Wandering Adventure Party

@sludgecatheter@outerheaven.club I own it as well and have only read a few pages. Alas. I will read it eventually

Despite billions in losses, we still have not learned that null pointers, or things like them, are bad. We deserve our fate.

Def foo() -> list | None:
   …

This is a bad function definition, people who write python or any other dynamic language. Stop returning multiple different kinds of things from your function. It’s a footgun and is the cause of so many bugs in my career. Return items that share the same API only.

Return an empty list, an empty dictionary, an empty string, or an object. All these are better. They have the same API as a filled value and don’t usually cause everything to explode if you accidentally forget a check.

I will be ignored by my team, and I will continue to fix this bug. Don’t live my life.

@sludgecatheter@outerheaven.club They make tailored literature.

@peachymist@labyrinth.zone the central technical challenge is does age verification an where is it stored such that it is “secure”.

California asserts the OS should do it during account creation. and provide an API for applications that want or need to verify age. They assert this keeps the data on the users machine.

Of course this is all bullshit. This is all about control, people trying to profit from mechanisms of control through regulatory lockin, and others pushing it to create layers of protection between them and responsibility.

@NeonPurpleStar@outerheaven.club they wasted so much god damn money, I cannot understand where it all went. There’s seemingly no discernible effect on the world. When the US Government wastes this much money, they end up with 6-7 nuclear aircraft carriers. Meta? They could have gotten more from the money by throwing it in a blast furnace to heat low income homes. Incredible.

@fireweed I wouldn’t treat it as an obligation. Habits are hard to form from things we hate.

@fireweed I appreciate it; it's really hard to get people to come to the meetings consistently.

Oh hey cool, a “small web” stumble upon tool.

Immediately lands me on AI slop

…if your site is requires a large language model to do the writing, it is not part of the small web. It’s part of the slop web. ​:ferndisgust:​

@syveria indeed, it’s really interesting and notoriously difficult. Patents must be “novel, non-obvious, and useful”. The result of mixing of most ingredients is pretty obvious. You need a formula that is surprising, like “red + blue = the color of magic”. Usually the companies patent things around the recipe like tools and processes.

Although even then food companies hesitate. The deal with patents is that to get one, you have to essentially teach everyone how you did it, and the patent eventually expires. If your security is good enough, you can keep a trade secret forever.

I think the miss with DLSS 5 over just AI stuff is that this will be really expensive tech.

The demos I saw were running on a pair of RTX 5090 GPUs. One was handling the game rendering, the other was dedicated entirely to running the DLSS 5 AI model. NVIDIA was upfront that there's still significant optimization work to do, and the plan is to ship DLSS 5 running on a single GPU when it launches later this year.

I don’t see how nvidia reasonably gets to that performance without significant cost increase or degradation. It’s not like they’re going to give it to us for free.

And I think people are about ‘tapped out’ on what they’re willing to spend on cards. The people I knew who used to build ‘megarigs’ all build mid-range rigs now, because the cost has overtaken them. If no one has the hardware for this feature, it won’t drive sales.

I kinda think we’re entering the nadir of powerful home machines. Everyone is going to be scaling back, not up. PC gaming manufacturers will have to stop assuming that users will just keep paying every other year for power and performance.

@damian what’s the next fill going to be?

@fincs@mastodon.social @endrift@social.treehouse.systems right! Before they were called Satsuma tubers, they were Ryūkyū tubers, and before that, Kara (Chinese) tubers, reflecting how the Portuguese brought them to China, from China to the Ryūkyū kingdoms (the trade backdoor between China and Japan), and then finally to the Satsuma domain, who dominated the Ryūkyū kingdom. It’s a big ol chain of cultural transmission along a trade route expressed in the name.

Sometimes I really want to sit down with an author and ask them questions about their work. With The Murder at the Black Car Cafe I want to ask:

* why is 15% of the book a painful explanation of the mystery trope we’re about to experience?
* why is every scene just the protagonist interrogating exposition fonts?
* why is everything tell, not show?
* Did you know that the Sherlock-Holmes style narrative structure was already about 50 years past its pull date by the 1970s?
* did you really have to kill the cat?
* Wouldn’t it be cool if half of the interrogations wasn’t framed around a witness, telling a story to the constable, telling the story to the detective, telling the story to the narrator, telling the story to us?
* What are these “shameful western clothing” you go on about? Do you actually know? All we know is it’s “loud”. It’s weird when we get exact descriptions of the Japanese styles.
* why the maps? They don’t ever seem important
* did you know you can just say Yokohama? Everyone knows what Y— means.

I mean I dropped around half way through so maybe I would have gotten more answers if I continued…

This being “The murder at the black cafe cafe” by Seishi Yokomizo. Which I would obviously not recommend.

I think it’s time to drop this book. I’m beginning to fight it at every turn. I’m 70 pages in and bored out of my mind. Zero characterization, just seems like a painfully droll Japanese Sherlock-style mystery. I also think I know “the twist”

I skipped to the end and … I was mostly right. The author gave away the entire mystery in a single sentence on page 50 or so. ​:akko_badday:​

the chief inspector felt a curious unease rise up through his chest.

I think this guy just needs to see a doctor… he’s got all kinds of weird sensations going on.

a chill ran down the chief inspector’s spine.
2 pages later same scene.
a chill ran down the chief inspector’s spine.

Ok guy, you only get one spine-chill a scene, otherwise you just need to admit that you’re cold.

@matt5sean3@urusai.social Something happens. Police make a statement - Press nearly reprints entire police statement with little to no independent verification, because work. Press becomes mouth piece for the police. Tale as old as time.

@yon@sakurajima.moe indeed. iIt’s sometimes kinda macabre to me. Mythologizing living memory.

I think many people are just overlaying the past with the sense of safety their childhood memories have, even if they didn’t live those times (because it’s all on a curve in a simplistic sort of way).

As someone who had a shit childhood, I wish my more fortunate fellows would color their views of those times with the reminder that their surrounding adults and society at large were constantly hiding the ugliness of reality from them.