Discussion

Sent out a quote today that I needed to price higher than I'd like because otherwise the service isn't sustainable. This meant I was subconsciously expecting a long and drawn out negotiation and explanation process, while what I actually got was an email half an hour later saying (basically) "where do I send the money?"

So that was a nice encouragement for the day!

@[email protected] You have picked your instance well, I can feel the tech bro burn from a different country @[email protected]

bonfire.mavnn.eu/pub/objects...

I mean, seriously? It just interpreted "accepting" as "surrendering" which rather changed the tone of the message I sent.

@[email protected] ignoring both the ethics and the tech limitations (which we shouldn't, to be clear) I don't see the pitch here. Either I have a desire to read something super bespoke and I get "magic" to write the novel for me ('like Star Wars, but with more kumquats'), or I want to read the idea somebody else find interesting. In practice I suspect even the first option with working, ethical, tech would end up feeling unsatisfying but I don't see any world where I want to pay money for stuff other people wanted to automatically generate if I have access to the generating tech myself.

@[email protected] it reads very much to me as a list of 'important' books much more than a list of books I would enjoy. Doesn't mean they're bad, or I don't enjoy some of them, but it's not even close to what you'd get asking me for a "good" book list.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] "They tried to bribe me to add a backdoor, but jokes on them - it's already rushed and full of bugs."

@[email protected] @[email protected] fair, fair. In wanting to get through to people trying not to be an arse I can see my wording ignores other common causes of over explanation like "no, I really am an arse" and "insecurity".

@[email protected] I managed to initially read this as error whiskies, which would be one response to AI job threats I suppose!

This feels rather similar to the All True Star Wars Fans™ are white men over forty contingent.

beige.party/users/geekysteve...

Okay, #gamedev people: if you were teaching somebody game dev from a non-programming background, who wanted to make a small one person game to learn what game dev is like would you have any reasons to suggest #unity over #godot? (I'm making #godot the default here mostly based on system requirements and getting started speed, so I feel like I'd need an active reason to suggest the overhead of Unity and I'm not thinking of any).

Context: they actively want to use a game engine, they aren't interested in learning the details of how the sausage is made at the rendering/physics simulation level (yet)

I suspect quite a few men see examples of #mansplaining and assume "I would never do that, I'm not an arse", but this afternoon I nearly explained user agent strings to [checks notes] a widely respected expert on distributed system design before I checked who I was about to reply to. I had assumed a completely wrong context.

Some recent comments from @[email protected] about the XY problem reminded me that mansplaining is what happens when you don't check what the context is before you speak. You may not mansplain because you're an arse, but you'll do it anyway if you believe you never would and so fail to build in the helpful habitual self doubt that makes you pause and say "what do I actually know about this person again?". Especially because if you're a man reading my timeline you likely belong to a society where there's a wealth of research suggesting you (and I) have been socialised to assume less competence in women.

@[email protected] I'd reply with the Twitter endless screaming bot, but unfortunately it was unable to make the appointment due to a rich Nazi and three videos advertising reasons to endlessly scream as a service

Always check the critical hits per lux rating before purchasing your new laser pistol.

chaos.social/users/weirdunit...

I found this episode especially amusing because I used to own one of the Chinese clevers he's making a replacement for, and they are awesome in exactly the opposite ways the knives he makes are awesome.

They're made out of thick, cheap, soft, stainless steel that means they go blunt in seconds but sharpen just as quickly and it is almost impossible to permanently damage them as they bend rather than break.

Conversely, his knives are light, will keep an edge for years, and cut through neatly anything - but if you damage it you'll be in for a world of work, and sharpening is a decent amount of effort and requires skill.

A YouTube channel of somebody making bespoke and beautiful chef's knives to order (for actual chefs, not just for show although they are very pretty). Basically advertising, admittedly, but advertising mostly based around stories of people getting each other thoughtful gifts so I'll take it.

Might be some good #ttrpg inspiration in there as well for some unusual looking blade finishes.

youtu.be/abBXwtCSLEY

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] It's kind of disturbing just how much more aggressive the llm crawlers are than the search crawlers, even from companies that must have had all of the infrastructure in place already.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Of course, I have some other concerns around LLMs as 'automation' given the relative failure rates compared to other things I would call automation (plus ethics, legality, etc). But the 'can it be done' discussions and the 'should we use this tool' discussions seem to get more time than the 'is this even a good goal' discussions.

@[email protected] @[email protected] It's the only thing that's managed to even make me notice the overhead of running forgejo on a raspberry pi: it started querying every file in every commit of my blog history with about 70+ concurrent connections at a time, and then at some point seemed to get stuck in a loop and just kept on doing it. At least I think it did; it was still going a day later when I was in a position to log into the server and start dropping requests and my blog's history isn't that huge.

@[email protected] @[email protected] It's one of the only FRED edition HERO books I didn't own, and I now regret it. I actually have a huge respect of both you and Steve Long for totally different reasons and I can't really imagine two less compatible styles of writing or philosophies on GMing (when I'm in a crunchy mood I appreciate Steve's literally lawerly clarity and precision in writing rules and even sometimes backgrounds, but I wouldn't say that I'd jump at a chance to play at his table reading between the lines of his GMing style)

@[email protected] @[email protected]

> there is value in the process rather than just in the output

This seems a crucial aspect that is frequently being ignored, and I suppose I see this highlighted as somebody who's doing some teaching at the moment. Brandon Sanderson (the author) has a saying he's given several variations of that boils down to "I didn't get any money for all the books I wrote before I got published, but I did get a better writer and a better person from them."

On the other hand, I started programming by literally automating my then data entry job out of existance. I didn't learn any more manually copying the data between a spreadsheet and a database the third time than the second.

But I think we're terrible at judging what is and what isn't a learning experience and worth doing, and even worse I think that can change with both experience and situation. My advice on whether to use an automatic website creator is going to different if you're an art student who needs an online portfolio right now, or if you want to be a website designer.