William Blackerby

@blackerby
34 Followers
276 Following
212 Posts
Apparently I'm a librarian. Retooting, mainly.

Just so you know, using an AI notetaker during a meeting without priorly asking for consent from all participants before starting it breaches many if not most privacy laws around the world.

In certain cases, it can even breach two-party consent laws, and be a criminal act.

Ideally, never use these privacy-invasive tools ever. But if you do use them, you must ask for everyone's consent first, and respect their choice fully if they refuse to be recorded.

#Privacy #AInotetakers #NoAI

Cool looking talk - The Design of the Unix Shell, speaker Stephen R. Bourne streaming today from NYC*BUG 23:30 UTC https://www.nycbug.org
NYC*BUG

New York City BSD User Group

Periodic reminder that “rate your pain on a scale from 1 to 10" is bullshit without reference points. People with chronic pain, tough guys, people with intense periods, and people who struggle with interoception all struggle when the endpoints are nebulous.

Let me introduce you to the DVPRS: https://www.va.gov/WHOLEHEALTHLIBRARY/docs/Defense-and-Veterans-Pain-Rating-Scale.pdf

It even works if you substitute pain for general impact. If you're asked to rate a symptom on a scale from 1 to 10, this works too.

0 = No pain
1 = Hardly notice pain
2 = Notice pain, does not interfere with activities
3 = Sometimes distracts me
4 = Distracts me, can do usual activities
5 = Interrupts some activities
6 = Hardto ignore, avoid usual activities
7 = Focus of attention, prevents doing daily activities
8 = Awful, hard to do anything
9 = Can’t bear the pain, unable to do anything
10 = As bad as it could be, nothing else matters

10 is still pretty subjective there, but "nothing else matters" is clear enough, and really 9 or 10 isn't really a big difference in how much it matters clinically. (It tells the clinician if an intervention helps though)

Doom is so overdetermined at this point – coming at us from so many directions, in so many ways – that belaboring the details feels uninteresting to me. The question before us is no other than what it has always been: how are we to live good lives together, in whatever time and space remains for us?
“Alexa, show us an interview you couldn’t pay us any amount of money to watch”

Folks are gonna need to stop with the "grandma on the computer" to mean uneducated users tropes soon.

I was writing and debugging code to a cassette tape drive before a lot of folks who say this nonsense were even born. I have built my own computers from the case up. My first computer class in college was COBOL. I hard coded websites before there were any tools to do it with.

I'm 52.

What I find is that most of the yunguns have no fucking idea how they work and couldn't find a command line if their life depended on it.

So, yanow, maybe stop.

tiny lua compiler: a lua compiler in a single file, that's well-documented, that was hand-crafted over several years, and made to teach you compiler/tokenizer/parser/lexer design.

this is a crazy impressive project, and in a time when people are haphazardly slopcoding projects, is a standard to live by.

https://github.com/bytexenon/Tiny-Lua-Compiler

#programming #lua

I'm winning
does anyone know of any computer programs that are good? so far on my list I have ffmpeg, pandoc, and ImageMagick
With the LLM labs raising prices - I’ve been working on a great new set of tools. They’re called “Integrated Development Environments.” They work with formal specification languages, and a series of language processing models to turn that formal language into working software. Best of all, there is little to no cost and they can be hosted entirely locally - even on very old hardware. And they work with the platforms you support today. All without usage limits.