dev

If Cloudflare really is "verifying" that I'm human with its obnoxious widget, why does it do this for multiple web sites and over and over again for a given web site? Shouldn't it be able to verify I'm human once and for all? What exactly are they doing with their sprawling control of all these web sites if not adding value through economy of scale?

#Cloudflare #SecurityTheater #surveillance #web #tech #dev #DarkPattern

Nowadays programming in a programming language I don't use daily seems to always require an upgrade cascade of editors, tools, plugins, dependencies, libraries, my DNA, ??? I put some effort into keeping my environment static but all it takes is one autoupgrading thing I missed to kick off one of these cascades, and it feels like whack-a-mole trying to find and lock down every possible cause. This time it looks like a newer version of scala metals might have stopped supporting Java 11 and somehow got updated without my knowledge (maybe? I'm guessing).

P.S. This is not an invitation to post critiques about any of these technologies or recommendations about what I should be doing instead.

#scala #dev #tech #SoftwareDevelopment #coding #programming

I just had to "prove" I am human to view a shop listing for a refrigerator.

#captcha #bot #human #CloudFlare #web #tech #dev

Just performed a technical interview and during one of the discussions the candidate end up with the following code in codepad: struct S { int x = x; };

A bit to my surprise it compiled successfully with the codepad built-in GCC 12.

Then I was wondering what does that even mean.

It turns out that in C++20 this is a syntactically correct designated initializer for a non-union aggregate. And no one explicitly forbids it from being self-referential!
So basically that's attempt to assign the x value to the same x. Before it was initialized. And yes, that's possible, and yes, that's UB.

The more I see C++ code the more I grow an opinion "You can type any random string into modern C++ compiler and it would compile successfully. And it will contain at least one UB."

#dev #cpp

It suddenly struck me the other day that generative AI used in government and media has a very Memoirs Found in a Bathtub quality about it. One of the premises of Lem's (amazing) novel is that paper disintegrates for unknown reasons, leaving very few hard records of anything. The book is a mock diary of a person who lived through the disorienting chaos that ensued.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #tech #dev #StanislawLem #fiction #SciFi #ScienceFiction #cybernetics

Nothing is more valuable than a clear-headed understanding of which particular lies are most likely to succeed in the present environment, and which are just evanescent byproducts of the generally mendacious atmosphere. Dodge the decoys, save the right kind of energy to counter the real blows. Turning up the heat in lamenting the current crisis risks mistaking a mere mirage for a more substantial threat.

From “LYING IN POLITICS”: HANNAH ARENDT’S ANTIDOTE TO ANTICIPATORY DESPAIR https://www.publicbooks.org/lying-in-politics-hannah-arendts-antidote-to-anticipatory-despair/

I found this to be an excellent and orienting read for anyone concerned about the US right now.

While folks are understandably worried about this administration, which has already inflicted significant harms, it's important to stay level headed and aligned with the actual facts and truths. That's our primary defense against what's happening which, as Arendt argued in the 1970s, hinges on a process of defactualization. Shouting "fascism!" and drawing analogies with the Nazis, as this essay argues, is going too far, turning up the heat about a mirage. Much as we wish they'd do better--and they could do better--in point of fact we do still have a functioning judicial system and media ecosystem, and there are significant numbers of people, including politicians and judges, fully willing to challenge every lie the administration emits. As dangerous as these times are we are nowhere near as far along the authoritarian trajectory as shouting "fascism!" makes it sound, and we should really stop doing that. Doing so grants bluffs and bluster more power than it actually has, which is ultimately a form of surrender. We should recognize our own strength and save it for real threats.

This is one of many reasons why I relentlessly call BS on generative AI and the claims about it coming out of the technology sector. There is a defactualization process at work there that plays into the broader political one; some of the individuals enacting this defactualization in tech are personally involved in doing the same in the federal government. If you've been watching you probably know some of their names and the companies they came from. Generative AI is itself a defactualization machine; that's one of its primary appeals to this crew.

Dodge the decoys and save your energy for the real blows.

#USPol #HannahArendt #authoritarianism #despair #tech #dev #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM

It seems to me that the ability to read source code will become more and more important over time. This skill is rarely taught, as far as I can tell. The learning situation resembles that for natural language: knowing how to produce/generate text does not immediately translate into the ability to read it, let alone read it well.

