stewart

@nuclearpidgeon
20 Followers
76 Following
126 Posts
systems engineer / software developer / codebase historian, computer science masters graduate, lover of strange electronic sounds and music
areamelbourne, australia
webhttps://swebb.id.au
stewart5d ago
Zhuowei Zhang5d ago
The `left-pad` incident was 10 years ago today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident

Thankfully, we've completely solved software supply chains in the years since.
npm left-pad incident - Wikipedia

stewartMar 6
Been getting an unfortunate amount of regular use out of this pic recently
stewartJul 25, 2025
Show threadLaurent BercotJul 24, 2025

@kloenk @navi Back when 128 kB was the limit for argv+envp, Google was hitting it too because they passed all the configuration for their whole software stack on the command line as --long-option=value switches.

Their solution? Compress the command line. So every binary started by ungzipping argv[1] and parsing it to get the configuration.

The person explaining this to me saw my horrified face, and said with the perfect Hide The Pain Harold smile: "a series of individually completely rational and reasonable decisions led to this." and I have been thinking a lot about it since.

stewartJul 22, 2025
Who made Envoy Proxy and how do I find them and hurt them
stewartJul 4, 2025

Today in #depthsofwikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc

Spelling of disc - Wikipedia

Show threadstewartMay 20, 2025
choice quote 2/2, ~39:27
> and like, sure, this has always been a thing - SEO has always been a thing, companies want to make money, obviously always been a thing - but the thing that is new here, the thing that makes me frustrated, is that these are deceptive - this is deception. They're using an AI, to create what looks like a blog post written by a human and yet, it's not, and so it's just - it's just a bunch of lies. I don't like it, when people lie - I think that's a shitty thing to do!
Show threadstewartMay 20, 2025
Choice quote 1/2, ~53:17:
> what I find especially egregious is that in AI models, [one of] the core metrics of what makes a good AI is how well it impersonates us - how well did it fool you? That is a metric for how good an AI is
stewartMay 20, 2025
Finally got around to watching all of @acegikmo's recent video on Generative AI https://youtu.be/-opBifFfsMY. It puts a lot of what has irked me so much about the tech into words that I hadn't been able to quite fully form myself. Especially eye-opening to me was the view of this "AI" as being fundamentally deceptive, because its output is trained to seem like it was written by a person, and that many people posting AI slop are essentially just "lying" by putting up content that appears human-written
Generative AI is a Parasitic Cancer

YouTube
stewartMar 27, 2025
DilDog đź……Mar 25, 2025
stewartMar 20, 2025

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/discord-heightens-ad-focus-by-introducing-video-ads-to-mobile-apps-in-june/

> “Expanding our advertising platform to mobile is an obvious, natural evolution in our strategy," Peter Sellis, Discord’s product SVP, said in a statement accompanying today’s announcement. "Our mission is to create the most authentic, player-centric advertising platform in the galaxy."

wow, “authentic player-centric advertising” was just the feature my paid chat app was missing! // haha enshittification go brrrr

Discord heightens ad focus by introducing video ads to mobile apps in June

Discord looks for more ways to make money ahead of expected IPO.

Ars Technica