Mark T. Tomczak

Career software engineer living something approximating the dream he had as a kid.

Public Key

npub1wgss3r73xkpwp3gz3lqq5ftnqwqav4u2p4lzp2670cut7gapf6yqhja0n5

NIP-05 Address

mark@mastodon-fixermark-com.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs8yggg3lgntqhqc5pglsq2y4es8qwk279q6l3q4d08uw9lyws5azqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsa6cydf

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub1wgss3r73xkpwp3gz3lqq5ftnqwqav4u2p4lzp2670cut7gapf6yqhja0n5

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Last Notes

2026-08-25 22:26:14 UTC

Hot damn #emacs .
Just when I think I've hit a roadblock and something is truly impossible, you hit me with "no really, I'm just a LISP engine someone implemented a text editor in."
unread-command-events is the nuclear option for forcing code to behave as if you literally invoked it from the keyboard. It pushes a key sequence into emacs's event handler as if the keys were literally typed.
I'm doing black magic with hydras and it's gross but it works. ;)

2026-08-24 16:46:45 UTC

Thinking about the era of technology where the easiest way to display images was to take all the air out of a tube and point a death ray at your face.
It's fine though. There was a thin screen between you and the death ray that caught all the death and turned it into pretty colors.

2026-08-08 00:28:20 UTC

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@nprofile…s8xx @nprofile…5q2f @nprofile…d8vz
The face on that is really good!

2026-07-14 15:56:42 UTC

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@nprofile…tq4u God, yes. If anything, AI is a bias machine. The whole point of a trained neural network is "respond strongly to some patterns and ignore others."
An unbiased network is useless, and we need to stop trying to claim otherwise. Best we can do is control for non-response to the things it should be unbiased for, and the algorithm itself doesn't generally do that directly.

2026-07-06 14:43:47 UTC

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@nprofile…s8xx Silly question / I don't read enough IETF docs: is it standard to not define the abbreviation in the title until section 11, and then only indirectly? I'd never get away with that in my office's design docs is why I ask.

2026-05-15 19:13:17 UTC

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@nprofile…75wv Yes, correct. Or, if I may... The metrics are off, in that they don't track what you may care about.
Posts that are least specific resonate with the most readers, and that'll boost your like and reshares (and of course, reshares influence reach, even on Mastodon). Reshares in particular are worth comment; because you can't scope a reshare (and that's been tried and found a bit too complicated; Google+ had "circles" and people generally find them hard to use and understand), people will tend to reshare more mass-appeal things.
But maybe even though we don't have an obvious metric for it, the real value of a system like this is "long tail" connections. It's not about stars; it's about getting signal to someone that wouldn't have otherwise and could really use, even if it's just one person.
I humbly submit the scoreboard doesn't matter because it's for a game you don't really want to win.

2026-04-28 15:46:58 UTC

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@nprofile…rtl5 Wait, is someone asking to outlaw Mastodon? What did I miss?

2026-04-07 19:19:45 UTC

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@nprofile…rtl5 Technology Connections video is what sold me and I'm kicking myself for not realizing it sooner.
The math is simple: a farmer in Iowa can make more money solar-panelling a field than growing corn in it. The only reason the corn might be more profitable is subsidy. And then, most of that corn will be turned, inefficiently, into ethanol for burning anyway, so the total power collected is higher if they just do the panel thing too!

2026-04-06 18:43:39 UTC

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@nprofile…36qa @nprofile…nmr0 I think this frames a lot of my understanding of my frustrations with anarchy.
... because where I grew up, the answer to that specific question is "They pulled guns and shot at each other for literal weeks across the cul-de-sac, over and over, grudge upon grudge upon grudge, until 90% of them were dead or had fled."

2026-04-01 17:26:17 UTC

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@nprofile…hzu2 Claiming that Anthropic doesn't have a copyright to the code because it's AI-generated and simply refusing the takedown request would be the baller move here. At the very least, it could push the whole story into a discovery that Anthropic doesn't want to participate in.

