanding the subtleties of the CPython implementation, which is something LLMs would be really bad at). If you're saying 'any project that accepts any LLM contributions deserves the vibecoding tag', that's a policy choice. I'm not entirely opposed to that, but it means that, for example, any story about Linux should have the vibecoding tag. As should a huge number of other F/OSS projects. And that's fine as a self-consistent policy, but that's when I stop bothering to read the site.

@mkljczk @mariusor I really wish Mozilla would stop calling things like this ‘AI’ because it causes exactly the confusion that you’re addressing.

My flow for conferences:Oh, that's the distant future, sure, I'll give a talk! It'll be fun!I agreed to give a talk at a thing in two weeks? Is there any way I can get out of it?I guess that wasn't so bad but I need to remember to say 'no' next time.Go to step 1.

@EUCommission @david_chisnall My experience is that is pretty much the majority of all games. The ratcheting difficulty I live with and then finish with it. The incessant adverts are a more immediate reason for termination for me, but I found for many games the ads don’t appear if you play offline… although there is also the fact the ads are often not anything to do with the game, and that should be ASA business.

@david_chisnall Because Xtian values formed (allegedly!) 'the backbone of European Values - judiciously ignoring the bit where Greece and then Rome collapsed leaving only the Eastern Roman Empire and the massive role Muslim scholars played in preserving the academic works of that era while the Church decreed such teachings 'Heresy'.

@david_chisnall I am afraid my own research casts doubt on your findings. After reviewing NHS data going back to the early 1950s, I can confirm that all girls have left toes, and all boys have right toes.

Pro tip: You can eliminate all correctness errors in your software by not having a spec.

@NatureMC I agree. I don't use follower-only posts because I don't think that there's any real restriction in distribution once you have more than a couple of dozen followers on different instances. It might have some benefits for reducing harassment, but only against not-very-motivated individuals. But that's not how it's described

@david_chisnall We can't have that! Here are two pictures that I *think* might be of the exact lizard you were thinking of.

I was pondering recently a throw-away remark from a prominent F/OSS developer that they use LLMs for creating ffmpeg command lines. And I had a bunch of reactions.First, I wouldn't use an LLM for creating something with a bunch of context-specific flags, that seems high risk. A bunch of flags in the documentation don't make sense in a load of cases.Then I realised that the way I normally create an ffmpeg command line to do $THING is to search for '$THING ffmpeg'. And almost all of the time I find a forum post or web page where someone has posted exactly the command line I want. So then I thought 'they probably have the exact right answers in the training set'. And so an LLM probably gives the right answer.But then I thought 'well, that's probably only true for 95% of the uses'. And if I ask it for something in the 5%, I'll get something that looks completely plausible, but is likely to be wrong. But then I thought 'what's the worst that can happen?' and generally ML is good for things where the benefit of getting a good answer outweigh the cost of getting it wrong. And maybe ffmpeg is like that. So an LLM is fine: it might be wrong, but you can see and fix it after it's burned a few seconds of CPU time if so.And then I remembered that the output file was part of the command line and the tool runs with no sandboxing. And so the worst that can happen is you get some escaping wrong and it overwrites random files in your disk.And so my main conclusion is: I don't know how any normal person could be expected to understand whether any given task is something where is safe to use an LLM.

@david_chisnall With some of the recipients of the long LLM-generated content using their own LLM to summarise

@bill88t I always thought the ISA reference starting AAA was a masterful piece of expectation management. If you’re not screaming by the end, you probably misunderstood some of it.

@david_chisnall Samoyed puppies are amazing fluffballs.