@[email protected] Write once, run anywhere

@[email protected] The lights and shutters in my house are triggered via the OpenWebNet protocol which is controlled by a single company, and is a bus protocol not designed to be exposed on the web. I do access it via a tcp gateway but that's just to get the raw bus messages on and off the physical bus wiring, so even net is a stretch. I think they just saw Microsoft call something .NET and went "why didn't we think of that first?"

@[email protected] I was very bemused the first time I applied to an IT company over 20 years ago when the first question was whether I could whiteboard code how I'd check if a word was a palindrome in the language of my choice. Afterwards the interviewer apologised but said that it allowed him to eliminate nearly half of the applicants who made it to interview (i.e. had CVs that looked fine). I can only imagine how much worse that is getting in our brave new world of today.

In this time of the world being a pretty heavy place I wanted to take a moment out to suggest following feeds with a regular pulse of things that are just beautiful, like @[email protected] (fine art/cover art) or @[email protected] (stunning pictures of birds in nature).

Sometimes it is really what you need in the middle of your feed to keep the mental health, er, healthy. The apple a day of the brain.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I can also see a fairly credible world in which Microsoft decides the best possible business plan at this point is to pretend the last fifteen years never happened and hit reset.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Careful though, it probably goes both ways. I could see smorgasbord.py getting quite large quite quickly.

@[email protected] Very nice. Reminds me of Ed Alleyne-Johnson, who've I've known about and been listening to for decades but only today noticed was also the violinist for New Model Army at their peak. Some of his solo busking tracks are spectacular (e.g. youtube.com/watch?v=vizUjKLv... )

Some of the loopstation beatbox is great, but some gets a bit too 'crowded' for my taste (as does some of the competitive skill based beatboxing, honestly). One of the things I love about the Jo Quail track you posted, and Ed, and Wing, is how the skill underpins a love of the actual music. I have the same problem with some jazz, that it starts bleeding from music into technical demo.

Serendipitously, Wing actually ranted about the same thing at length recently in a video where he breakdown how he judged submissions for this years beatbox 'world championship' if you wanted some philisophy in a pre-selected beatbox smorgasbord. youtube.com/watch?v=XKkYLmyT...

@[email protected] That is quite the scenary! For the beatboxing deep dive I won't point you at other stuff by Wing as that's just a case of clicking on his channel, but I don't know how obvious it is that he's also part of a group who do some pretty impressive bits and pieces: youtube.com/channel/UCWuLbEA...

In case y'all are wondering why ADHD medication is a good thing, somebody I follow recently posted about discovering the same track that launched my last hyperfixation deep dive and I didn't immediately fill their mentions with half a dozen suggestions of next things to listen to despite not even knowing their music taste. Impulsive behaviour is a thing when I'm not medicated.

In other news, you should absolutely go check out these tracks from Wing that I didn't spam into someone's notifications because sharing hyperfixations is fun (if you're not spamming)!

• Killing me Softly: not a cover, an original beatbox blues song with a guitar solo. youtu.be/hQZJ-23r_Sg
• Phenomenon: most recent track, deep bass dance track still with lots of musicality: youtu.be/eDcLqMp7idQ
• Doppelganger: Wing sings a nice little introspective song ooutside a cafe but snuck a band into the back of his throat when no one was looking youtu.be/YqRBULfanQI #ADHD #beatbox

@[email protected] the rabbit hole is quite deep...

@[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] 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.

@[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] 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"

@[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.

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"

@[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.

@[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:).