#tech #dev #code #CodeLiteracy

It's odd to me that people talk about data centers in terms of megawatts, a measure of electric power. For one example among many, a Bloomberg article from March about Microsoft cancelling data center plans began:

Microsoft Corp. has walked away from new data center projects in the US and Europe that would have amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity, according to TD Cowen analysts, who attributed the pullback to an oversupply of the clusters of computers that power artificial intelligence.

"Data center projects that...amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity" is a nonsensical statement. The (technical) capacities of a data center have to do with storage, compute, transmission, and latency. I understand there's probably some Fermi calculation along the lines of converting electric power to compute capacity using the TDP of NVIDIA's latest GPUs or something like that. Nevertheless, it's misleading to speak this way, not to mention lazy. It is oversimplifying in a bad way, treating data centers as utilities that supply a commodity when that is just not the case (at least not with AI, where prices for services still fluctuate fairly wildly).

#dev #tech #AI #energy #power #DataCenters

Once again a fully automated, non-human system is denying me access to a resource on the internet because it has determined I am not human enough.

#2025 #dystopia #Cloudflare #AI #human #web #tech #dev

At some point Google Drive started preventing the context menu from appearing when you right-click something. I installed a browser extension that re-enabled this function. The modern web is quite tiresome.

#tech #dev #web #DarkPatterns #GoogleDrive

Oh, your service logged me out for my security? Great, I'll just open up the vault that contains my private keys so that I can open up the password manager with the master password of my other vault, which has the credentials I'll use to log back into my account. And then to finish the login process you'll send me a one-time password in clear text through SMS or email because those are the only options you offer for a "second factor". I feel much more secure now thank you.

(For clarity this is a sardonic post).

#InfoSec #cybersecurity #security #web #dev #tech

Feel like I really not updating a lot of my old project but today is the day I do!

finally updated my fork of imgs (A simple image sharing platform) imgp to support account, image management and API creation besides the original S3 storage modification

https://code.wedotstud.io/forks/imgp

#foss #cloud #sharing #dev #s3 #imagesharing #showfediverse

Software "agents" were a hype-y topic when I was a graduate student 25 years ago. I wrote one for a class. I feel like what's being called "agents" or "AI agents" these days are even less capable than what seemed possible a quarter of a century (1) ago when I was in school.

What I thought then is still true today: to make something like a software agent legitimately useful for a lot of people would require a large amount of low-level grunt work and non-technical work (2) of the sort that the typical Silicon Valley company is unwilling to do. (3) The technology is the absolute easiest part of this task. Throwing a Bigger Computer at the problem leaves all those other pieces of work undone. It's like putting a bigger engine in a car with no wheels, hoping that'll make the car go.

By the way #AI companies and VCs, I'm available for contract work and have done due diligence research before if you ever want to stop wasting everyone's time and money!

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #agents #hype #SiliconValley #VentureCapital #dev #tech

(1) Which we've been told repeatedly is essentially infinite time in the tech world.
(2) Establishing semantic data standards and convincing a large enough number of people to implement them being an important component. LLMs do not magically develop protocols and solve all the ETL-style problems of translating among different ones. The Semantic Web didn't really stick for a lot of reasons, but one reason is that it's hard!
(3) Back when I was still in the startup world I was asked several times by VCs to tell them what I thought about some new startup that claimed to be able to magically clean and fuse data. I think they're still very keen on investing in this style of magic, because it requires an intense amount of human labor, but I think where companies landed was invisibilizing low-paid workers in other countries and pretending a computer did the work they did. Which has also been happening for well over a quarter of a century.

For anyone tracking what's going on with generative AI appearing in the eBook software calibre, the calibre developer seems to be asking us to avoid his software:

In a GitHub issue about adding LLM features:

I definitely think allowing the user to continue the conversation is useful. In my own use of LLMs I tend to often ask followup questions, being able to do so in the same window will be useful.

In other words he likes LLMs and uses them himself; he's probably not adding these features under pressure from users. I can't help but wonder whether there's vibe code in there.


In the bug report:

Wow, really! What is it with you people that think you can dictate what I choose to do with my time and my software? You find AI offensive, dont use it, or even better, dont use calibre, I can certainly do without users like you. Do NOT try to dictate to other people what they can or cannot do.

"You people", also known as paying users. He's dismissive of people's concerns about generative AI, and claims ownership of the software ("my software"). He tells people with concerns to get lost, setting up an antagonistic, us-versus-them scenario. We even get scream caps!