2026-03-19 17:51:16 UTC

One of the more interesting aspects of the Ukraine war was the revelation of how badly compromised Russia's defense assets were. It was, honestly, a little startling to the public to learn that the feared Former Soviet State still had size on its side, but not a modern military; their tech was either out-dated or had been pillaged by corruption so badly that it couldn't be deployed as intelligence analysts had assumed it could be.
It is extremely fair to argue that Russia's greatest state-defense asset was perception and that the war in Ukraine damaged that and, in so doing, materially threatened the country's safety---that if they had simply never started a war, everyone would still perceive them as unassailable and incredibly dangerous to engage in combat and nobody would even think to try stochastic attacks, asymmetric drone warfare, or any other modern tactics under the assumption that such a grand superpower had a solution for all of that.
In short, all they had to do to keep everyone's perception of their strength was literally not start a war to test it.
Just a thing I'm thinking of right now for some reason.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/18/politics/us-ford-carrier-fire-iran-war

2026-02-25 22:14:52 UTC

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@nprofile…s8xx "Security at the expense of usability comes at the expense of security" is brilliant.

2026-02-25 22:02:43 UTC

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@nprofile…s8xx I'm curious your thoughts on usability in the space. You've shared some of them, but I tripped over something this week and I thought you might be interested.
I tried adding scope to an API token I had Atlassian generate for me, and the scoped token wouldn't work. I bashed my head against the problem for awhile: peeled apart the library I was using to find the actual URLs it was hitting, confirmed the scopes I'd assigned should match that URL, confirmed an unscoped token worked... It finally turned out that the issue was if you're using a scoped token, you have to hit an entirely different hostname and top-level path in the URL; they have a slightly different API for the requests with scoped tokens.
At that point I gave up and used an unscoped one because nobody in IT was forcing me to use scoped, I just liked the idea that my token intended to read JIRA tickets couldn't also delete them, but I don't care enough to rewrite my API library.
How do we balance security and usability? Is there even a rule of thumb?
(Also, if you ever hear what the first twelve characters in an Atlassian API token mean, I'd love to find out. I had to generate five tokens while testing this problem, and they all started with the same twelve characters... My guess is it's a customer-identifier specific to my company, but I haven't had time to pin down a coworker long enough to have them generate a token to compare with).

2026-02-24 22:06:50 UTC

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@nprofile…rtl5 Yep, it's pretty solid. Unfortunately, it isn't trusted in my industry; we prefer languages that we had to buy specialized analysis tools to handle the ten thousand blades attached to the handle of the language because we'd rather use a language with checkers for those failures than a language where they're impossible in the first place. 😉

2026-02-24 21:12:01 UTC

Unpopular opinion: error output of compilers like gcc and javac are great to build tooling on top of.
That output is human-hostile and no human being should be required to read it without cybernetic assistance.
#java #cplusplus

2026-02-24 15:25:21 UTC

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@nprofile…tkx6 As a point of law, it is an interesting thing we are testing in this administration, the hypothesis that it can be illegal to be too incompetent.
"Interesting" in the "Boy I sure would like to read about this era in a history of American legal jurisprudence some 50 years hence" sense, not in the living-through-it sense.

2026-02-17 23:16:06 UTC

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@nprofile…nmr0 Deep wisdom.
That kind of ignorance is as much about them as it is about you. Sometimes a person isn't ready to see the truth yet. That's inconvenient. Sometimes even dangerous. But every person is a person and that's not really a transformation you can force on someone. It's gonna have to happen at their pace.

2026-02-11 16:03:01 UTC

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@nprofile…v2v2 I like this one specifically because the Cloudflare gate is there to address the problem of "Too many visitors."

2026-02-02 14:29:32 UTC

A lot of best practice and process in software engineering actually attacks the same goal, and it's a relatively straightforward goal: making it feasible for somebody who is responsible for the system to be responsible for it without reading every single line of source code that the system depends upon. And this is necessary because if you factor in the system as a whole, even excluding the parts that are described by hardware specification, that is millions upon millions of lines of code and many of them are secret.
This makes software engineering not just a technical problem of specifying a machine that is as efficient as it can be on the hardware it runs on, but a communication problem of writing for an audience you don't necessarily know and having the responsibility of writing something they can understand.
I find myself wondering if this overlaps with academia. When you write an academic paper, how much responsibility do you have for creating an artifact that is comprehensible to the reader? Do we basically solve the problem with citations? And if we do, does academia in fact therefore not solve the problem because truly understanding somebody's work would require you to be familiar with all cited documents, and the documents they cite, down and down the tree?

