#and I may be a translator and not a programmer but fuck if I don't have the skills to save us literal months of work

[lensdeer]

I almost sent my boss a link to my blog to prove I can create a functioning document rendering pipeline using JSON data lmfao fucking oops

[starlitvases]

I can't tell if it's just me, but it very much feels like the @snowchester-system is pushing harmful stereotypes against Mexicans, those with Mexican heritage, and native Spanish-speakers.

Their story is that WitSec (Witness Protection) moved them to Mexico in order to escape their programmers. They claim to have a DSPM script. I find these claims very hard to believe, but that isn't the point.

They publicly state that since they're located in Mexico, they are attempting to learn Spanish. My issue is not it feels very apparent that they aren't making a genuine effort to learn.

1. They have a Quackity introject. Quackity is a real-life YouTuber that lives in Mexico and speaks Spanish fluently. When scrolling through every single one of their posts (yes, I scrolled to the very beginning), there are only four instances in which Spanish is spoken on their page, which is by their Quackity. In these posts, Quackity is aggressive and frequently curses out who they are speaking to. This pushes the stereotype that only Mexicans speak Spanish as well as the stereotype that Mexicans and Latinos overall are loud, aggressive, and dangerous.

2. When Spanish is spoken, it's very broken, with the exception of one post, which I will get to in #3. In these posts, it's an entirely English sentence with one or two words replaced with Spanish. I feel this is making a mockery of Spanglish, which has a deep cultural influence on Spanish-speaking Latinos. It's often used when certain phrases in a language make more sense to say, when one forgets the respective translation, and can be used to signal to others their heritage and bilingual skills. Some use Spanglish because they may feel vulnerable, which I know is the case for me. Simply replacing a couple words in an entirely English sentence is not how one learns Spanish.

3. In the third instance of the Quackity introject speaking Spanish, it is again used to cuss someone out, reflecting a harmful Latino stereotype mentioned in point #1. This post is entirely in Spanish, but it's clear to me it was written in English, then translated to Spanish using Google Translate.

English Translation using Google Translate: "Fuck off. How did you know that? That is one of the triggers of our program and the protectors have been very busy in the inner world. We don't have anyone capable of coping that won't be activated except me. I'm the only headmate able to speak up front at the moment and there are no alters around to translate for me. It's good that he lives in Mexico. - quackity"

Plugging the English translation back into Google Translate gets virtually the same thing. Nevermind the fact that if someone did indeed post a program trigger for them, they should not have replied to the person and posted it. Now, a program trigger is publicly available, and anyone can use it against them. My point here is that they say, "No one is available to translate for me." English is their first language. They are learning Spanish. They have every ability to respond in English, even though they should not have responded at all. I highly suspect Google Translate was used due to the discrepancies in their statements. Again, this is not how one learns Spanish. You should learn from native Spanish-speakers. There are many free resources online made by native Spanish-speakers that one can use. Google Translate is not the answer.

As someone with Mexican and indigenous heritage to Mexico, someone whose family immigrated from Mexico for better opportunities, and as someone that is actively learning Spanish to connect more with my culture, I find this system's behavior abysmal and abhorrent. I have asked other Latinos, and they agree with my stance on this system's behavior. I want to know what other Mexicans, Latinos, and native Spanish-speakers feel about this system and their pushing of negative Mexican stereotypes.

Snowchester, if you are reading this, I need you to take an internal look into your behavior. Even though you think your page is anonymous, the page is still very much public and is open to public-forum. People can, and likely will, notice this behavior of yours and have their own thoughts about it. They may post about your behavior on other platforms, in which someone may recognise your page (previous friends, teachers, etc.) and call you out, publicly. They may know your name and state that publicly. There is already a post of yours in which someone knew a direct cue for your system. Bad people are out there and you've already seen evidence of that. Even if those people aren't directly connected to your case, they can still find and harm you. Right now, the issue is contained to Tumblr, but that likely won't be for long if you continue the reckless and discriminatory behavior. Please talk to your therapist.