Personally, besides the fact that I have a zero tolerance policy about generative AI, I've had enough of arrogant software developers. Read the room.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #calibre #eBooks #eBookManagers #AISlop #AIPoisoning #InformationOilSpill #dev #tech #FOSS #SoftwareDevelopment

🎵 ✨ Beautifully minimal, delightfully intuitive.
The folks at Open Planet Software entrusted us with Sessions’ UI design. For musicians who need all their virtual instruments at their fingertips, this carefully crafted user experience keeps the focus on what matters: the freedom to explore, create, play, and perform. Need UX help? Get in touch. https://iconfactory.com #Ux #UIDesign #IconDesign #macOS #dev

The other day I had the intrusive thought

AI is intellectual Viagra

and it hasn't left me so I am exorcising it here. I'm sorry in advance for any pain this might cause.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #DiffusionModels #tech #dev #coding #software #SoftwareDevelopment #writing #art #VisualArt

Edit: Thanks to @GeopJr for pointing this out: this AI assistant is a third-party project and not directly affiliated with the GNOME desktop. I was tripped up by the wording of the Phoronix post I shared, which could have made this point clearer. I'll leave the original post below for the sake of transparency and also in case it helps anyone else who was similarly confused.

I am very twitchy about what's happening with AI polluting every corner of Microsoft Windows and am worried the same will happen to at least some Linux distributions. I think the worry is warranted, but in this case I misfired--sorry about that.


I guess I won't be using GNOME ever again

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-AI-Assistant-1.0

#tech #dev #FOSS #OpenSource #linux #software #GNOME #NoAI #AI

Slack is giving me a very stern, very red warning that my web browser will not be supported after November.

#slack #DarkPatterns #tech #dev #web

If you take the stance that technical debt is code nobody understands, then current LLM-based code generators are technical debt generators until somebody reads and understands their output.

If you take the stance that writing is thinking--that writing is among other things a process by which we order our thoughts--then understanding code generator output will require substantial rewriting of the code by whomever is tasked with converting it from technical debt to technical asset.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #CodeAssistant #AgenticAI #tech #dev #coding #TechnicalDebt

Not a single mask in sight. Very disappointing to see this, especially as we're in a COVID uptick. The number of people in photo 1 who have their hands up is probably roughly equal to how many will leave this conference with COVID or some other respiratory illness.

https://fosstodon.org/users/scala_lang/statuses/115056704676502452

#dev #tech #coding #conference #scala #ScalaDays #CovidIsNotOver #CovidIsAirborne #LongCovid #MaskUp #accessibility

O Mastodon 4.5.3 foi lançado e com ele a primeira leva de traduções de que ativamente participei.

Neste começo, estou atuando principalmente na uniformização das traduções pt_BR para que os mesmos termos originais tenham as mesmas traduções em toda a interface e para corrigir erros óbvios, principalmente na troca de verbo <-> substantivo.

#mastodon #dev #fediadminbr

Is it just me, or has the number of captcha challenges significantly increased over the past few months? Nowadays I feel like I'm being hit with captchas all day every day, where before it was relatively rare. It is especially noticeable on sites I visit frequently, have accounts with, and presumably have cookies for.

#captcha #SecurityTheater #infosec #CyberSecurity #security #tech #dev #internet #web

A subtoot: corporations, and corporate(-like) behavior, are political. Anyone claiming that corporate-like work is apolitical--work that includes business-friendly software development whether it occurs within the walls of a corporate entity or not--is either naive or deliberately obfuscating reality.

"Politics" isn't only about institutions. It's about organizing large numbers of people to do something they wouldn't otherwise do. Corporations organize large numbers of people to do things they probably wouldn't do if they weren't paid and/or didn't need the money to live. 10,000 people wouldn't spontaneously get together and spend the best hours of their days for months building a commercial jet airliner if there weren't corporate structures in place and a society that keeps them close enough to deprivation that they will do this in exchange for money.

#FOSS #OSS #OpenSource #software #OpenSourceSoftware #tech #dev #SoftwareDevelopment #politics #economics #corporations

Fill in the blank without using a search engine to find the original source!

Like other addictive technologies, I have a love/hate relationship with ____________, and the more I despise it, the more I use it, and the more I use it, the more disgusted I am at how addicted I’ve gotten, and the more addicted I get, the more I wish it had never been invented.

#dev #tech

Regarding last boost: "Firefox For Web Developers" is out here urging me to stop using Firefox.

#Mozilla #Firefox #DarkPatterns#antifeatures #AISlop #NoAI #NoAIWebBrowsers #AICruft #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #tech #dev #web