@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

isaaclyman

@isaaclyman@toot.cafe

Senior .NET / JS developer, writer, blogger. Be nice or I’ll write my congressperson about you.

Viewpoints expressed are my own and do not represent the views of my employer or anyone affiliated with them.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Not going to link to the actual review because I don’t care and will not care about the movie in question, but I find it interesting how quickly and thoroughly the meaning of “AI” in the public vocabulary as shifted from “futuristic automated intelligence” to “bad and lazily made”

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@baldur It also, interestingly, sets “AI” as the level of quality where no interest or attention is merited. It’s a 0 out of 10, even when it exists and is somewhat coherent and genre aware. It seems like AI has actually raised that bar - it’s successfully devalued mediocrity.

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

If you got upset at me for pointing out that more people died of Covid under Biden than Trump, in large part because Biden rolled back common sense restrictions that were in place under Trump...

Then you'll hate me pointing out that Trump introduced a 25% tariff on Chinese EVs, and Biden is upping that to 100% tariff.

https://insideevs.com/news/719283/chinese-ev-tariffs-biden-quadruple/

We can't allow the US to get off of fossil fuels... unless US billionaires win! 🤡

Fear the BYD Dolphin! (an EV car for $12K)
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/T3nfyO_UHjk

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@KevinMarks @mekkaokereke The sudden popularity of cargo e-bikes in my neighborhood (lots of families with young kids) has been surprising. We got one for fun and exercise, but now we can hardly convince the kids to get in the car for anything. They want to ride on back of the e-bike.

That’s okay though. I did the math. Mile for mile, e-bike is cheaper by far.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“More layoffs for the flutter team 😬 : FlutterDev”

This thread on reddit on Google sacking a part of the Flutter team does a good job of highlighting the anxiety and chaos being caused by the now regular mass layoffs https://old.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1cduhra/more_layoffs_for_the_flutter_team/

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@baldur Flutter is one of the most genuinely useful tools of the last 10 years. I’ve published three apps with it. Losing it, even in a community-takeover situation, would be a big blow.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“What Elon Musk’s favorite game tells us about him”

I like Polytopia. It’s the sort of game you play if you want to be bored without feeling bored. That Elon think’s it’s the greatest game ever invented is… well, Dave Karpf explains it better than I could https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/what-elon-musks-favorite-game-tells

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@baldur Agreed on Polytopia. I played it pretty hard for about a week. It’s fun enough.

There isn’t a better chess, but if there were, it would be Into The Breach. Polytopia isn’t even trying to be that

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

That feeling when you do a customer survey for a SaaS investigating generative model features and nowhere in the survey does “I don’t want or need AI features” appear even once

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@baldur I had an interview recently with a software CEO who said “we didn’t build crypto features two years ago. We look smart now, even if we didn’t then. And we’re not building AI features now.” I’ve never been so impressed by what someone isn’t doing

dawngreeter, to random

So, uh... Am I using Mastodon wrong? Are favorites not supposed to be used as likes? Have I been rude for favoriting instead of boosting other people's toots?

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@zozo @dawngreeter Same conversation is perennial on Tumblr. Likes/favs don’t affect the algorithm, because there is no algorithm, so they’re not financially meaningful to indie artists and so forth. But that doesn’t mean they’re useless. Their purpose is to say “hey OP, I like this and I want you to know I like it.” Which is nice.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“Joe Russo: Artificial Intelligence Will Create Movies in Two Years”

"AI will be able to “actually create” a movie, Russo predicted: “Two years.”"

This was published a year ago. https://variety.com/2023/film/news/joe-russo-artificial-intelligence-create-movies-two-years-1235593319/

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

There’s something so droll about CEOs, filmmakers, studio executives etc. admitting (by way of AI discourse) that, as far as they can tell, all it takes to make their product is putting a bunch of things in some kind of order.

But the Russos? Come on. They of all people should know substance is more important than form. Do they think people walked out of Endgame and said “wow, that was a lot like a movie if you squinted a bit”?

bkardell, to random
@bkardell@toot.cafe avatar

Name a famous person that you think has "aged well"?

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@bkardell Lenny Kravitz may have actually gotten younger over the last two decades. Still waiting for lab results

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“Doing their hype for them • Buttondown”

"The central claim of the tech companies selling LLMs is that any work that people do that results in text artifacts is just “text in-text out” and can therefore be replaced by their synthetic text-extruding machines."

And all too many people I know buy this line from them https://buttondown.email/maiht3k/archive/doing-their-hype-for-them/

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@baldur If #GenAI has a place in education at all, it’s to teach us some things we already should have known:

  • That text has no inherent value or meaning
  • That making a text longer (or shorter) has no inherent impact on its value
  • That vocabulary and grammatical correctness are tangential to value

Which means that in approximately all situations where an #LLM is used, the prompt is more valuable than the output. Once we recalibrate culturally, LLMs will be seen as worse than useless.

isaaclyman, to RPG
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

I've been putting together a little directory of tabletop RPGs with some not-always-apparent details like crunch, genre, spinoff franchises, popularity, and licensing.

https://rpg.freakinheck.party/

I'd love to see a PR if your favorite RPG is missing.

#rpg #tabletop #ttrpg

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Clearly, I’m taking Linkedin by storm. The Linkedin king. That’s me.

