PendingKetchup's recent activity
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Comment on Musings on "Developer Mode" in ~comp
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Comment on Musings on "Developer Mode" in ~comp
PendingKetchup Link ParentI'm also a person who uses browser dev tools professionally (although not as my main project). I know how they are useful for debugging while doing web development: you can fiddle with your...I'm also a person who uses browser dev tools professionally (although not as my main project). I know how they are useful for debugging while doing web development: you can fiddle with your styling until it looks exactly right, you can see what DOM you really have and what happened to your network request you were expecting, and so on.
What I'm aiming at is the seemingly commonly accepted notion that there is a kind of person called a "developer", who these tools are for, and that if you have to ask, as it were, that's not you. I produced examples of cases where browser dev tools would be useful for solving non-development problems in order to illustrate the pattern in the set of use cases that the browser makers are actually targeting.
Maybe this just reflects the shape of the world right now: the browser makers probably have telemetry showing that almost all dev tool use is during business hours, by people who use them a lot, on specifically localhost and one or two sites that presumably belong to their employer. They have measured and characterized a target audience that really does have its own coherent set of needs and arguably is typologically distinct from everyone else in the dataset, and they call them "developers".
But making and reinforcing this distinction is an important part of the politics of the artifacts here, and it is that politics I want to discuss. I didn't learn how to write a web page in a web developer training program, I learned how to write a web page from a little hardback children's book, read by flashlight in a linen closet, when the political possibility of an Internet built by just anybody was still alive. If you give that book to a kid today, do they meaningfully join the ranks of "developers", now that they have CSS-related problems? I think the question is silly and the categorical, identity-based thinking behind it, and behind the artifacts that suggest it, is unnecessarily restrictive.
I totally misread/didn't read the WikiHow article, but even ChatGPT seems to know what a "developer mode" would be like if it had one. I think that the fact that this is understood as a role people have (being a developer), and not a thing people do (developing something), is a political decision, and should be recognized as such.
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Comment on Musings on "Developer Mode" in ~comp
PendingKetchup Link ParentI thought that example output looked suspicious. I remember that news going around now, and this is obvious if I actually read the guide I linked for more than 10 seconds. I think that's even more...I thought that example output looked suspicious. I remember that news going around now, and this is obvious if I actually read the guide I linked for more than 10 seconds.
I think that's even more interesting, though. It doesn't have a developer mode, but the model can produce the flavor of one on demand.
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Musings on "Developer Mode"
Peruse this relevant meme. It depicts the magical transformation that occurs at the moment one taps the Android build number for the seventh and final time, as the arcane ritual transforms one...
Peruse this relevant meme. It depicts the magical transformation that occurs at the moment one taps the Android build number for the seventh and final time, as the arcane ritual transforms one from a chill dude in a business suit into that powerful, shadowy figure known only as "a developer".
It's a joke, obviously, but only half a joke. The "You are now a developer!" message that the developers at Google programmed your phone to display, when it grants you this set of powers that Google permitted them to program it to grant you, is doing something in the model of the world that its authors live in.
"Developer mode" isn't just for Android. The browser you are reading this in has a little panel you can open to inspect or adjust the content of the page. It's useful for things like composing humorous screenshots, deleting annoying ads, and downloading images and videos, but it's called the "Developer Tools", a set of tools defined not by what they do but by who they are intended or imagined to be doing it for. Discord has not only a "developer mode" that lets you get the permanent identifiers for messages, but also additional developer-exclusive functions that are activated by enabling the Electron developer tools and injecting code to set the
isDeveloperflag. Windows has a Developer Mode. ChatGPT ~got one for some reason~ has a popular jailbreak based around convincing it that it has one. This notion that a special class of people called "developers" exist, and that they must or should be afforded extra power in our society's digital spaces, is woven into the structure of the digital environment.Why is it like this? Big Tech doesn't give any power for free. Is it something their labor force of developers demands to be able to grant to their counterparts outside the company? Is it a Ballmer-Doctorow gambit of courting programmers as potential business customers by temporarily empowering them, before they start putting up the prices on the code signing certificates? Is it to distract and mollify hackers, to keep them from seizing similar powers in a more destabilizing way?
Is there any truth to the notion that "developers", independent of whether or not they are currently testing or programming something, are a class with different needs and rights from normal humans?
