Discussion
Scripted up a simple data transformation for school today in Google Sheets and App Scripts are slooooow. Like order of magnitude slower than running vbscript in Excel circa 2000. Is this normal?
Turns out that each operation is very, very, slow but the code speed isn't actually too bad. Basically: for must batch updates and then set values for large ranges at a time, or your code will run like molasses.
Scripted up a simple data transformation for school today in Google Sheets and App Scripts are slooooow. Like order of magnitude slower than running vbscript in Excel circa 2000. Is this normal?
@[email protected] I think you're right, yes.
@[email protected] I probably wasn't clear: the spells your character casts are a stack based programming language whose built in functions are implemented as nodes. So gdscript interpreting arrays of nodes as stacks of operations, sort of. Including quotations and subprocesses - sorry, subspells. It's very silly.
Lighting starting to get going, and no #godot logo! (No real artwork either, but hey).
Initial performance tests are encouraging though; given the spells are basically a very slowly interpreted language built of Godot nodes I was worried it would be unworkably slow and I'd need to start optimising early to get it workable. Turns out that even with dozens of spells flying around at a time it all still just works. #GameDev
One of the students at my wife's school showed great cunning and skill by managing to sneak his mobile phone into a no digital device externally moderated exam.
He showed slightly less cunning when he posted a picture of one of the other students taking the exam to my wife's Google Classroom complaining that nobody with that posture could be taking the exam seriously.
I'm honestly unclear on what he thought would happen next.
Hooking up barks (the short exclaimations made in games by NPCs to respond to events happening in real time).
Death cries seemed the kind of moments of pathos where I could both test the plumbing and flex my mighty game narrative writing skills in some deeply poignant last words.
=== death_cry ===
{~Oh noes!|Woe is me...|Never surrender!|Next time, gadget!|Aaaaaaaaaargh!}
-> END
@agreeable_landfall Worse than that, I live in SOMA, the most paved-over neighborhood in San Francisco. We have more pigeons than leaves. A pigeon-blower would be just as effective.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Hate gas blower so I was very dubious when someone recommended me an electric one. It's great! No louder than a large hair dryer, no messing with explosive petrochemicals, blows all the leaves into a pile that's easy to sweep up. Only thing I'm not clear on is why the leaves are so much harder to sweep up when blown by a gas blower... (and yes, I do live somewhere where there's lots of leaves)
https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access So, that's the limit on LLMs, then -- not a technical cap but a policy one? Why would any frontier model provider continue investing in capability enhancements if there's an artificial ceiling on deployment?
@[email protected] Gotta love the argument of "we agree that none of these things can ever be protected from jail breaking so you should let us carry on selling ours." I mean, yes, the government is biased inconsistent bullshit but as counter arguments go "why haven't you just nuked our whole industry" is a surprising take.
I’d like to see somebody create conlang inspired from prisencolinensinainciusol with the use case being as a film industry standard filler language to depict English speakers, when you already have English used to depict say Russian speakers. The prisencol can help communicate the perspective shift, ie that from the （Anglo depicted) Russian speaker perspective, the Brits or Americans are speaking in Foreign Tongue. I wouldn’t do this by swapping the languages because that would just sound wrong
@[email protected] In the original Turkish translation of Narnia, the translators ended up calling Aslan "Lion" (Lewis had used the Turkish word to sound foreign). It confused me rather and definitely sounded wrong (we happened to be living in Istanbul when it was released).
RE: https://bonfire.mavnn.eu/pub/objects/01KTXR624EZSNZZ3DKSS49KMHT
Artificial Ingratiation? Nah. Almost Incomprehensible? No. Sycophancy-as-a-service? NAILED IT!
@[email protected] I think I managed to break the quote acceptance, so let's have a final try pasting a manual link that might work in both Bonfire and Mastodon. 4th time lucky, or something.
@mavnn @GossiTheDog I quote tooted your post, but it's still telling me you have to approve showing the quote.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Yeah, in a true fediverse moment I think I managed to upgrade to a broken pre-release of Bonfire while the acceptance was queued. Hopefully it will finish working its way back through the backlog and accept the quote reasonably soon 🙈
@[email protected] would it be possible to have federation deletion jobs that don't find the thing to delete not be considered a failed job? I seem to get an awful lot of them (enough to drop federation job success rates down to ~60% sometimes) which makes it hard to spot actual problems when they do happen. Especially because (it appears?) some servers keep on sending the deletion requests, meaning that it's showing errors for things that have already been successfully deleted.
@[email protected] Oh! And "UX". The idea it could also mean something easy and/or efficient to use rather than just "visually shiney". Is that software? I feel like that's at least software adjacent.
What named principles (e.g., information hiding, DRY, etc.) in software development do you find are often referred to but are commonly misunderstood (or are actually flawed)? I have a talk, Principle Misunderstandings, where I cover a few, but I'm planning to extend this to half- and full-day formats, so I'd be interested in what you find is commonly misunderstood.
@mavnn @briankrebs @GossiTheDog "sycophancy as a service" brilliant take, I'm going to borrow that.
@[email protected] Thank you, although I have to honest and say that I think I've heard it used before. Unfortunately I can't remember where, so I'll take a bit of Schrödinger pride in the case that maybe I did coin it on the fly...
second podcast drop in the same week! i'm chatting with beam there done that about game servers on BEAM check it out! https://youtu.be/4MDObD_R5E4?si=ggX1c07MYUlaKp-h
YouTube
@[email protected] I'd never spotted your company name before. Can I just say that "Heuristic Salvo" is an amazing name, I love it.
@GossiTheDog Kind of makes one wonder whether the consulting firms have a future if they are just relying on AI to produce their own reports. OTOH, this story isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of that replacement.
@[email protected] @[email protected] You would have thought that the large, er, "thought leading" consulting firms would have been violently anti-AI; verbose sycophancy as a service is basically the whole business model. That and pre-arranged supplier approval with large orgs so that nobody manages to hire any consultants who are actual experts.
I'm mentoring an older teen through building a game in Godot and we just finished hooking up Ink so he could start adding dialogue to his matrix-esqe cyberpunk rogue-like (he's used it before in @VisualInk during a #VisualNovel course). The code work finished, he realized he needed to pick a dialogue style and now all his cyberpunk revolutionaries have a Sheffield accent and a surprising number of them wax lyrical about Gregg's sausage rolls when not hitting people with a baseball bat. #GameDev #pastry #Godot
@[email protected] Best wishes from a random stranger who happens to like your photos! Hope it goes well, life could do with more happiness these days.
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