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@baldur on my way to boost that number by 12.5%. To the moon 🚀

isaaclyman, to random
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

There need to be portability laws for email addresses. You know how cell phone companies are legally required to transfer your phone number if you ask? That, but for email. I'd have a much worse time losing my email address than my phone number.

b0rk, (edited ) to random
@b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

people have been asking for this one a lot, so: what are your favourite git aliases to set?

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@b0rk I wouldn’t say these are useful, necessarily, but they do spark joy

isaaclyman, to random
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

I never sign up for competitions because I hate being timed. I like to go slow. There should be a category of competition where they hook electrodes up to your head and whoever enjoys themself the most wins.

isaaclyman, to tech
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

When (as a kid) I first read the fable of the goose that laid golden eggs, it seemed completely unrealistic. Even in fiction, I thought there was no way anyone was dumb enough to kill that goose.

Watching every big tech company go out of their way to do exactly that over the last decade has been...disheartening.

#tech #capitalism

isaaclyman, to random
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@baldur I just finished Loose Coupling from Yellow. I didn't understand what "late binding" meant or how to tell if a language has it, have you written more about that somewhere?

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@baldur Thanks! That clears things up.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Keep your browser fresh for dev, last day of the bundle offer, and links: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/keep-your-browser-fresh/

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@baldur Went through for me!

Teri_Kanefield, to random

Deep thought for the day: Why do they call the little candy bars "fun size."

Isn't it more fun to get a big candy bar?

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@Teri_Kanefield They must’ve decided Fun is the opposite of King. Honestly so patriotic of them

kepano, to random
@kepano@mastodon.social avatar

A math teacher at Grand Valley State University used #Obsidian to create a course textbook with exhaustive linking:

https://publish.obsidian.md/mth225

I like this structure because you can easily dig deeper on any concept you don't understand. Very well done!

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@kepano My first thought is “this is what Web 1.0 was, or wanted to be”—heavily hyperlinked, self-contained websites written by anyone who can use a keyboard. Making the process accessible to people who weren’t tech savvy was a big sticking point, though. We really only figured out how to get blogs and social media accounts into the hands of the people.

This is something else, and hopefully it catches on.

baldur, (edited ) to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

In yet another instance of "naming things is super hard", while I'm working on the course I keep changing my mind about what to call it

Currently: "Uncluttered Test-Driven Web Dev". Nice sounding. Ultimately means nothing.

"Test-Driven Web Dev Without Node". Does what it says on the tin.

"Without node: A guide to test-driven web development using mocha and the browser". Would imply further entries in a "without node" series

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/courses/uncluttered-test-driven-web-dev/

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@baldur From a random bystander perspective, "without node" is a point of interest that doesn't stand out to me otherwise. I don't know if I've ever run JS unit tests without Node being involved.

Karma tests, for example, run in the browser but Node is a hard requirement.

cliffwade, (edited ) to fediverse
@cliffwade@allthingstech.social avatar

Were you an active user of Google+(Google Plus)?

Please BOOST for maximum exposure to the

Comment below with how you used it the most and if you miss it or not!

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@cliffwade I posted links to all my blog posts, open source projects, etc. Pretty much just programming stuff. There were a couple people I know who never used any social media except G+, so that was the only place I interacted with them regularly. I don’t really miss it though, it wasn’t a very lively place. The shutdown was inevitable given how hard they were struggling to capture any kind of network effect.

malwaretech, to random

Aight, I wasn't going to post the extra-spicy hot wings take. But, fuck it.

Reply-guy climate activists are the most annoying out of touch people on the planet. They'll literally show up in my mentions with shit like "why don't you bicycle down the freeway to the grocery store. You can just clench your re-usable grocery bags between your ass cheeks".
"Need to go to NYC for an important meeting? Take the train....oh, the US doesn't have trains? Why don't you just build you own."

How someone can witness the entire covid pandemic and not only be like "yes, personal responsibility will for sure solve humanity's problems" but also propose nothing but the most braindead solutions imaginable is literally beyond me.

I get the frustration with the currency system, but annoying the shit out of random Mastodon users with the most garbage advice you can muster is just not it. Some of us are actually trying to make real systemic change.

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@malwaretech “Human nature is predictable and isn’t gonna change overnight” is a take a lot of people need to hear re: climate change, animal welfare, wealth disparity, vaccination, etc. If we have to rely on everybody going out of their way to do the right thing in unison, that’s game over.

Most people will go vegan when it’s convenient and cheap. Most people will drive electric when it’s convenient and cheap.

The only shortcut is to replace “convenient and cheap” with “required by law.”

isaaclyman, to rust
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

I think #Rust has done a lot of damage to the old “it doesn’t matter what programming language you use” line.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/qsharp/introducing-the-azure-quantum-development-kit-preview/

Sure, it still isn’t the most important or impactful choice a software team has to make. But it does matter. People can tell when something is 100x faster and doesn’t crash all the time.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“Why I chose Codepen PRO over Copilot - CodePen Blog” https://blog.codepen.io/2023/09/20/why-i-chose-codepen-pro-over-copilot/

isaaclyman,
@isaaclyman@toot.cafe avatar

@baldur "Why I chose to get better at my job instead of actively avoiding getting better at my job," tbh

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