@judell@social.coop avatar

judell

@judell@social.coop

Patron saint of trailing-edge technologies, grateful resident of the nation-state of California.

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J12t, to random
@J12t@social.coop avatar

New_ Public is starting a project on hyperlocal online communities -- neighborhoods, towns, that kind
of thing.

I'd be in, if something like this existed in my neighborhood, and is better than Nextdoor!

/cc @wearenew_public

judell,
@judell@social.coop avatar

@J12t @wearenew_public Given that we're in a world where FB and NextDoor and other things exist, it's hard for me to imagine a new thing displacing them, no matter how good the software and the culture it embodies.

But maybe it could wrap them, and thus provide something better - for those who want it right away - while offering a smooth upgrade path for people in the legacy services?

judell, to community
@judell@social.coop avatar

This column was both painful and exhilarating to write. Painful because it forced me to reconsider long-standing assumptions. And exhilarating for the same reason!

https://thenewstack.io/how-llms-can-unite-analog-event-promotion-and-digital-calendars/

datasette-extract reading an event poster

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

An increasingly familiar discussion about link rot, this one initiated by Rafe Needleman on LinkedIn (hat-tip @pluralistic and @judell). https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rafeneedleman_pluralistic-linkrot-21-may-2024-activity-7199527942530490368-qRc-?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

judell,
@judell@social.coop avatar

@ricmac @pluralistic I used to give my dad grief for printing out my BYTE articles and saving them in a binder.

Should've saved that binder!

judell,
@judell@social.coop avatar

@ricmac @pluralistic When CMP bought and killed BYTE, btw, I begged them to rehost the magazine's final 8 years which I had lovingly published to the web.

The assholes refused, and instead scraped byte.com to create the wonky web version that now only exists in Wayback.

Fortunately there is now also a PDF archive of the whole 1975-1999 collection.

Like my dad's binder, I used to mock PDFs. Live and learn.

judell, to random
@judell@social.coop avatar

My dad flew WW2 naval aircraft and never lost his sense of wonder that planes could fly at all.

His reaction to a new (to me) feature - pins labeling landmarks on the moving flight map, with popup Wikipedia entries explaining them - would have been tears of joy.

judell, to random
@judell@social.coop avatar

"orcas have been observed developing “cultural ‘fads,’” including carrying dead fish on their heads, and the incidents with the boats may be nothing more than a “fashion trend.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/05/14/orcas-yacht-ambush-gibraltar/

judell, to random
@judell@social.coop avatar

"...the emerging field of searchable encryption. It allows you to search encrypted data without decrypting the entire database."

What Pater Wayner's seminal Translucent Databases foresaw is becoming real? Excellent!

https://thenewstack.io/a-postgres-proxy-for-searchable-encryption-for-data-in-use/

judell, to random
@judell@social.coop avatar

Here's one for the @b0rk compendium of git oddities.

Today I learned there is a difference between a lightweight tag:

$ git tag v0.20
$ git cat-file -t v0.20
commit

and an annotated tag:

$ git tag -a v0.21 -m "this is an annotated tag"
$ git cat-file -t v0.21
tag

I have only ever used the former, but it's possible for software to care about the difference between the former (the type of the object is commit) and the latter (the type is tag).

What a tangled web we weave.

judell, to random
@judell@social.coop avatar

I was the perfect reader for this chapter. Without realizing it, I had always needed an explanation that I could wrap my head around and (not that I have done, but could!) reproduce. https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/112337153507129104

judell, to Ergonomics
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I've long thought I probably should stand vs sit in front of the computer, but never made it happen. Now it looks like a sore tailbone will force me to, at least for a while. I have so many questions, and will appreciate any thoughts and advice.

Ideally I'll find a way to keep using my beloved Captain Kirk Chair which is ergonomic for my hands and wrists if not my butt, but maybe I'll need to mount the keyboard on a standing desk.

https://blog.jonudell.net/2014/10/17/voyage-of-the-captain-kirk-floating-arms-keyboard-chair/

gvwilson, to random
@gvwilson@mastodon.social avatar

sigh cron alternatives with more readable config syntax? please?

judell,
@judell@social.coop avatar

@gvwilson We refer people to https://crontab.guru/

judell,
@judell@social.coop avatar

@gvwilson better to wrap than replace eh?

judell, to random
@judell@social.coop avatar

There's much talk of AI-driven unemployment, not so much about AI-powered employment. Reflecting on a week in which I accomplished a lot more than I could have two years ago, I'm feeling conflicted. It's exhilarating to be empowered by tools that make me a more effective thinker and doer. It's also starting to feel exhausting. As with all forms of augmentation, we need to find balance. Just because we can exercise these new superpowers doesn't mean we always should.