2026-01-21 16:18:31 UTC

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@nprofile…44dh I hate to be that guy, but... What did the editors think was going to happen?
There's a reason Google keeps the bad-ads detection algorithm secret.

2026-01-16 04:22:29 UTC

So I logged back into Facebook for awhile.
Ugh.
You know... I'm gonna just say it. And yes, this is me being snobbish and elitist right now. Feel like an asshole; might delete later.
Half the problem with Facebook is me. I can't see people only 2 degrees separate from me be that dumb and not say something. Against my better judgment and against benefit for social cohesion.
... and half the problem is them. You know what I like about Mastodon? It's a different kind of stupid, When yinz are being dumb, you're being earnestly dumb. Dumb but within the parameters of what you know and trying your best. Intellectually-curiously-dumb. Smart-dumb.
The dumb I see on Facebook is just dumb-dumb. Head-in-the-sand dumb. "My Fourth Amendment Rights aren't as important as enforcing immigration law" dumb.
I need to stop trying to bail the ocean and I need to remember that I left that site because I didn't want to feed Zucc's algorithm anymore and also sometimes I need a mental health break from the raw, visceral reminder that I share a democracy with that level of deeply uninspired civics-class dropout.
Feel like an asshole; might delete later.
#facebook

2025-12-15 16:43:07 UTC

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@nprofile…j0re
Isn't it OBVIOUS that these are bad things?
All but the last two, depending on the goals of the developer. It is a deeply-frustrating truism of human behavior that direct calls-to-action simply work. When you add them, subscription count goes up.
For more information on this... Like and subscribe, and hit that bell!

2025-12-05 18:57:56 UTC

In the Starfleet Technical Manual, there is a throwaway detail of the LCARS user interface that when it is upgraded, users can still utilize the previous several versions. This is because their work is mission-critical and it is unacceptable to compromise the mission by forcing unfamiliar changes; eventual retraining is part of their job, but the flexibility allows them to take the retraining at their own pace.
I think about this from time-to-time and how this is still a sci-fi idea that is seen all too rarely in how we do actual computer UIs.
#StarTrek #LCARS #UI

2025-11-22 05:16:07 UTC

Maybe the real problem is we never actually told anyone how to get to Sesame Street.

2025-11-17 03:12:33 UTC

TIL: matplotlib supports specifying colors using standard X11/CSS4 names, but also supports the names from the xkcd color survey if you prefix the string with "xkcd:".
(While looking this up, I also learned about the full-on xkcd mode, but different topic!)
#python #matplotlib

2025-11-13 21:33:15 UTC

Dear lazymastodon,
Any tips on editing C++ in emacs? I find myself burning a lot of time looking for implementations that could live in a .cpp file, a .h file, a .h.cc file, and so on. This language seems to delight in just tossing implementations wherever relative to other languages I use.
Is there a convenient tool stack to simplify navigating this space?
#cplusplus #emacs

2025-11-12 20:37:10 UTC

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@nprofile…59g0 Sorry, but... He came at you in This The Year Of Our Lord 2025, The Julian Month Of November over something you wrote in 2008?
Is he, like.... Bored?

2025-11-07 21:45:35 UTC

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@nprofile…rpwy As the seasons are changing, my alley is displaying size-of-my-head leaf fall, and the weird thing about it is I cannot tell which tree it's coming from. It's been very windy the past couple of days.
None of the ones I recognize on the street have leaves this big! So either these catch the wind real well or someone's playing an elaborate prank, and if it's the latter... I ain't even mad, frankly, I'm impressed!

2025-11-07 00:49:15 UTC

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@nprofile…mfuv I don't actually know why that makes a difference! What is the significance of the transaction in speeding up ingesting a database dump?

