Posts by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
(DIR) Post #Aa9Uj1yVKKrG6sGXK4 by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2023-09-26T07:33:08Z
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@simon it's possible to write good code in any reasonable language, and although some languages make it harder, it's all the nicer when people do it in those languages anyway!
(DIR) Post #AaJnqeiRWq2h02hZaq by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2023-10-01T06:54:39Z
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@simon I feel that a grey cloud of depressed cynicism had fallen over the section of the computer nerd community I live in, largely driven by the enshitiffication of commercial software and services, and how blockchain technology started as an interesting breakthrough in distributed algorithms and quickly turned into grift and waste, and now it's hard for anyone to get enthusiastic about anything any more.
(DIR) Post #AaKKEWrzY4Gu9Iazk8 by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2023-10-01T06:58:05Z
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@simon having said that, I've yet to find anything anybody has done with LLMs particularly useful for the problems I face in my own life, and I'm aware that's touching a raw nerve for me - too complex to detail here, but in summary I often feel like an outsider - and so I suppress the irrational anger that brings up for me, to avoid the temptation to join in with the hating on them - cathartic as it would be :-)
(DIR) Post #AaKKEXnQ6YD11PSrFw by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2023-10-01T07:24:50Z
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@simon OTOH I think that NFTs could have been used to build a new DNS without the centralisation/enshittification problems of the current hierarchical commercial model (and there are now working systems using no PoW energy waste), and am also grumpy it's now impossible to discus such things without being crushed between people getting excited about speculating on domain names and people getting angry with anything involving cryptocurrencies :-)
(DIR) Post #AaKKEYoWJwgQB6zFbs by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2023-10-01T08:00:00Z
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@simon and I suppose I should elaborate a bit on my experience with LLMs, while trying not to be grumpy: everything I've seen people be excited about them so far boils down to solving problems I don't have, or making me more productive at this I DO do by doing the fun parts for me, so I only have soulless drudgery left. They'll make programmers more productive in a burnout-inducing factory line way!
(DIR) Post #AaKKEZl0oTTH6WLxmS by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2023-10-01T08:06:09Z
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@simon the side of my work I'd love to get a tool to do - the "why did this fail in production and I can't recreate in dev" type of thing - might be helped by LLMs if there's a way to give it interactive access to the entire source tree, docs for third party components, and so on (that'll be more than the input token limits so it'll need an interactive browsing interface to find the relevant stuff) and some kind of supervised safe access to prod so it can investigate... Has anyone done that?
(DIR) Post #AaKKEbWCGWoCZ9R9xw by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2023-10-01T08:19:14Z
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@simon but, I don't think that you're deluded about the value of LLMs. You just don't like doing the fun parts of programming, and want to build tools to automate away the things I like to do so I can't get paid to do them any more! I don't think you're bad. We just like different things.
(DIR) Post #AaKiA0ql3NoYaBOjI0 by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2023-10-01T17:23:43Z
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@simon yeah, that's a step towards a useful debugging tool, just the things I work on don't generally fit in little Pyrhon VMs - what it needs is to be given SSH access to production servers or the special hardware my app needs or a box with the multi-terabyte test dataset lives or whatever, instead :-) So, some system where you get to review and OK each command it wants to run, perhaps?
(DIR) Post #AbUWaYXbqAtwggoLei by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2023-11-05T08:55:10Z
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@simon I've seen user research summaries in the UK gov; they tend to have a bunch of statistics ("56% of responses expressed support for the proposed change", "22% cited fear of giant spiders as a concern", etc) and pulling out a few representative quotes ("I can see that replacing teachers with giant spiders would free up school budgets to spend on equipment and could help with classroom discipline, but...")
(DIR) Post #Ac9M4lcRu7rzYc5ei0 by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2023-11-25T01:40:33Z
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@simon ugh. They really failed in hiring and building a culture that actually met their mission.And, apparently, in not putting non-complete clauses in their contracts so anybody who went to MS would be bankrupted...
(DIR) Post #AhWdSfMPdkmNnJ6kAy by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2024-05-03T20:34:37Z
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@foone you'll need a MIDI input, unless you can bit bang it on the GPIOs...
(DIR) Post #AiA4GINNXqaAxgK3ea by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2024-05-22T21:09:31Z
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@aral @starlabs @tuxedocomputers @system76 I love my Star labs machine! 👍
(DIR) Post #Az00Rzqs7pJzS8stP6 by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2025-10-07T21:17:34Z
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@b0rk @cwebber i've yet to see a good description of WHAT bsky did to ban somebody on blacksky? A good number of people used to say that was impossible, who were surprised. Was it some obscure technical aspect of the protocol? Can people on blacksky not still see the blocked stuff, or has bsky somehow managed to block it there? What ACTUALLY happened?
(DIR) Post #B1ZM6Mr9RSF9uLG05w by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2025-12-24T09:27:35Z
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@futurebird I am disqualified from this, as on my real desk I have a wax seal stamp with my kitten tech logo
(DIR) Post #B23qApwWkDdvhGvsZM by kitten_tech@fosstodon.org
2026-01-08T02:25:54Z
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@futurebird the back of every kitchen utensil drawer in a British house owned by grandparents contains at least one utensil whose purpose is now long forgotten, but was essential for one of these Victorian recipes.