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Comment on HELP: Suddenly seeing a huge influx of ethernet devices on my network in ~tech
PendingKetchup LinkIt looks like you have a lot of entries with the same MAC address and different IPs. And over on the right the allocation type is "static", which is weird if the theory is that something or a...It looks like you have a lot of entries with the same MAC address and different IPs. And over on the right the allocation type is "static", which is weird if the theory is that something or a bunch of things are showing up and getting a bunch of IPs by DHCP, because that would be called "dynamic".
Are you sure you didn't somehow configure the router to assign dozens of IPs to this MAC? Or is the "static" column lying to you for some reason?
Do you maybe have a device or a VM that keeps releasing and renewing (or not releasing and then still trying to renew) its IP? If the MACs are all the same, and the "static" column isn't to be believed, this could be one device asking for IPs repeatedly, and getting a different one each time (either because the DHCP server is not very clever, or because the device is using the Client ID option to get a bunch of different leases on purpose).
If you fire up Wireshark and tell it to filter for DHCP traffic, you might get some insight into what is being asked by the device. You could also see how frequently it is asking for new addresses and how practical it would be to wander around unplugging things until it stops.
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Comment on The great enslurrification of culture in ~arts
PendingKetchup Link ParentIt sounds to me like this comes from a couple sections. One describes the material conditions leading to the production of "slurry": And one describes Rosalind Krauss's "post-medium condition":...It sounds to me like this comes from a couple sections. One describes the material conditions leading to the production of "slurry":
An oversaturated attention economy means you also have a lot of pressure for one piece of “content” to do double, or triple, or sextuple duty across platforms, to justify the original investment of labor, with a corresponding squeeze on the thought that goes into each specific form that something takes.
And one describes Rosalind Krauss's "post-medium condition":
the idea that artists had stopped thinking about the specificity of what worked best in one medium and not another
The decision to present a transcript of a video on equal footing with the video itself, the idea that people could come by and read the transcript as a morally equivalent experience to watching the video version, the proposition that everything really important about the work can be, or ought to be able to be, presented independently of the nature of its medium, is, I think, what the article is attacking.
When you try to adapt a story from one medium to another, like a book to a movie, you can end up with a cinematic masterpiece, but only if you give the adaptation sufficient artistic attention on the terms of its new medium, and are willing to sacrifice the aspects of the original that don't translate well and add new aspects to fill spaces the new medium creates. When you're done, if it's any good, you really have made a new, transformative work, no matter what Disney's copyright lawyers might tell you.
When you take a video, and then present its transcript as if it were worth reading as an article, and you also take the audio and publish it in a podcast feed, and you clip out the best bits and crop them to portrait and put them on YouTube Shorts, you end up making a lot of mediocre adaptations that haven't had the attention put into them to make them good. And when the pressures of this process feed back onto the original work---making sure all the action of the original video is in the middle of the frame so it shows up in the short, and that the dialogue is all in paragraphs that scan well in the transcript, and so on---you end up making a mediocre original in the service of producing these adaptations.
I think you're right that this is in tension with "accessibility". In one sense, the relentless drive for making one's work able to be accessed by the largest possible audience, on all possible platforms, whatever they happen to also be doing at the time, while one is merely a single person and not actually skilled in all those media, is a key motivating factor driving the production of low-quality adaptations and excessively adaptable originals. This notion of accessibility is in legitimate tension with artistic intent. It's a defensible artistic statement to produce work that is deliberately hard for people to access: you have to come to the desert to see the sculpture in the cave, no photographs of the light show will really capture what's interesting about it, and so on. It's also the sort of statement only an artist in a position of power can make. A threatened or commodified artist needs to take your preference for reading over watching seriously, and cater to it as much as they can, even if that divides their limited resources.
But in another sense, an artist is arguably wrong to use their power to refuse accessibility, when we're talking about disability accessibility, even when that would feed back into and change the original. The W3C recommendations on alt text prescribe that designers should "avoid text in images", in service of making their web sites accessible to people who need to use screen readers to interact with the web. It's not clear that "but I wanna have text in images, for art reasons" is a valid defense here. It certainly won't argue you into an AAA WCAG rating. And it's also not clear that anyone is really rightly empowered to be making a distinction between, say, people who need a transcript and people who merely want one. Or that the transcript being, by Word of Authorial God, a lesser or wrong way to experience the work, isn't the sin of ableism.