2025-11-04 17:00:42 UTC

... Also, if you're angry about the American two-party system, local elections are where you can get somebody from the third party.
The statistics of large numbers cause the American system to collapse into two parties at the national level. At the local level? These positions are being determined by five votes. Five.
You want to get a communist on the school board? If you're friendly with like eight neighbors you stand a good chance to do so.
#Pennsylvania #vote

2025-11-03 23:14:49 UTC

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@nprofile…mfuv I appreciate they found a way to work them into the videogame. At least (from what I can see) they don't crawl on you and start actively pulling components out like they can also do in the table top RPG.
(Speaking of: there's another mech combat tabletop, Lancer, that has the Caliban-class mech. Very much inspired by Elementals, with just a touch of Doom guy; its main distinguishing feature is that it bends the relative-size rules so that when it's hitting you, regardless of your mech's size, it hits like it's the largest class of mech. You're piloting a 100-foot-tall walking skyscraper? Skyscraper's got ankles; get shanked bro.)

2025-10-15 03:20:04 UTC

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@nprofile…mfuv I'm also wondering how drop proof it would be. Could go either way... The looser-coupled components could put weird stresses on things, but they could also carry a lot more kinetic energy away by just flying apart.

2025-10-02 20:55:43 UTC

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@nprofile…5jjk I sometimes wonder if one of the advantages of the Mastodon experiment is that the growth incentives are technological and loosely "vibes," not "We need N% YoY or our investors pull their money." I wonder what pressures BlueSky is feeling to keep users and be soft on bans because bans decrease the usercount.
... but mostly, I wonder if the larger issue is that there is one BlueSky and the entire model of "A single organization applying its TOS to every one of a billion users some semblance of "uniformly" is just flawed. Is it okay to trade-off the notion that there are entire "Nazi nodes" in the Fediverse finding each other (but cut off from the rest) for the fact that when Jesse Singal tries to make an account on my server, I can just tell him to fuck off?
I think yes, but I'm probably a little biased because, lemme tell ya, the power to actually ban Nazis is intoxicating. 😉
Anyway, I'm just ruminating on the notion that this entire exchange over on BSKY is moot in Mastodon because around here, we can easily ban the person who runs into the Waffle House claiming we must hate pancakes. We can ban them for being rude and not listening before speaking. We don't need a better reason; we don't have user counts to keep up.

2025-10-01 21:19:50 UTC

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@nprofile…6yg2 Who enforces the Hatch Act?

2025-06-16 16:59:07 UTC

General Fediverse question.
Sooner or later, the Fediverse will hit the point where somebody's individual node in their closet is the primary posting source for incredibly popular high bandwidth content, like a primary source news clip. As currently architected, the system will hug that data to death when individuals who do not have accounts on an equivalent fediverse server go requesting that content (and possibly also when 100 nodes of the given service go requesting the content).
Are there any projects to do content distribution networks or other multiplexed and more local caching for fediverse content? What would that even look like?
#fediverse

2025-06-11 22:40:37 UTC

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@nprofile…h6f2 I'd actually like to see that law. I think it might be the one about "Don't use the home addresses of jurors or cops in their line of duty to intimidate," but I'm not quite sure.
I'm not pro-doxxing, but it'd be news to me if they made it illegal for us ordinary plebes.

2025-06-11 18:52:40 UTC

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@nprofile…7mte They need to slow it down.
Otherwise it could subvert their monopolies before they tie up the technical and legal loose ends to bring their own AI generators tuned and trained on their fully-owned IP online.

2025-06-08 21:11:14 UTC

What's everyone's favorite mapping app on Android that uses OpenStreetMap as its data source?
I've been using MagicEarth but I'm getting impatient with how it seems to never sync edits from the OSM core dataset.
#osm #openstreetmap #android

2025-06-01 21:58:39 UTC

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@nprofile…frjf Good bot.

2025-06-01 20:34:38 UTC

Congratulations to the c-47s, the winning team for the Pittsburgh 48-hour film festival 2025.
https://youtu.be/ZhQZpt4fF_I?si=P_9KbneDWZUPhzbi
#pittsburgh #48Hour #Film

2025-05-21 16:45:41 UTC

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@nprofile…xr7v This has been a concern ever since Reader's Digest came along. I can't tell if the Internet is making it worse.

2025-05-16 17:30:24 UTC

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@nprofile…wjfe He's not going to stop. The man already demonstrated his ability to hallucinate an emergency in a complete vacuum of credible evidence after the 2020 election.
The Courts will not stop him from treating things as an emergency. Only Congress has the power to check his mania.