judell,
@judell@social.coop avatar

@dckc @sandro To counteract the hype I've been chronicling my practical day-to-day uses in a series that started on my blog and moved to The New Stack. I keep track of installments on my blog: https://blog.jonudell.net/2024/04/09/code-in-context-how-ai-can-help-improve-our-documentation/

I think a lot of folks are having these kinds of experiences but, for various reasons, aren't talking about them much.

judell,
@judell@social.coop avatar

@dckc @sandro We're in another mainframe era. I'm looking forward to the PC era that will inevitably follow.

gvwilson, (edited ) to random
@gvwilson@mastodon.social avatar

Starting to wonder if AI is like spreadsheets: for every programmer pointing out flaws and deficiencies, a double dozen people are using 'em to do something they find useful. 1/4

Added: please see https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/112265751571981599 for clarification.

judell,
@judell@social.coop avatar

@gvwilson As an educator, what do you think learners need to know, and how would you envision teaching them?

judell,
@judell@social.coop avatar

@gvwilson @jenniferplusplus I think the ebike analogy is particularly apt. You still pedal and steer, but can go farther and/or faster.

I like to ask people about their experience with LLMs. Our finance guy told me they enable him to do some things that would otherwise be beyond his reach, or would be within his reach but unjustifiably time consuming. Case in point was a Python script that he'd never have pulled off on its own. It didn't solve our problem, but enabled me to take the next step.

judell, to random
@judell@social.coop avatar

"Processing unstructured data is one of the most directly useful applications of Large Language Models."

I worked hard to syndicate event data from iCalendar feeds, but they were and still are scarce. Much real-world data lives inaccessibly in event posters; that's always felt wrong.

It also feels wrong (to techies) to make feeds from pictures of posters.

"That isn't data!"

But for normies it makes total sense.

"Of course it's data, I can see it plainly!" https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/112243754613807997

judell, to random
@judell@social.coop avatar

These two items were adjacent in my feed.

https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/112237545994624170

https://octodon.social/@jalefkowit/112238324590392720

I hugely respect both @simon and @baldur. How to square their opposing views? Two things can be true. Some who use LLMs are experiencing a massive boost. Others are fooling themselves about AGI.

judell, to random
@judell@social.coop avatar

"What's happening at the data level that allows these very different complex systems with billions of moving parts to exhibit similar behavior? Theres's some sort of generality, but not generality of intelligence, I think it's generality somewhere deep inside the training data that's going into both human brains starting at birth and into large models as they're being trained."

One of many provocative insights in a long but rewarding podcast.

https://thegradientpub.substack.com/p/venkatesh-rao-protocols-intelligence-scaling

gvwilson, to random
@gvwilson@mastodon.social avatar

In Search of Balls and Sticks: https://third-bit.com/2024/04/07/in-search-of-balls-and-sticks/

judell,
@judell@social.coop avatar

@gvwilson “merely useful” 🤣

mhoye, to random
@mhoye@mastodon.social avatar

I strongly suspect that in the long run we're going to discover that the rush to write documentation with AI, rather than code, is where these tools are going to cause the most damage.

judell,
@judell@social.coop avatar

@mhoye It's going pretty well for me so far, using the tools as assistants that help me research our code, gather examples, etc. I'm not relying on ChatGPT-style world knowledge, though, but instead Unblocked-style local knowledge gleaned from repos and existing docs it has indexed.

judell, to LLMs
@judell@social.coop avatar

I've been thinking for a long time about tools to help people learn to be better writers. The latest experiment wasn't a resounding success, nor did I really expect that. But it feels promising, and I'm interest to compare notes with fellow travelers. I know wattenberger@bird.makeup is one, who else?

#llms #writing #education

https://thenewstack.io/using-ai-to-improve-bad-business-writing/

judell, to random
@judell@social.coop avatar

Although we are on opposite sides of the LLM conversation, I agree with all of what @baldur says here. Grim news, powerfully delivered, at a moment when many are wondering: "What should I do?"

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-one-about-the-web-developer-job-market/

judell, to random
@judell@social.coop avatar

If you've never tried a Khan course, or anyway not recently, now's a good time to dive in and see what you think.

Imperfect? Of course. Useful? I think so, and I agree with this assessment.

"Khanmigo is the best model we have for how to develop and implement AI for the public good."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/22/artificial-intelligence-sal-khan/

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