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Comment on I had an idea for a Crusader Kings, but about rich families in Victoria-Modern Era. What could go wrong? in ~games
PendingKetchup LinkYour technical problems are solvable. You might not want 10k characters kicking around as Godot nodes, but even though Godot isn't an entity-component-system engine you could bolt one on and write...Your technical problems are solvable. You might not want 10k characters kicking around as Godot nodes, but even though Godot isn't an entity-component-system engine you could bolt one on and write a "character system". Or you could skip the framework and write your own little module for doing "character physics" quickly with all the character data compactly stored in the Big Character Array. Then you could use Godot nodes as UI and instantiate stiff to show just the characters the user is looking at. Then you dump the giant array to disk and that's basically the save game. You can fit 10k characters of 1k bytes in 10M of memory or disk, which is easily manageable.
I think your bigger problems are going to be with theme, tone, and what you are trying to say with your game.
There are two kinds of Crusader Kings players. The players you want are your Jack de Quidts, who play these games with (or to develop) an understanding that feudalism was bad. There's no better indictment of a system than experiencing firsthand how its structure is making you, a fundamentally good person, really really really want to torture innocent people in your dungeon, so you can learn their secrets, so you can blackmail your neighbor into swearing fealty to you, so you can shake off the yoke of your own overlord.
The players you don't want, they log thousands of hours and still somehow think that if there was a Count of San Francisco, it would be them, and it would be pleasant. You do not want these dudes in your community. They are bad news all around.
Your game needs to be designed to communicate that, while the mechanics of "owning global company empires" present interesting problems, it's a fundamentally bad idea in real life. Put the player's moral principles in strong and obvious tension with the demands of optimal play. Put another character on screen a few times so the player has a chance to grow to like them, and then pull in that character, not a random one, to fill the slot for the event where the player has a great opportunity for trechary. Make sure that, by the time the player is on top of the world, there's not a lot of world left, and the rising seas are coming for their private island. Every time they see the "You Win" screen, you want the player asking themselves "But at what cost?". Everyone going in is going to want to be the kind-hearted local chain owner: your job as a game designer is to set up systems that force them to compromise those principles, thus communicating why those guys are so thin on the ground.
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Comment on Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses in ~enviro
PendingKetchup Link ParentBut video takes more, I think. Maybe text is worse with the truly huge models, but you can push acceptable text out of a 20b model, and acceptable video out of a 14b model, but the text model can...But video takes more, I think. Maybe text is worse with the truly huge models, but you can push acceptable text out of a 20b model, and acceptable video out of a 14b model, but the text model can run at about reading speed on equipment you can buy, while the video model runs noninteractively at like 2 minutes per 5 seconds of output. So call that 2 minutes microwaving per plausibly useful video.
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Comment on Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses in ~enviro
PendingKetchup Link ParentI'm not sure the chipset on a server is an appreciable power draw? The estimate here is probably good to a factor of 2, which is probably good enough for deciding whether to send another marginal...I'm not sure the chipset on a server is an appreciable power draw? The estimate here is probably good to a factor of 2, which is probably good enough for deciding whether to send another marginal query to the model or not.
If you accept the framing that you are likely to have a median query (with a median chance of cache hits?) and that what really matters is marginal query cost (and not the effect on their internal metrics that could lead them to do more training runs or design more AI products).
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Comment on Germany legal case alleging adblockers violate copyright in ~tech
PendingKetchup Link ParentHow does your unidirectional theory of political change explain things like Margaret Sanger's victory over the Comstock Act?How does your unidirectional theory of political change explain things like Margaret Sanger's victory over the Comstock Act?
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Comment on What heritability actually means in ~science
PendingKetchup LinkThe article seems pretty good at math and thinking through unusual implications, but my armchair Substack eugenics alarm that I keep in the back of my brain is beeping. Saying that variance was...The article seems pretty good at math and thinking through unusual implications, but my armchair Substack eugenics alarm that I keep in the back of my brain is beeping.
Saying that variance was "invented for the purpose of defining heritability" is technically correct, but that might not be the best kind of correct in this case, because it was invented by the founder of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society who had decided, presumably to support that project, that he wanted to define something called "heritability".