[sburbian-sage]

Hey so I've been very carefully fucking around with sburb's coding using some weird and complicated methods do basically scan items to allow me to view their base code and whatnot (trying to figure out a way on my own to edit code but it isn't going very well)

But like have you ever heard of AH? This dude is referenced everywhere for basically everything from sprite pendants to weapons

Whoever they are their awful at shit because sburb has some of the worst spaghetti code ive ever seen

I scanned a rock and breaking it down its code was basically 'if rock - stay rock unless funny' 'TODO, AH please add more rocks'

Who is this guy? Have you heard anything?this is only my second session so im new to the replayer-net

I feel like doing any amount of code editing is begging for the game to detect YOU as a virus and then delete you. Or even looking at the code in any prodding manner. But who am I to judge people for their hobbies.

As for who AH is, I have no clue who they are *in particular*, but contextually they're obviously a programmer who helped work on SBURB (or else they refer to themselves in the third person). "AH" could be an abbreviated online handle (like how you might abbreviate skepticArbiter as SA), or someone's real life initials, human or troll. If it's initials, then AH along with their collaborators are more likely than not deceased. If it's a handle, they could be a replayer, potentially still alive.

You're probably slapping your cheeks and saying "THIS IS HUGE, do you mean SBURB was actually made by humans or trolls", and I'm going to deflate your head a little. SBURB was made by Skaia, or whatever cosmic forces govern Skaia. In most worlds, a session will begin once history has reached a state of widespread industrialization, by which point a company by the name of "Skaianet" with blatantly obvious ties to the game will have situated themselves, so they can release the game to this universe's coplayers. There are circumstances where Skaianet may not exist, however, in which case the universe will force SBURB to come into existence, one way or another. Maybe a hidden catacomb under Bethesda HQ gets discovered, and the runes can be translated into a type of code which produces SBURB, which Bethesda sells. Or one of the players is responsible for SBURB's creation, plagued by persistent yet vividly detailed dreams which compel them to code the game from scratch, after which they will have forgotten the dreams or how they accomplished this feat, leaving behind an impenetrable black box of their own creation.

And before you start going off about "version drift", these altered circumstances would reasonably introduce several windows through which alterations to the base SBURB code can be implemented. However, seeing as how the genesis of SBURB is supernatural in nature, it just so happens to create a compatible and recognizable version of SBURB, warts and all. If you were responsible for creating SBURB in one of your sessions and kicked yourself for not fixing the door or whatever, you were most likely in a fugue state throughout the entire process. So don't beat yourself up about it.

So in all likelihood, this "AH" was just whoever got saddled with the unfortunate duty of coding SBURB in a world with unusual circumstances that couldn't accommodate a conventional Skaianet. Or if Skaianet did exist in your world, they're a normal human who stumbled ass-backwards into the situation and got reprimanded by, I assume, Skaia itself. Poor sap.

[stumpyjoepete]

Ok, this is a niche thing to complain about, but it insane to me that the situation with strict aliasing rules in C and C++ has such a monumental mismatch between the standard and what people actually want and need to do:

For a long time, there was no standard-compliant way to alias a piece of memory using two different types.[1] I mean, people did it anyway, but whether you got fucked over by the optimizer was dependent on how you did it, which things were in which translation unit (or I suppose whether someone did LTO), which compiler you used, which compiler-specific attributes or flags you used, and/or luck.

memcpy has (always?) been blessed as a way to bit-cast between types, but, as the name implies, it copies data--there's no way to just ask for a single memory location with two different views onto it, although the compiler may or may not be smart enough to avoid actually copying stuff.

It was only in C11--published in 2011!--, that the popular method of union-based type-punning was finally added to explicitly clarified to be in the standard. This is often good enough for what you want to do, but it's not enough--you can't write a standard-compliant implementation of malloc in C11 (or C17), as far as I can tell![2]

The union trick is not kosher in C++, but they added bit_cast (which is basically type-safe memcpy) in C++20, and they're adding start_lifetime_as in C++23, which I think actually makes it possible to write a standard-compliant malloc? Or do the type-punning you wanted to do to fucking begin with?

