Michael Newton
boosted
@hananc Scarborough Fair
Christian, husband, dad, coder, trainer, speaker, rpg geek, adhd
@aeva xml is for people born in 60s/70s. if you're born in 80s/90s, it's yaml for you.
@[email protected] @[email protected] NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORWAY
bonfire.mavnn.eu/pub/objects...
Starting the day with a moderately spicy take to help me wake up. It's the 'finishing last nights vindaloo' strategy for social media.
@[email protected] I'm going to say it: if as an industry we'd done SOAP properly and built the tooling to support it in more languages, it would have been awesome. XSD is so much better than json schema for specifying a domain.
@[email protected] Of course, we were never going to do it properly. The very first paid dev work I did was integration software between a UK fire and rescue service and a brand new reporting service set up by the national government for collecting stats.
During the launch, the project lead on the government side pulled me aside to thank me for writing the only implementation out of over fifty that sent xml that validated. Several of the other implementations were written by large consulting firms at orders of magnitude greater cost.
xml stands for excellent markup language
@[email protected] I'm going to say it: if as an industry we'd done SOAP properly and built the tooling to support it in more languages, it would have been awesome. XSD is so much better than json schema for specifying a domain.
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Michael Newton
boosted
It has been an honor and delight getting to know @Tzipporah and @Yehuda over the past few months.
If you haven’t met them, they’re the grandfather & grandkid duo that co-admin #TurtleIsland, a server focused on building community with Native/Indigenous people, other BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) people, and allies. To me, their story perfectly encapsulates the best thing about the fediverse and Mastodon: People coming together to build a place for themselves.
Read their beautiful story: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/05/community-spotlight-tzipporah-and-yehuda-of-turtle-island-social/
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Michael Newton
boosted
It's the second week in our free web development bootcamp and we will have our first guest speaker join us. @Edent is streaming with us at 2pm UTC May 6th to help demystify SVGs by showing us some magic.
Everyone is welcome, no sign up needed, feel free to drop in!
https://badwebsite.club/bootcamps/spring-2026/lessons/2026-05-06-guest-session/
Michael Newton
boosted
The wrong people have imposter syndrome
it is funny to me that Meilai is one of the few characters in this story who has a very normal, real life name, and all her distant cousins from Chald write their names in her native script as HIDDEN MERCY and DEFENDER OF THE HEAVENS like the overdramatic fantasy characters they are
@[email protected] To be fair, you can have fun with that even with every day real life names. I mean, going the literal translation route my own marriage was between "One who is like God" and "The Woods", which, much as I value my marriage, sounds a little over the top and mythic.
@[email protected] Procol Harum's lesser known hit, "A special sort of awful"
@kirtai @whitequark @iris *glances towards profile picture* I think I'll be ok :)
@[email protected] this comment prompted me to go to your profile as up to this moment I'd only viewed your profile pic in feed - where my brain has always interpreted the mini version as a teddy bear with a party hat.
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Michael Newton
boosted
I've been working on my version of the Monk class for Final Fantasy Union's coming book about Final Fantasy jobs 👊
Kickstarter here :
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/finalfantasyunion/the-defenders-of-the-crystal-an-encyclopedia-of-jobs
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Michael Newton
boosted
Got chased away but couldn’t resist grabbing a sip of nectar
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xoxo.zone/users/Ashedryden/s...
Oof. This. The combination of #adhd and #chronicfatigue is a life of constant war between "you should rest immediately when you need to" and "here is your reminder of critical thing that if you don't do it right now it will drop into a black hole for ever"
@grimalkina @mavnn Huh. Well, OK! Practical data beats theoretical concerns, so if it's helpful I shall grumble more quietly. (What, me, not grumble? Hah, as if :)
I suspect this is another facet of "everything everywhere is a mess, nothing is ever perfect including the definition of 'perfect', so you do what you can with what you have at hand."
Life. Just a never ending series of compromises, but beats the alternative.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Yeah, this is fascinating as I'd only hit the reverse issue; people thinking they had 'taught' the LLM something and then being surprised (and sometimes embarrassed while showing off the progress) that the explanation had no impact on the next time they asked the LLM to do the same task.
Using 'learning' as a way to explain how the question you are asking shapes the response is something I'd never thought to try, but is certainly something I'll keep in mind for the future.
Anyway, sorry for derailing the thing you were meaning to spend your time on this morning; this is very much idle curiousity on my end, so please don't let it highjack you.
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@grimalkina I think what bothers me about the (in my view, which is of course inarguably 100% correct 😊 use of "learning" is that it carries implications that are inaccurate and leads people to making assumptions and decisions based on that inaccurate implication. Not even in a malicious way, pareidolia is absolutely a thing, but secondary decisions are made based on primary misunderstandings, and once those get hardened into a system... it's difficult to fix, because systems are persistent.
@[email protected] @[email protected] The language space is getting pretty overloaded in this area in ways that are unhelpful, it has to be said. I recently nearly skipped over a genuinely interesting piece of machine learning (sorry!) research as it had AI in the title and was something LLMs would obviously be terrible at - but they weren't using LLMs.
> I really mostly saw people correctly take it to just mean "this changes in response to information"
It's interesting to see you (Cat) say this, as one of the issues I have with LLMs is that people assume they will learn while in reality the 'learning' already happened at the model training stage (with added bonus confusion if there is or isn't any context being stored), and the thing you're actually using doesn't change in response to information. Which is true of a lot of machine learning tools in general, not just LLMs, but LLMs have the added disguise of tracking context within a conversation (and frequently now an internet connection), so interface almost implies that longer term learning is happening (despite not having 'learning' in the name :facepalm:).
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Tempted to write a json-ld library for #zig as a way of learning Zig properly and because it might be a better way of implementing #fediverss (blog.mavnn.eu/2026/04/10/fed...) for low resource environments than dotnet. #activitypub #rss
Me, being clever: so I don't want this RayCast node firing every physics tick, so I'll disable it and only enable it when I force it to update.
adds all the code to enable and disable the ray casting
Me, actually reading the doc comment for the force raycast update function: "Note: enabled does not need to be set to true for this to work." sigh
It's almost like the devs considered this use case! #godot #gamedev
My latest modern art creation: the warming of the soup.
Worth at least an extra ten thousand due to the ephemeral nature of its satisfying beauty.
Michael Newton
boosted
@mttaggart I am just screaming incoherently into a pillow over here as I am trying to stop learning *new* genres of horror as I desperately try to complete my menagerie of horrors
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