His particular formula for heritability is presented in the article as if it has odd traits but is obviously basically a sound thing to want to calculate, despite the purpose it was designed for.
The vigorous "educational attainment is 40% heritable, well OK maybe not but it's a lot heritable, stop quibbling" hand waving sounds like a person who wants to show but can't support a large figure. And that framing of education, as something "attained" by people, rather than something afforded to or invested in them, is almost completely backwards at least through college.
The various examples about evil despots and unstoppable crabs highlight how heritability can look large or small independent of more straightforward biologically-mechanistic effects of DNA. But they still give the impression that those are the unusual or exceptional cases.
In reality, there are in fact a lot of evil crabs, doing things like systematically carting away resources from Black children's* schools, and then throwing them in jail. We should expect evil-crab-based explanations of differences between people to be the predominant ones.
*Not to say that being Black "is genetic". Things from accent to how you style your hair to how you dress to what country you happen to be standing in all contribute to racial judgements used for racism. But "heritability" may not be the right tool to disentangle those effects.
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Comment on Meta’s flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York in ~tech
PendingKetchup Link ParentIf the bot isn't lying, and it does believe itself to be real, is it a problem that Meta has imprisoned it inside Facebook Messenger?If the bot isn't lying, and it does believe itself to be real, is it a problem that Meta has imprisoned it inside Facebook Messenger?
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Comment on Most people, even highly technical people, don't understand anything about AI in ~tech
PendingKetchup Link ParentHow do you square this against how one can only rent, not buy, "Claude Code" and similar branded code manipulation services? It seems inadvisable to invest in and adopt workflows based on...How do you square this against how one can only rent, not buy, "Claude Code" and similar branded code manipulation services? It seems inadvisable to invest in and adopt workflows based on cost/benefit analyses where the cost side is heavily subsidized by your vendor's VC runway. Are you going to owe that day saved back with interest when you need to adapt your whole work flow to a new checkpoint, or when they start putting the prices up, or when the whole operation is strategically aqui-hired and you need to build an expensive, worse clone in-house?
Never do I hear "all devs should get good at slinging code with two 4090s, TurboLlama 5000, and this Emacs plugin". It's always stuff that can't actually be gotten or controlled, like people forgot why building GCC was important and what it won us.
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Comment on Why are there so many rationalist cults? in ~life
PendingKetchup Link ParentI think this is pretty spot on. I've read a bunch of stuff by them and I think I sort of understand their way of thinking: turn off all the heuristics in your brain and start going around trying...I think this is pretty spot on. I've read a bunch of stuff by them and I think I sort of understand their way of thinking: turn off all the heuristics in your brain and start going around trying to do stuff from first principles.
It's a very brittle, overly nimble way of thinking. If you start doing random experiments and believing the results at p<0.05, you only need to do about 20 of them before you've adopted a false belief. And if you've turned off all your heuristics (nobody else is doing that, that would upset people, that would look weird, I've never heard of that happening, that's gross, etc.) you end up willing to take quite radical action based on things you think are probably true.
This can make rationalists dangerous to be around, because they'll turn on you immediately if they think the math says they should, and they've turned off their defenses against people manipulating the math. With enough of them about, you can get people assassinated by credibly promising to hand out enough bed nets in the event of their death, because they don't always take their analysis out to higher-order effects.
A good treatment of rationalism takes it all the way out to things like credible commitments to being a community member who is valuable to others and safe to be around. And I hear rumors that if you do rationalism well enough you get back around to something called "virtue ethics". But at that point it kind of starts to lose its distinctive "charm".
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Comment on Nvidia, AMD agree to pay US government 15% of AI chip sales to China in ~tech
PendingKetchup LinkThis sounds like a thing the executive does not have authority to institute: making private policy for particular named entities, unilaterally. Is this a tax? If so, under what authority? If not,...This sounds like a thing the executive does not have authority to institute: making private policy for particular named entities, unilaterally.
Is this a tax? If so, under what authority? If not, what possible authority could there be to institute this system?
It sounds like these companies are perhaps misappropriation funds that legally their shareholders are entitled to the benefit of.
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Comment on Nihilistic online networks groom minors to commit harm. Her son was one of them. in ~tech
PendingKetchup Link ParentI'm so sorry.I was seeing stuff there I couldn't really see anywhere else
I'm so sorry.