There aren't that many super great reasons to start a new project today in C or C++. But if you're writing an operating system or a language runtime or doing embedded programming or whatever, there weren't really any good alternatives for a long time. But these are exactly the situations where you want to alias the same memory via different types! I feel like I am taking crazy pills!

tl;dr -- regular C programmers talking with the people who write the language standard and the optimizers in compilers:

[1]: Someone is going to bring up the thing about char*. You are allowed to alias anything as a char*. This is sufficient if all you want to do is print out the underlying representation or twiddle the bits one at a time, but it's only one way! You can't start with a char* and then alias it as something else. This doesn't get you what you want with type-punning, and it's definitely not enough to make malloc work.

[2]: Yes, really. I think you could make some very trivial malloc implementations (no-op free or just delegating every malloc/free to a system call and never recycling memory) in a standard-compliant way, but otherwise no. I don't see anything C23 that's relevant to the situation. It ironically might be possible to write a standard-compliant malloc in C++ using the new C++23 features though, and I think someone is trying to do this in llvm's in-progress libc.

[thirst2]

Every so often I'll come across a post, lately, where AI's been used to, say, help with medical research or help workers do their jobs more easily or less dangerously and there'll be a comment like, "THIS is good use of AI."

And, like, they're not wrong; there's also the whole discussion to be had about how the phrase AI is rather broad and the way it's used in art theft isn't necessarily the same as its application in other areas of computing but, like, yeah: tools that can be used to inflict harm can also be used in a beneficial way (e.g. you can beat a man to death with a hammer but you can also shelter a person by building a house).

But something that I, now, notice all of the time is the way we have these conversations like we're rooting for various teams.

Because, ultimately, that's all (most) people can do in this conversation (as it is currently exists), if we really think about it? Unless someone wants to tell me that most of the AI-to-steal-art-is-Bad-but-that's-not-all-we-can-use-AI-for crowd are AI programmers/users.

It is companies and proprietary-holders who have built these AI models; "Go AI!" can only ever translate to "I support what these companies are building! Even though I will have no say in how they are built or how they are used!"

And, after the last damn decade, why would we ever be comfortable about that? It was nearly 9 years ago we were super concerned about the overreach of police across the country, having conversations about taking pictures during protests, and warning of the ways police use those pictures to track down individuals well after the protest was finished. Pretty sure it was within the last decade that we were concerned about the way automated systems (like AI, for example) could further entrench certain biases about race and gender and ableness, even if unintentionally, or how they could erase the marginalized within those categories entirely.

It's not that I don't understand the arguments vying for nuance in the conversation; it's that I don't understand jumping on the bandwagon of a campaign you have no control over the future of. From a viewpoint of praxis, my first step would be securing the latter – not arguing about whether it should even exist or not.

My standpoint on AI is and has been that, if it's not open-source (and, by that, I mean thoroughly copyrighted with a copyleft software license which guarantees anyone can look at the code, regardless of who writes it, and that it is always available to do so), I have no interest in what it does or what it's used for.

Anything less than that can not guarantee that we know how it's being used or allow us to swiftly and completely correct the biases it may take on.

Think you're solving a problem-space so important that I should trust you, Microsoft? Then show us the fucking code.

[synthmusic91]

comment I left on this video:

Re: Silicon Valley coders, I think the crux of the "Promethean delusion", as CJ puts it, is that their medium is abstracted enough that it does, in fact, feel like playing god. The tools are good enough that they become almost invisible. Computers and programming languages are precise enough that overwhelmingly, an error or discrepancy in a program's behavior is due to the programmer failing to consider some nuance of the language or computational environment. The logical conclusion of this is of course that as long as a programmer writes the right commands, they can do _anything_. It's like, if you can think a thought just right, you can change the way a computer behaves, and sometimes the computer might be controlling a gigantic metal arm, or running someone's life support, or running a game that's making thousands of people cry. It's actually like magic. Within whatever pocket of computational space they're working with, the programmer is literally god.