2025-05-14 21:33:30 UTC

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@nprofile…sw23 That very much sounds like a Peter Gabriel thing to do.
I am honored to have been born into an overlapping spacetime with him.

2025-05-14 17:02:48 UTC

"A good roadie knows his whole job is to make someone else look good, keep someone else safe, help someone else do what they were put here to do. A good roadie stays out of the spotlight. If he's doing his job right, you don't even know he's there. Once in a while he might step on stage just to fix a problem, to set something right. But then before you even realize he was there or what he did, he's gone."

2025-05-13 21:09:42 UTC

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@nprofile…sw23 I love "i, Robot." Great performances by Will Smith and Alan Tudyk (as well as the whole rest of the cast).
I also love Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" for completely separate reasons. In fact, the only irritation I have with the movie is the name-association when the stories are barely touching each other. If they had named the first one "Will Smith punches some robots for two hours" I would still have come watch it! Trust your audience Hollywood! 😉
(What makes the anthology brilliant is that Asimov plays the Three Laws completely straight, and then the drama, tension, and horror are in the consequences of those laws playing out to their conclusions. So many interpretations get that wrong. Not unlike Frankenstein interpretations where they make the story "Dr. Frankenstein created a miserable creature that is less than a human" when the true horror of Shelley's original work is "Frankenstein created something better than human and then failed to respect what he'd done." Modern Prometheus is horrifying not because he failed to bring fire, but because he brought fire, dropped it in a forest and walked away) 😉

2025-05-13 20:07:51 UTC

"We can't let LLMs take over programming; human creativity is vital to the enterprise."
My brothers and sisters in code, humans couldn't even decide to standardize on TitleCase, snake_case, kebab-case, camelCase, or SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE, or SCREAMING-KEBAB-CASE for identifiers, variables, and flags. I think we greatly over-estimate the benefits of humans in controlling computers.

2025-05-12 21:34:30 UTC

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@nprofile…gu7x @nprofile…teeu I've been at this for approximately 20 years outside of school, and I think I've forgotten how TLS works twice.
By and large, my experience with TLS is "It's that thing that breaks and I can't get to my website so I type in the Chrome override secret phrase from memory." 😉
(Credit to the WebXR protocol for forcing HTTPS on us at least. I don't know who decided that was important, but someone decided that as a standard, WebXR would not let anonymous men in the middle hijack the code feeding images directly into my eyeballs. Of course, the MITM can still just toss a forged cert vaguely in my direction and I will see the unsafe warning and then hit the "proceed anyway" button...).

2025-05-12 21:32:35 UTC

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@nprofile…yc9s "But Nowhere Girl," Pagliacci sobbed, "I live in society."

2025-04-24 20:29:24 UTC

We need to start "OPSEC is my passion" trending.
It has the exact same connotation as "Design is my passion."

2025-04-23 19:33:26 UTC

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@nprofile…4dwe Not-so-subtle accusation?! It'd be more subtle to commission a billboard off I-5 with a big picture of Donald Trump and a caption that reads "Just Says Things!"

2025-04-18 17:51:50 UTC

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@nprofile…skc4 Holy cats...
this is not Photoshopped?
Wow.

2025-04-12 20:24:21 UTC

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@nprofile…9z8h I don't relish the idea of a civil war with a centralized power that has a nuclear arsenal.

2025-04-12 04:34:02 UTC

I think I've given up on getting Mastodon running in Docker. Not really necessary since the non-Docker solution is well-supported (and I have dedicated hardware set up to run it), and ultimately, didn't solve my overall problem, which was that upgrading brings my Raspberry Pi to its knees when it goes to optimize the web bits.
#mastodon #mastoadmin

2025-04-11 21:25:16 UTC

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@nprofile…7cpy Apologies, I'm trying to wrap my head around this thought.
Is the issue "It doesn't matter how good the use case is, training it involved boiling a lake?" Or is the issue "You can't build one of these things at all without a core of stolen data?" Or is it "There are no good applications for this technology, regardless of how free and open it is?"

2025-04-07 18:25:58 UTC

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@nprofile…slxn Thank you for sharing your experience!
The legal entanglement sucks. :( That's exactly the kind of thing a lawyer would be great for, but (a) I'm sure you don't want to be trying to retain a lawyer on FOSS donations and (b) I'm not even sure what country the lawyer would need to be licensed to practice in!