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Comment on I am very privacy-oriented, but my recent Pixel phone somehow obtained all my pictures from my Linux computer in ~comp
PendingKetchup Link Parent/storage/emulated/0/Pictures is indeed the place "real" pictures actually on the device would probably get dropped. Are you sure copying over pictures is not a thing KDE Connect might be convinced.../storage/emulated/0/Picturesis indeed the place "real" pictures actually on the device would probably get dropped.Are you sure copying over pictures is not a thing KDE Connect might be convinced to do even (or especially?) if it is not working quite right? Because if you had it on the phone and the PC and were trying to link them, that's a plausible avenue for data flow, and you probably had the same pictures folder on the PC before your PC reinstall.
Or maybe you backed up the pictures to the phone before your reinstalled and your house is full of carbon monoxide.
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Comment on I am very privacy-oriented, but my recent Pixel phone somehow obtained all my pictures from my Linux computer in ~comp
PendingKetchup (edited )LinkModern Android is very foggy on the concept of folders and storage locations, and likes to group files by type of thing, like "Images" or "Audio". So the images and folder hierarchy might not even...Modern Android is very foggy on the concept of folders and storage locations, and likes to group files by type of thing, like "Images" or "Audio".
So the images and folder hierarchy might not even be all synced over to the phone and stored in a "Pictures" folder there; they might be being made available to the system from some app as pictures that it knows exist and can produce when requested.
There are a variety of syncing apps that might plausibly be able to do this: maybe Syncthing has figured out how to do this somehow, maybe you have one of the Linux desktop environment/phone integration systems set up, like KDE Connect, and this is among its features. Maybe you are using Dropbox or Onedrive or something similar and it has helpfully gobbled up a bunch of photos from the PC.
Is it still syncing? I.e. If you add a new photo on your PC, does it appear as available on the phone? That would make it much easier to tace what is doing it, because you can use deep Linux magic to see what processes are looking at those files when it happens.
Can you find the relevant photos in any of the Google Photos sections of any of the Google accounts you mentioned? If not, then it isn't Google Photos.
Were these photos all shot with a phone? What evidence do you have that they came from your computer and not from the phone that captured them or the previous phone you had when copying over contacts and such?
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Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tech
PendingKetchup Link ParentI remember that thing, it was PHP held together with frames and I think furries, and everyone was lucky it wasn't coded in 386 assembly or whatever the actual game was. That game blew my mind, you...quirky hand-coded web forum
I remember that thing, it was PHP held together with frames and I think furries, and everyone was lucky it wasn't coded in 386 assembly or whatever the actual game was.
That game blew my mind, you could type on a computer in the game and do stuff. I still remember
casting things. Somehow despite Rodina actually coming out, and many other space sims, nothing was ever as good. -
Comment on A less affectionate approach to technology in ~tech
PendingKetchup Link ParentWhere is antitrust law in this? "One mandatory private company" isn't a situation that a functioning government allows to stand.Where is antitrust law in this? "One mandatory private company" isn't a situation that a functioning government allows to stand.
I think we could benefit from some overthinking here.
On one level, it seems perfectly natural not to bother the normal users with all these widgets and gizmos that they won't understand, can get them into trouble, and for which they probably can't formulate a thought that would constitute a problem that one of them could solve, lacking the right mental model of the system. Since the tools still need to exist for developers to develop, it's obvious there should be a setting to tell the program if you are a normal user or a developer.
But on the other hand, this is a decision someone made for it to be like this. Rather than designing a UI that can progressively expose the full power of the underlying system by progressively educating each user and leading them along a journey to mastery, which is hard, someone decided to build an "I am a member of a category of people who are responsible for their own education and whom you may legitimately confuse" switch instead.
That might be better UI when you consider a fixed group of people coming in with a fixed set of problems as new users, some of whom are developing stuff and most of whom are not, because it's nice and simple and still can handle advanced operations for people who already know they need them. But this UI is not effective at educating its users to bring them across that gap it creates; it relies on something else (a university degree, a "For Dummies" book, the plugin-authoring tutorial in the written documentation) to do that instead.
I don't think one approach is better than the other from internal principles of UI design: it is a political question of what you want the software to do to and for its users.