Adding to the magic of it, within programming there is also the idea of data vs. code: both are stored the exact same way on a hard drive. The distinction is purely in where we allow the program to read from. The power of this is like if you were reading a book and suddenly you read a sentence and that caused the page to change color. That's fucking bananas!

"Standing on the shoulders of giants" is also an interesting thing to say re: coding, because while that's objectively true, the reason we have programming languages is to abstract all of that away. In programming languages, there's this idea called Turing completeness. A Turing machine (you may already know this but I'm going to spare you the Wikipedia search just in case) is an early computer that, while primitive, can theoretically (sometimes it's slow, but again this is theory) run any computer algorithm. The standard for a language being Turing complete is being able to simulate a Turing machine which, transitively, means it can run any computer algorithm. Turing completeness is the highest class of programming language that currently exists in that it can express everything we currently know is possible to express in computing. I say all this to say that if all you care about is a program's execution, every programming language can be directly translated to every other programming language without any loss of information. So while computing technology may have advanced really far, we are, mathematically speaking, still doing the same thing that Ada Lovelace did before computers even really existed, just with enough veracity that we can see results within an actually feasible amount of time. The feedback loop has gotten a lot faster.

There are of course different ways/styles of achieving the same execution, which is where the creativity comes in. I don't have a good analogy for this, because usually when people are consuming the products of a programmer's labor, they don't care about the style in which the programmer wrote it. The nuance and the style aren't apparent to those who don't have access to the code. When you're programming, you, and by you I mean me, really do feel like the God in the tower, whose art is not hung up in the Louvre, but rather exists in the arrangement of molecules of the building itself. To an observer doesn't understand programming, I want to say it would feel almost like witnessing something transhuman—like the coder is accessing a value system that the observer can't understand. To be clear, I'm not saying that coding is a superior form of art of whatever, I'm just saying that the creativity is just harder to observe.

It's interesting that you said woodworking feels like creating something out of nothing, because that's what programming feels that way to me—one starts with literally nothing, physically speaking, and ends with a program, which does things that are spiritually very real (I'm also showing my age here—I grew up on the internet). The low physical barrier to entry is also a factor in making coding feel like playing god. The only physical limitation is how fast I can type, which is not relevant because the actual bottleneck is how fast I can think. So that ethereal and cerebral quality of programming contributes to the god complex, I think.

Contrast that to how I feel singing or painting. I'm taking voice lessons right now, and having to do the slow work of training my body to produce the sounds I hear in my head is a very mortal experience. And painting is painting. Nothing tethers me to the physical world more than my acrylics drying before I've had a chance to use them.

But anyway I hope that explained the Silicon Valley coders' feelings about programming in an enlightening way, because I know coders are NOT very good with their words lol (except me, I'm special).

[techforevil-er]

20/11-03/12/2022

I think the main thing I learned from doing those is that I need to write them weekly or I forget absolutely everything that happened.

Team 1 is trundling along. One of the things we want to do (migrating stuff from a fairly archaic and badly performing app to a standard format) is finally making some progress after a huge decisionmaking overhead (people were already quite impatient about it when I joined in August). Thankfully I managed to agree someone with specialism we don't have in the team to spend 3 days per week on it instead of having 3 people for a day each.

The team handed over some recommendations from a Discovery to another area. They're fairly small and process-type fixes as opposed to something more transformative, which we also can't tackle because it's in another team's remit and they have plans to work on it or commission a managed service in a quarter or few. Doesn't feel ideal to me but I don't think I'd have much success if I pushed the subject.

We had a fun away day we went to Manchester for, with a mince pie blind taste test. I need to pull together the results and publish the structured tasting sheets so other people can do it if they want haha. I've send everyone joining remotely pastries as well and I've gotta say their reviews made me really want to try the Wahaca mincepie empandas and mulled plum pastries from Brighton's Flour Pot bakeries. :P We went to an escape room whih is one of those things that are not quite the same remotely....

