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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Infinite scroll is scarcely ever used in a good way

    Just to clarify, we’re only talking about mainstream social media here, right? Those are the only platforms they’re considering here, and more specifically, only TikTok right now.

    “Infinite scroll” is also how you can scroll up in your chat log and see more messages. It’s how you can open logs for a VM online and see logs going further and further back. It’s how you can search for a video on YouTube and keep scrolling down (past the inevitable pile of shit) until you find it.

    On social media platforms, and in particular not in a chat interface, it can be toxic.


  • You can’t really ban dark patterns even though we all agree they suck.

    I think the point I was getting at was that a lot of things dark patterns do are individually things that have the potential for good or bad. Infinite scroll is one example. There’s also modals, sale banners, and so on.

    What makes a dark pattern dark isn’t the specific, individual tools at use. It’s the sum of those, plus the intent.


  • Doesn’t look like this extends beyond TikTok, or at least mainstream social media as a whole.

    Infinite scroll itself isn’t really a problem. It’s just one of the many tools used to keep users engaged on these platforms specifically by removing an interruption from the experience, but isn’t sufficient on its own to create that unhealthy behavior. It’s also used in healthier ways, like search results, chat logs, and so on.

    The EU attempting to rein in these platforms’ control over its users will be interesting to watch. There are decades of research these companies have done on user psychology to maximize their capture of the user’s attention. Forcing them not to use all the tools they developed might result in people breaking out of the cycle of endlessly scrolling. Or it might just annoy users. I don’t know which will happen.



  • If you’re writing a script that’s more than 269 lines long, you shouldn’t be using Bash.

    Jokes aside, the point isn’t the lines of code. It’s complexity. Higher level languages can reduce complexity with tasks by having better tools for more complex logic. What could be one line of code in Python can be dozens in Bash (or a long, convoluted pipeline consisting of awk and sed, which I usually just glaze over at that point). Using other languages means better access to dev tools, like tools for testing, linting, and formatting the scripts.

    While I’m not really a fan of hostility, it annoys me a lot when I see these massive Bash scripts at work. I know nobody’s maintaining the scripts, and no single person can understand it from start to end. When it inevitably starts to fail, debugging them is a nightmare, and trying to add to it ends up with constantly looking up the syntax specific commands/programs want. Using a higher level language at least makes the scripts more maintainable later on.



  • EDIT: briefly searching indicates it’s common in South Korea too. Not sure if it’s just more common in Asia right now or what. Seems like most of the articles about the West I’m finding are about cameras in bathrooms and shit (not that that’s better…).

    It can (and does) happen in all countries. For whatever reason though, it seems to be more common in eastern Asia, from what I’ve seen anyway.

    If this bothers you (and it probably should), then you should really check every hotel room you stay in, regardless of country. It usually just takes a few minutes when you get into the room, plus you can check for bed bugs while you’re at it.


  • Moreover, you cannot say compilers are deterministic. There are situations where they are not (at least for the user).

    https://krystalgamer.github.io/high-level-game-patches/

    I’m not following. Which part of this is nondeterministic?

    The language being complicated to write and the compiler being confusing to use isn’t an indicator of determinism. If GCC were truly nondeterministic, that’d be a pretty major bug.

    Also, note that I mentioned that the output behavior is deterministic. I’m not referring to reproducible builds, just that it always produces code that does what the source specifies (in this case according to a spec).





  • The library is two text files (code) that are processed by an LLM (interpreter) to generate code of another type. This is not that new in terms of workflow.

    I think what makes this the worst is the fact that the author admits that you can’t be sure the library will work until you generate the code and test it. Even then you cannot guarantee the security of the generated code and as you do not understand the code you also cannot give support or patch it.

    I’ve tried explaining how LLMs are not equatable to compilers/interpreters in the past, and it’s usually to people who aren’t in software roles. What it usually comes down to when I try to explain it is determinism. A compiler or interpreter deterministically produces code with some kind of behavior (defined by the source code). They often are developed to a spec, and the output doing the wrong thing is a bug. LLMs producing the wrong output is a feature. It’s not something you try to fix, and something you often can’t fix.

    This, of course, ignores a lot of “lower level” optimizations someone can make about specific algorithms or data structures. I use “lower level” in quotes, of course, because those are some of the most important decisions you can make while writing code, but turning off your brain and letting a LLM do it for you “abstracts” those decisions away to a random number generator.





  • Funding or not, Miller expects sudo-rs to become the next generation of the tool in coming years.

    “Ubuntu is already shipping sudo-rs as the default sudo command in their latest versions,” Miller told us. “I’ve been in contact with the people working on sudo-rs since the project started and I trust them to do right by the sudo user base.”

    Projects don’t last forever, and when they inevitably end, it’s an opportunity to switch to something newer and hopefully better. Sudo coming to an end, if it does, will just force people onto alternatives.

    Being open source, sudo will always exist, whether someone else wants to maintain it, fork it, use it as-is, or just reference it. It’s because it’s open source that it can serve a purpose even beyond its EOL.

    Anyway, sudo’s not dead yet, so there’s still plenty of time for people to look at what’s out there. Some distros have already moved to, or are considering moving to, alternatives like sudo-rs, so I’d expect that to continue.