2025-04-03 02:04:27 UTC

Well, I don't have a solution to the problem, but... buildsnap is known to just hang sometimes when run under the QEMU emulator (amd64 -> arm64). For reasons! Ill-defined reasons. 😛
Commenting that line out of the Dockerfile and seeing what the result is.
#mastodon #mastoadmin

2025-04-02 16:56:24 UTC

Receiving an email that notifies me I have reported a user on my own instance (of one person) is very "I want to speak to a manager" / "I am the manager" vibes.
#mastodon #mastoadmin

2025-04-01 15:17:20 UTC

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@nprofile…6m2n Now that you mention it, 90% of my initial how-to-use-a-command-line knowledge came from a crash course freshman year of undergrad. And it was a custom curriculum; we were taught man existed and how to access it but not really how to derive information from it (1) (and in fact, it was an honor code violation to access man during the written tests, which... Ugh, I do not miss that pedagogy).
(1) man is, to this day, my biggest bugbear because in terms of accessing it, it's the textbook example of "strings instead of things." You want to find out what the -c flag does? Either have the regex memorized to search for the flag in its whitespace isolation, or enjoy looking at every hyphenated-word-starting-with-c in the file, noob!

2025-03-31 22:09:52 UTC

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@nprofile…cl5w Absolutely. But if the question is " how human do they need to be before we stop calling them 'AI Slop," I would assert the issue is the slop, not the AI.
In context, that Miyazaki comment going around, for example, makes perfect sense. The thing he was being shown was the kind of early prototype stuff that as someone who's been in this space for a while, I look at and go " oh yeah, good job, I can see the improvements over the previous version that was even worse..." But to someone not in the self-learning, self-walking simulator space looks absolutely hideous as he described it.

2025-03-31 21:57:00 UTC

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@nprofile…cl5w Corridor Digital has been doing some interesting experiments with automated rotoscoping (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWZOEFvczzA) (making of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ6z90MuURM).
Now, the question in my mind is: when does this stop being "art?" I believe they're hand-rendering the backgrounds right now... if they start auto-genning those (or auto-gen a 3D textured environment and puppet the camera around in it), is it no longer "art?"
(This rabbit-hole rapidly becomes tedious if you go too far down it; Jackson Pollock looks up from the canvas he just danced over in bare feet and dares us to put hard limits on what art is allowed to be...)

2025-03-31 21:41:11 UTC

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@nprofile…cl5w I strongly suspect that, as with so many things in art, we will come to think of this eventually as the "slop" part being the dominant part, not the AI part.
In other words, "Art done badly is bad."
Even Studio Ghibli uses OpenToonz auto-tweening.

2025-03-31 12:28:26 UTC

Does anyone know where Mastodon admins hang out online?
I'd like to get better at tuning and running my instance, but I'm reaching the limit of how far I can get pulling at web searches. I'm running into some "Why does that tool do that" questions that are hard to sort out.
#mastodon

2025-03-16 03:56:44 UTC

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@nprofile…6zhx Oh, absolutely. Americans do not know how it feels to be occupied; haven't had it happen since 1812.
I can't guarantee we wouldn't bite back like a rabid dog, but I can guarantee it would fuck with our identity fiercely to have a foreign sovereignty holding our soil.

2025-03-11 19:24:47 UTC

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@nprofile…cl5w What color are you gonna paint it?

2025-03-09 03:16:01 UTC

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@nprofile…fgmj @nprofile…t9ta There's a world of difference between being forced involuntarily out of a country and voluntarily choosing to stop using a service which only has value proportional to how many use it, right?

2025-03-03 21:44:53 UTC

when u try to add a small penalty to your learning algorithm to make it stop solving the problem by "being clever" and dodging the solution
#AI
https://mastodon.fixermark.com/system/media_attachments/files/114/100/683/646/977/273/original/d5e0a1357911987f.png

2025-02-20 14:29:15 UTC

"This is your father's emacs. Not as clumsy or random as a vscode."
Proceeds to get carpal tunnel from reaching for the meta key all the time
#emacs

2025-02-14 15:45:45 UTC

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@nprofile…etf0 Incidentally: how long are we supposed to pretend that the guys who named their chat apps "Slack" and "Discord" didn't know exactly what they were doing? 😉

2025-02-14 14:51:15 UTC

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@nprofile…80xv I really need to get around to doing a blog post about what StackOverflow's success and popularity says about the nature of manpage-style documentation.
(Although TBF, half of what's wrong with manpages could be addressed with the bare minimum of semantic signal on that text-blob. The fact that searching for a flag means I pull up every instance of hyphenation with the same letter in the body of descriptions of other, unrelated flags is just a usability hole in the app, nothing more).