Team 2 ways of working are getting a bit more settled (despite - again - lack of a PM), with some refinements to Trello and hacking together an Objective -> Epic -> Card structure. Lots of engagement with other departments and private sector to improve things they've done mostly with good results.

Overall I feel like there's very little consciousness on the programme how much overhead the lack of ownership, constant handovers, and high & varied WIP bring. So far I've been escalating on behalf of my teams but maybe there's a chance of doing something more structured. I should put my thoughts in order in case my contract does not get renewed anyway.

No major revelations about coaching altho I think I'm just settling into being more empathetic and supportive with the current group. 🤦‍♀️ I want to think how I can translate this into something I can do for a living by May 2023.

Black Friday happened! Shopping:

lots of games on Steam

lots of courses (pottery and jewellery-making)

I've not played everything I bought yet but The Case of the Golden Idol (ideal for people who thought Obra Dinn was ok but a bit difficult like me, hehe) and Boyfriend Dungeon (Hades-lite) were very fun. Unpacking was fine, I guess. I appreciate the gay anyway.

The courses mostly start in January apart from the wheel throwing 1:1 which once again confirmed I have absolutely no contol over my body. The instructor did say it took her 3 months to even center well which I don't believe but I'll take. 😂 I really need to join a studio to get some independent practice time.

Food wise I finally made it to Din Tai Fung (dim sum) and Unity Diner (vegan food and cocktails/mocktails). Both well worth your money. I'll be back to Unity Diner for lunch very very soon.

I also had two proper (until closing time) pub nights in this time period which was fucking amazing, I miss this shit from before Covid. Best chats and goss in a long time.

Good vids of the last fortnight:

Bonus mention to the Defunctland Disney Channel Theme video (very similar in theme to that hbomberguy) vid, and which you should really watch to learn about Andrea Taylor (and how the thoughts of fish are planted in kids' minds well before Finding Nemo).

Next two week is pretty busy socially if nothing else (firebreak @ work, remains to be seen if I join any project.. Team 2 might carry on as usual so probably just a bit of a breather to do admin things...).

[books-and-dragons]

oK TAKE TWO; TUMBLR PLS DON'T MONCH THIS: What cognitive treasure do you think would fit the decaying theatre aesthetic of the palace!goro au I'm working on ?? I'm honestly stumped bc I can't think of anything that would fit his distortion well enough or translate well into the physical version of the treasure, the locket from his mother that he lost during his constant shuffle around foster homes.

TUMBLR I CANT BELIEVE YOU MONCHED THIS FIRST TIME ROUND

well, i suppose a withering, decaying mask could always be a contender, same could be said for a costume….

a withering bouquet of flowers could be interesting, it may not fit for a treasure? but i’ll mention it because it came to mind as an interesting aspect- a bouquet is always given to the lead role of the production, at the end of the bows, it’s basically tradition. 

a playbill/programme? like the locket, it holds precious secrets inside, details, has a lot of sentimental value- especially for performers. director’s headset could be interesting, as it’s key for management and control how how something appears? it’s the driving direction, key to making sure all functions as it shouldsame goes for stage mic, all performers must have one, and without it you’re pretty fucked. you can fake it, but it’s gonna be at the expense of your own voice, and eventually it’s gonna get worse and people will start to noticeif in doubt, a locket itself could work, some actors do have a lucky item that they wear for performances. or maybe it’s her suicide note, or something along those linesall principles get their own dressing room, it could be something like the costume rack- various outfits, various personas (costumes tend to have notes on too, could relate to certain behaviours he should portray when a certain role) 

idk half of these are probably more aspect than treasures?god give me some more time and i’ll think of better ones, im drawing such a blank here, im awful at this

i dance all my life and suddenly go blank when i gotta think theatre things. i hate me.