I’m @froztbyte more or less everywhere that matters

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • In my experience even simple LLM changes are wrong somewhere around half the time. Often in disturbingly subtle ways that take an expert to spot.

    I just want to add: sailor’s reference to “expert” here is no joke. the amount of wild and subtle UB (undefined behaviour) you get in the C family is extremely high-knowledge stuff. it’s the sort of stuff that has in recent years become fashionable to describe as “cursed”, and often with good reason

    LLMs being bad at precision and detail is as perfect an antithesis in that picture as I am capable of conceiving. so any thought of a project like this that pairs LLMs (or, more broadly, any of the current generative family of nonsense) as a dependency in it’s implementation is just damn wild to me

    (and just incase: this post is not an opportunity to quibble about PLT and about what be or become possible.)









  • just came across a wild banger:

    (An aside — In their official docs, Apple refers to the menu bar always in lowercase, because it’s just a menu bar. The ‘desktop’ is the same way. This is interesting, because we live in an era where everything is a branded product whose name is a proper noun– see the Dock– and we are not allowed to merely use things, we are forced to experience using them and you legally can’t ‘experience’ a regular ‘ol noun. Everybody knows it’s gotta be a proper noun in order to be experienced. The Las Vegas Demon Orb Experience. The Microsoft Windows Desktop Experience. The ESPN Experience Brought To You By Sports Gambling. The 6th Street Hostel Bathroom Experience. But our friends “menu bar” and “desktop” are just two things, average, normal, unobtrusive. This says something about how the people who created these things thought about them.)






  • please enjoy the calibre dev repeatedly stepping on rakes that smack him in the face when multiple computer security professionals showed him 10+(!) severe vulnerabilities in a setuid root mount program nobody asked for that he implemented for frankly fucked personal reasons over the strong objections of his own community

    I’d heard of these but never looked into it (hadn’t needed to), opened now and saw who the bug was reported by. imagine getting that report from that source and then your first answer is to start arguing

    double up that multiple distros going back older than that report have had support for automatic user mount systems (and that calibre could’ve just used that)… goddamn

    recently I ran into the term “outsider programming” and I really like it as a frame for the kind of inexpert contributors (driveby or otherwise) that you get in a project like calibre, people who just trying to make their own little thing work as best they can - you could look at e.g. the code for the dedrm plugin if you want some examples of this. but then you also get whatever the fuck goyal is doing here, which is … far the other way