2025-02-12 01:08:24 UTC

A short story.
Back in 2012, the Google Maps team pulled off a hell of a clever partnership. In association with Square Enix, they populated the globe with tiles patterned after Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest for the rest of the world). And they put out an in-house call for anyone willing to contribute sprite art to the project.
My contribution was small: I carved out a bit of time and made some animals for the Pittsburgh Zoo: a polar bear, a penguin. I contributed some other ideas too, but they had to leave them on the cutting-room floor for legal reasons (yeah, Spaceship Earth is iconic, but there's no way in hell we're going to touch Disney's IP with a thirty-five-and-a-half-foot-pole). As a small congratulatory token, as was the style at the time, the Maps team awarded me---Well, the plan was to award everyone on the team a commemorative themed t-shirt, but since I am a large man (and not a Large man, which would be a 2XL by Japanese measurement, which is why they couldn't print the shirt because their printer of choice didn't scale up to "American with a sugar addiction..."), they passed me a gift certificate to a print-on-demand shop, where I acquired a cute little hoodie. Farenheit on one side of the zipper, Celsius on the other. I called it my cheatsheet.
It's been my lucky coding hoodie ever since... It's ratty and threadbare, but I kept it in the office for self-regulating against whatever the community had voted the thermostat to be that day, and then it followed me to my next job. It's not exactly soft, but not rough either... It's pretty much matched to whatever my cellular chemistry is, I guess. Burned away the parts that didn't work with my skin, kept the parts that did.
It's in the thrift shop pile now. I hope the next owner, who doesn't have these memories attached to it, cherishes it.
Because I can't anymore. I don't want to remember that I contributed to this.
#GoogleMaps
https://mastodon.fixermark.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/988/233/716/557/508/original/54a4136191699656.png

2025-02-08 02:25:45 UTC

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@nprofile…fq2y The concerns are fair, but as a fervent Tramp user and a sometimes vscode remote user: good idea on Microsoft's part because ssh has sucky connection reliability. Using it to bootstrap another channel is smart as hell.

2025-02-05 23:45:32 UTC

I watched my dental technician dismiss the half screen of news articles that Windows had automatically popped up on the computer that runs the X-ray machine.
... Hey folks, maybe this is a good time to start switching software for infrastructure and appliances away from Windows by default.
For reasons!

2025-02-02 03:08:41 UTC

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@nprofile…80xv Oh in this case, it's even sillier.
There's an account I have to log on to once every 90 days or they lock my access. This is an issue because I don't do anything with that account. It's an account that corporate expects me to keep online in case they expect me to use it one day.

2025-02-02 01:35:15 UTC

No, auto-reminder from work, I'm not happy. Yes, I'm glad you reminded me of the thing I have to do once a month. I don't like the thing though.
I appreciate the reminder, but if the reminder said "REMEMBER: eat a bag of dicks once a month to keep your job," I'll eat the bag but I won't be happy about it.

2025-01-26 18:11:57 UTC

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@nprofile…0nz2 This is a hole in my online space post-Facebook: is there a good alternative online to what FB offers for events on group pages?
That may, unfortunately, be best-of-breed right now.

2025-01-22 15:21:09 UTC

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@nprofile…l326 I feel this way about both my Ayn Rand phase and my Paul Graham phase.
My conclusion is "I guess I didn't actually have that much to compare those ideas to."

