This is a post about how I personally use AI. This is not a post about the ethical/societal/environmental issues. This is not because I do not think there are any, but because I do not wish to talk about them in this post. This is also not necessarily a judgment of other people's usage; these are my personal preferences. Conversely, do not read this post to imply that I condemn or…
If you have a functioning Internet connection, you've probably seen someone use the word "slop" to refer to something they don't like, especially if that something was produced by AI. I don't think this is useful. Arguing about definitions of fuzzy terms is inherently a fuzzy endeavor because by definition (heh) I can't be wrong about what other people mean by a term. So to be…
The word 'techbro' has seen a massive uptake in the past few years (source: trust me), driven in large part by the massive hype machine that is the AI industry. I don't think it's a useful word, I think it's used to imply connections that don't exist, and I think we'd be better off without it. To illustrate my point, here are three people I've seen referred…
Blowing the stack is one of the few ways to kill a Rust program that you can't really recover from. On Unix systems, the area just past the end of the stack is set up as a guard page (either by the host OS or by Rust's own setup code) so that trying to access it will trigger a SIGSEGV or SIGBUS signal, and as part of the general setup code Rust adds to every program, it installs a signal…
So recently I've been hearing a lot of buzz about this new operating system that a bunch of my friends have tried out. I had a spare machine lying around, so I decided to give it a shot. And frankly, I'm deeply unimpressed. There are two separate "settings" menus written with two different GUI toolkits, and some applications use a third one that seems to be from a 30-year-old build. This…
A virtual cat running arouund a window, chasing a pointer. I'm not sure this is what "pointer chasing" is supposed to be. This post assumes general familiarity with C (pointers, manual memory management, etc), Rust, and the idea of a display server, but no Wayland-specific knowledge. I'm not a Wayland expert by any means; this is just stuff I figured out by reading source code and…
I use full-disk encryption on my laptop because I'm a bit of a control nerd like that. And I didn't write down the password anywhere because that meant that anyone who got that password would probably also be able to get my laptop. Finally, I had a shorter password for my user account since I type it frequently (sudo, unlock screensaver, etc). Which worked fine... until I had a month or…
Recent advances in the field of 'biological intelligence' have been impressive. A hexade ago, they were limited to tasks that required navigating the physical world: turning knobs, pulling levers, and so on. Now, companies such as Carbonize and SpikeTrain are producing biological networks that are capable of producing what they claim is 'real art'. And it is true that the…
NOTE : I'm explicitly not going to address all the events that led to rms resigning and then rejoining the FSF board. I certainly do have opinions, but I want this piece to focus entirely on a technical/leadership perspective. I'm also going to talk a lot about emacs here because that's the GNU project that I have the most complaints about. To establish my Cool Kid Credentials,…
NOTE 2022-10-02 : Hello again, Hacker News . Some people have very strange opinions about the fact that I used the word 'depression' in the description of this post. See my response. Modern software can be... a mess. Electron has made it easier to develop cross-platform applications, but at the cost of bloating everything by the footprint of an entire browser, and browsers themselves are…
I'm one of those people that actually, genuinely enjoys using Linux. While macOS has its appeals, I like the idea of a computer setup that you can just tinker with as much as you want, and macOS very much isn't that. (And the less that's said about Windows as a desktop OS, the better.) Unfortunately, Linux hardware compatibility with laptops is always a bit of a game, due to the…
Patreon's core way of letting content creators interact with their patrons is by effectively hosting a blog that's ACLed so that only people who pay enough money can read the posts; patrons can also see a stream of all of the new posts across creators. In a better world, they would offer each user an RSS feed, or even a feed per creator. But they don't, because it's 2021 and…
Stepping on the rake Like many window manager nerds, I have a status bar (in my case, waybar ) that shows the artist and title of the song I'm currently listening to. cmus has a command-line tool that (among other things) will format information for you, so I thought it was as easy as cmus-remote -C "format_print '%a - %t'" . And that does, in fact work... as long as I don't…
About 8 months ago, I decided that I'd gotten tired of macOS. It's a Unix, which is nice, and I like that I can set up things with relatively minimal effort through Homebrew, but I wanted something that actually gave me more control over my system. So I decided that 2020 was going to be the Year Of Linux On Ash's Laptop. In addition, I decided to try out NixOS , which is an…
(This post is going to have some amount of spoilers for This Is How You Lose The Time War , so if you don't wan't to be spoiled on that, stop reading here. It's a fantastic book, promise.) I grew up, in a sense, on the Something Awful Dot Com forums. It's inarguable that if I hadn't been there, I wouldn't have met some of the people I did, I wouldn't have…