Posts by mhoye@cosocial.ca
(DIR) Post #B6njB0dPWmAmPBnV20 by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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I've changed my mind. "Do not hallucinate" isn't the biggest tell in this industry. The biggest tell is how many people are happy to throw their professional dignity and even basic fundamental ideas about epistemology and causality overboard as soon as they can hit arbitrary made up numbers while escaping responsibility for the understanding, growth and well-being of other people. The biggest tell is this boomer-grade, generational-rugpull selfishness. Claude is this industry's Sgt. Pepper.
(DIR) Post #B6nwUS23BhMOHbvJ5M by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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I think the undersold point here is that the CIA gets up to shit that they made an in house requisition process for gold bars to pay for, and they get up to enough of that shit and it’s so normal that keeping track of millions of dollars worth of gold bars is not really worth the hassle?https://www.npr.org/2026/05/28/nx-s1-5837308/cia-officer-gold-bars
(DIR) Post #B6suCRp9zfVAJ8ytn6 by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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You'll never see a motorcycle helmet or a rigging harness sold on the terms we sell software every day because that's obviously criminal negligence. When people depend - and I don't mean "use", I mean "depend" - on your software then your software has crossed a line and your obligations to it are different.I do not know where that line is, but at some point "this software is provided as is with no warranty express or implied" is not a morally defensible position. https://pleroma.envs.net/objects/7162a70f-f92d-40a7-af11-bee2fe26d395
(DIR) Post #B6yS1R80XNhgnC7E1Y by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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A brief thread about code and communications: Once people depend on a piece of software - not "use" but "depend" - I believe developers have a greater degree of responsibility to the communities relying on that software.At some point "this software is provided as is with no warranty express or implied" is no more defensible a position than "this building is provided as is and if it falls down well you chose to live in it, whether or not I decide to change it however I like in the future."
(DIR) Post #B6yS1RZIttXQ9qt1ZQ by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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I don't think it's a legal question; we live in a society and this is about risk management and community harm reduction. "We've made major changes for security reasons, to code with weak test coverage, so this may break some use cases, please test this before release" - there's nothing like this in the release notes. It's all just bullet points in a flurry of patch-level releases.If this had been shipped as "3.4.2 -> 3.5.0-alpha1" we wouldn't be having this conversation but here we are.
(DIR) Post #B6yS1S0bGPN9WVep7I by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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When people depend on something - and I don't mean use, I mean _depend_, the way we depend on mobility aids or accessibility tools, then if you change how they work without notice or consultation, not only will people be furious with you, but they'll be _right._"I've moved the pedals in your car around, and it's a stick shift now." "But I need to get to work." "The car is better now!"The _disrespect_. The _utter contempt_ in that.Developers show people that contempt all. the. time.
(DIR) Post #B6yS1SRXeEvIs4GL6u by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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If developers want to disavow that responsibility, they - you - are absolutely allowed. I wrote these pseudolicenses to try and help people do that, a maintenance-terms license that just says provided-as-is-and-we're-serious-about-that.https://github.com/mhoye/maintenance-terms/blob/main/MAINTENANCE-TERMS.mdBut that _can't be the default setting_. If enough people depend-as-in-depend on your software, free-as-in-to-die-alone-in-the-forest is not a tenable default moral position. "We live in a society" means more than just the law.
(DIR) Post #B6yS1StBzR2cFpCQD2 by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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... and I don't always know where those lines are but virtually all of the stock utilities that ship with a standard Linux are on the far side of it.There's lots of room between "free as in I found this software by the road in the woods outside of town, fuck off" and "the Eurocracy mandates that I straighten my cravat between keystrokes".People being justly furious when you break their shit with a patch update is 100% foreseeable, and it takes almost no planning and effort to avoid.
(DIR) Post #B6yS1THIXoK7SaTfma by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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This may seem entitled, but I have a long list of things in this world that I feel humans - and I specifically - are entitled to, things like clean running water, food that's safe to eat, and medicine that does what it says on the box. Restaurants with clean kitchens in buildings that don't fall down on their own. And this doesn't keep anyone from making herbal remedies or building snowforts or cooking that piece of fish that's _probably_ still good, it just means can't run society like that.
(DIR) Post #B6yS1TWBeSEWClRYzQ by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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One notably modern political tactic is the conservative efforts to tell you something is an "entitlement" so they can scold you into giving it up, but these aren't "entitlements". These are baseline expectations in a functioning society. Oh, so what, you think you deserve to just _drink_ whatever comes out of the tap whenever you _want,_ like some sort of _special fancy person_? Yeah. Yeah, I do.Not only that, but I expect to get notified well ahead of time if that might change.
(DIR) Post #B6yS1Tvi7YeLTvNwm0 by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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Anyway, one thing that jumped out of Tridge's recent riposte to all this is that he knew about regressions that weren't covered by the test suites, and that's not in the release notes, and he shipped anyway.I have a set of feelings about generative AI, but I guess this newfound "velocity" makes it pretty easy to convince yourself that major, maybe-breaking changes are ... no big deal. Just a patch, damn the downstream, ship another one and reliable semver ends up more genAI roadkill, I guess.
(DIR) Post #B6yS1WAJoDWUPoEdou by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of the other two guys in this trenchcoat.
(DIR) Post #B6zcQvnaeVPsDvWWhc by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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@azonenberg I can definitely understand why the Dwarf Fortress and Inkscape people were like at version 0.99999312 or whatever for years. Even so, it doesn't take a ton of effort to say, we need to make the following changes for these reasons, we believe they are going to break X and would like your help to test it, we know they are going to break Y which we regret but believe necessary, and unless something huge comes to light we'll make this change to the new version number on Z date.
(DIR) Post #B7i0W66NHKq6CTn02y by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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@dangillmor The thing that makes it unusable for me is that it just make stuff up out of whole cloth all the time.https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2026/05/02/lies-damned-lies-and-stochastics/
(DIR) Post #B8pVsxmPJF6IsAynui by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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@mntmn The sincerest forms of flattery, as the saying goes.
(DIR) Post #B8zws3wNJc7hVZt6rw by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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@mntmn is be interested in something adjacent to this, as a person who bought the 2nd gen clips for the original Reform. Repurposing those into battery packs would be good.
(DIR) Post #B909bXEATMo4ozexeK by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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@mntmn I never doubted you for a second.
(DIR) Post #B92e6Im1eDm9ua0FY8 by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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@mntmn What are you using for composite-in?
(DIR) Post #B9MqCo9kAf7MJGO2bY by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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@mntmn is this some horrifying variation of “glasgow kiss”
(DIR) Post #BATUG9J5HIcwhE9NrM by mhoye@cosocial.ca
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@IngaLovinde I thought the first time I read this that the near symmetry of those two events, as seen from a great distance, was a bit of poetic genius.