31 Followers
123 Following
36 Posts
Software developer from Germany.
Currently at brainbot.com / shutter.network
Githubhttps://github.com/ulope/
Twitterhttps://twitter.com/ulope

Hiring a software engineer in their late 40s:

Pros:
* Understands your stack better than you do after glancing through the repo for five minutes.
* Will rewrite said stack 2x as fast, and half as buggy if you let them.

Cons:
* Gives zero fucks.
* Knows we're not *really* like family here.
* No, seriously, absolutely zero fucks given.

Do not cite the deep magic to me, product manager, I was there when it was written.

In one day - one day! - of going open source, the Typst typesetting system passed 5,000 stars on Github.

If you ever needed evidence that there is a real hunger for a TeX replacement, this is it.

https://github.com/typst/typst

GitHub - typst/typst: A markup-based typesetting system that is powerful and easy to learn.

A markup-based typesetting system that is powerful and easy to learn. - typst/typst

GitHub
A thing about Mastodon that I didn't realize I'd missed from pre-algorithm Twitter is the sheer randomness of the content. No longer honed to be hyper-engaging (usually by being scary or enraging) I now see weird experiments, fun scientific papers, random shitposts. Of course it's not all exactly in my wheelhouse, but that makes it simultaneously more *interesting* while being less *addictive*. The whole experience feels a lot healthier for my brain.

All those t.co links are going to be a goldmine for sketchy redirects.

And then a complete shit show when brands realize their product links are ending up at some weird bukkake site.

Turns out the existence of an "alpha" wolf is a myth.

It was based on old/bad experiments, conducted when unrelated wolves were thrown together in captivity.

In actual wild wolves, packs are just families. There's no dominant alpha battling for the top spot -- and in the rare cases there is, it's an alpha *female* wolf.

Insert obvious implications for the use of this term in human societies.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-alpha-wolf-idea-a-myth/

Is the Alpha Wolf Idea a Myth?

The idea that wolf packs are led by a merciless dictator, or alpha wolf, comes from old studies of captive wolves. In the wild, wolf packs are simply families

Scientific American
Well shit…
After reading @simonw's blog post about Bing's AI and the New York Times article, I'm quite confident that AI would kill my wife. I wrote about a bit about the why. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2023/2/17/the-killing-ai/
I Think AI Would Kill my Wife

Why I'm a worried, but not too worried about AIs.

The stages of playing with GPT-3:

- OMG this can do anything
- There goes my job
- I should start a business around this
- Some of the responses aren’t too good
- Actually, some of these responses are just awful
- This isn’t really intelligence
- This is just spicy autocomplete

(as was forwarded to me w/no attribution)

I'm having such a hard time picking the best paragraph from this article.
https://www.platformer.news/p/yes-elon-musk-created-a-special-system
Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first

After his Super Bowl tweet did worse numbers than President Biden’s, Twitter’s CEO ordered major changes to the algorithm

Platformer

Have you noticed that "GPT" is starting to become a synonym for "confidently incorrect"?

I referred to a guy I know the other day as "GPT in real life" and I just saw a reddit thread that referred to someone humorously answering programming questions incorrectly as "ChadGPT"