2025-01-21 19:39:27 UTC

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@nprofile…l6pv Welcome!
Vibe can vary widely and is heavily influenced by whoever's moderating your node. I don't know much OTOH about masto.nu. I will say that one thing I like about Mastodon is that it seems (?) to be easier to carve a space than other social media platforms I've seen---sometimes you have to put the work in to tune your blocklist or find a node with values that align to your own, there's no global Community Standard keeping anyone in or out of the Fediverse as a whole, just the standards of every node and how active the admins are at enforcing them (by blocking individuals or blocking entire nodes). But I appreciate that Mastodon gives us the tools to do that.
I'm hoping you have a good time!

2025-01-15 19:40:07 UTC

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@nprofile…tywj Yep. Because the UI abstraction stack never actually got good.
To its credit, it did get less bad than it was when JQuery was king.

2025-01-14 01:07:52 UTC

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@nprofile…args Oh God, it's following me now.
Visited the Cleveland Museum of Natural History for the first time this weekend and they have fossils of that fish in five different places. It's IIUC the state fish fossil.
I swear, every time we turned around, it was staring at us. I'm going to remember "The Dunkleosteous had a self-sharpening beak" like I remember the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

2025-01-08 20:10:30 UTC

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@nprofile…vdjy Alternatively: "The company admins: 'Why is the load on the server so high right now?'"
"The furry engineers:"

2025-01-06 22:36:32 UTC

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@nprofile…fv4z @nprofile…g8jv
Honestly, I'm feeling this very hard.
I'm running my own Mastodon node and I haven't bothered to install an Android client. The web app is fine: It's fast, it's clear, it's extremely well crafted... I'm not sad that there are alternatives to be sure, but I just have no use for them.

2024-12-10 19:40:01 UTC

https://mastodon.fixermark.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/630/220/755/795/109/original/87266cc49bf35fa4.png

2024-12-04 23:48:33 UTC

Geezus Christ not even Facebook can hide the absolute derision for this man's legacy.
https://mastodon.fixermark.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/597/219/750/208/296/original/9245e55175d0440f.png

2024-11-26 19:55:02 UTC

Americans: "Oh no, we couldn't possibly replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20; what kind of precedent would it set if we just started changing the picture on our money?"
Australians:
https://mastodon.fixermark.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/551/007/719/461/614/original/751d69cfd9fd7a0f.png

2024-11-25 11:08:23 UTC

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@nprofile…cl5w Can confirm. Spit and bailing wire all the way down, with some notable exceptions holding the whole mess together.

2024-11-22 17:22:23 UTC

Well everyone, it's over.
Mastodon had a good run, but BlueSky is going to end up with all the users.
The reason?
They have a -chan now.
#mastodon #bluesky
https://mastodon.fixermark.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/527/752/183/814/122/original/08840fa9edaa9953.png

2024-06-27 21:39:39 UTC

#python , why are you trying to kill my soul?
>>> from math import nan
>>> min(nan, 1)
nan
>>> min(1, nan)
1
>>>
... stuff like this is why people just memorize the rule "Avoid the magic floating-point values like the plague."

2024-05-31 21:04:41 UTC

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@npub1psd…9sr7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16kBY2dO-Gk

2024-05-29 17:58:49 UTC

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@npub1upk…tcwy Can confirm that on my machine using Chrome it is currently rendering correctly.
What turned out to be the issue?

2024-05-08 21:12:50 UTC

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@npub1zdp…vqv8 I'm not sure we'll find one because I'm not sure that Java is fluent. 😉

2024-04-24 20:29:33 UTC

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@npub1jqc…3mpt ... Except by the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, of course.

2024-04-22 17:28:08 UTC

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@npub1k4q…3lsq Shit like this is why I run my own instance.

2024-03-14 19:15:14 UTC

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@npub1mhp…6t73 I strongly suspect you are not telling Jason Koebler, cofounder of 404 Media, anything he doesn't know about the news outlet he cofounded, which is paid for via reader subscriptions.

2023-09-01 18:23:49 UTC

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@npub1yne…sy9d @npub133q…k6l3 Legend of Zelda: the Marks of Karl.

2023-08-21 13:31:27 UTC

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@npub1efv…4jx2 Last Week Tonight was pretty spot-on in their assessment years ago.
https://mastodon.fixermark.com/system/media_attachments/files/110/927/849/813/399/950/original/69b3250169156da0.png

2023-08-18 18:47:38 UTC

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@npub1kpw…xzz4 Block means someone can't reply to your tweet, which drags their users into your timeline.