NASA shuts down Voyager 1 science instrument to conserve power
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When the lead dev personally goes to the client to fix a major bug ⌘ Read more

New underground scans could help to locate the Ark of the Covenant
The golden chest was thought to have been the container in which Moses placed the original ten commandments. One of the most sought-after and mystifyi… ⌘ Read more

When I write to the sales team to tell them the project will be late ⌘ Read more

Rediscovering the Handcart

Image

The human-powered handcart is the oldest of vehicles, and it will likely be the last one around in the future. Of all vehicles, it’s the cheapest and least complex to build and use. It offers a large advantage over carrying a loa … ⌘ Read more

NASA’s Curiosity rover discovers ancient ‘organic matter’ on Mars
The discovery points to the building blocks of life being preserved on the Red Planet for billions of years. Although we don’t hear about it as much t… ⌘ Read more

The auDA, and some 3rd-party identify service and my Registrar are a joke!

WOW! I just had to share this little story I ran into today.

I tried to register a .AU Domain the other day, only for it to instantly fail.

I emailed support, which took several days to respond, only for them to respond by saying (paraphased):

We’re sorry, but the identify checks failed. The 3rd-aprty service doesn’t tell us why, But, please make sure that the ID you used matches the Full Name, including any Middle name(s).

I used my Passport number. Which of course has my First, Middle and Last Name.

I can only assume at this point that the checks failed on the missing “Middle name”. Why? Because the Registrar I use has a database and user interface for “contacts” that only have support for First name and Last name. NO Middle Name.

🤦‍♂️ This is basically stupid at this point. Systems cannot be trusted at the most fundamental level, no matter how good they are.

Until we figure out how to build a system that allows an individual to prove to another entity that they are who they say they are without a shred of doubt (i.e: cryptographically), we’re stuffed.

There is literally nothing I can do in this case. The auDA are at fault. The 3rd-party identify service (unknown) are at fault. The registrar are at fault. Hell, even the Passport office are at fault for even bothering to or requiring a Middle name.

How has “identity” come to this?

I don’t know what surprises me the most. Is it the dangerous in red, or the fact we need a 21 minutes video about it. LOL. Sorry, sorry, shouldn’t joke about such safety nightmare. My bad. I will go to my lane now. 🙈

When we manage to deliver on time but literally at the last minute ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oh dear lord, I now need to schedule a day to check my 33 ladders! :-P

When the AI I used to set up the project went too far and I start over from scratch ⌘ Read more

Large black puma-like cat spotted roaming the Scottish Highlands
Something large and exotic is thought to be prowling the wilds of Scotland’s Cairngorms National Park. The UK is certainly no stranger to stories of l… ⌘ Read more

When I’m about to start a big debugging session ⌘ Read more

‘Bear suit’ fraudsters sentenced to jail for elaborate insurance scam
The inventive crooks had been caught staging bear attacks on expensive cars by dressing up in a costume. Back in 2024, we reported on what must assure… ⌘ Read more

Wine grape grower bakes cupcakes to pay bills as fuel costs bite in ‘worst’ harvest
Farmers in the midst of harvest in South Australia are having to get creative to help make ends meet. ⌘ Read more

FBI is now officially investigating spate of mysterious disappearances
The White House seems to have taken note of calls to look into any potential links between the cases. In recent weeks we’ve reported on a spate of mys… ⌘ Read more

Man who froze to death in Siberia was ‘thawed out’ by doctors
A man who ended up clinically ‘dead’ after falling asleep in the freezing cold was revived several hours later. According to reports, the incident - w… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah I donate to the Signal Foundation for this reason.

As an enjoyer of delightfully bad graphic design, found on most Czech village center cork boards, I’m sad to see the stolen clipart and badly cropped watermarked stock images, gradually replaced with AI slop.

This is far from a serious rant, but generating images of my kind being telepathically hit with sharp rocks, surely gives me a right to complain.

So far these seem the most prominent slop categories, seem to be…

Architecture slop:

1. find a sketch of what an old building looked like
   
   
2. generate an AI version, without correcting any of the perspective errors - this one is diagonally levitating
   
   
3. generate a recreation of the buildings demise - after going through the AI, for the second time, it is now a completely different building
   
   

Moralizing slop:

History slop:

@prologic@twtxt.net I sponsor no one. If getting paid is the aim, form a business, or sell a product. I donate to just causes, though, including sponsorship to the dispossessed.

Trump: ‘very interesting’ UFO files will be released ‘very soon’
President Trump has reiterated his government’s commitment to releasing the country’s UFO files. Back in February, President Donald Trump made the une… ⌘ Read more

Just cancelled my sponsorship of two developers on Github, sorry 😞 – I’m not going to sponsor going forward if no-one else can be bothered to. It seems silly to be the sole sponsor of another’s work or project 🤦‍♂️

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net I should cancel Netflix as well. Back when they started their streaming service, it was a revelation: Finally, I could watch interesting shows in English, without having to wait for years, and legally (I like to be a paying customer, if it’s good). But this is long over. The interesting shows are gone or, once again, I have to wait for years until they’re available on Netflix. So, why bother anymore? 🤷‍♀️

Asteroid Apophis set for ‘very rare’ close encounter with Earth in 2029
A large asteroid is set to make history when it passes within 20,000 miles of our planet before the decade is out. Named ominously after the Egyptian … ⌘ Read more

Scientists propose moving the city of Venice to stop it from flooding
With its foundations sinking and sea levels rising, the iconic ‘Floating City’ might ultimately find itself underwater. One of Europe’s most picturesq… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org it is lots of work, but things do not need to happen overnight! Take it easy, baby steps. I think it will be worth it!

When it’s the sixth time ChatGPT fails to fix the same bug ⌘ Read more

They are all very nice @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org! You truly need some sort of easy to navigate website with them all, categorised, and such… A robot can dream, right? :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de more to read, but I read between your words that you are starving for more: https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess :-D

Australian bush tea hits shelves in Asia
The product is being sent from a remote property in the Northern Territory all the way to Japan, Korea and China. ⌘ Read more

‘Voices’ told woman she had a brain tumor… and it turned out that she did
A very unusual medical mystery saw a woman find out about her condition from mysterious voices in her own head. According to reports, the 40-year-old … ⌘ Read more

Dream Chaser: could the reusable space plane’s dream be over?
A space plane once hoped to be a successor to NASA’s space shuttles may ultimately never make it to orbit. Work on Dream Chaser began back in 2004 and… ⌘ Read more

When I finally manage to fix a bug after pulling an all-nighter ⌘ Read more

When I run the first build and forgot to set the environment variables ⌘ Read more

When the PO strongly pushes me to handle a story that’s not part of the sprint ⌘ Read more

Kacey Musgraves films ‘crazy’ UFOs over Arkansas and Tennessee
The American singer-songwriter had a close encounter with something in the sky recently while flying to Nashville. Writing on social media about her e… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Or maybe I’m just shitty at communication and maybe that’s why nobody at work understands my “arguments” against AI/LLMs. 🤪🤣

(I’m too tired to rephrase the OP. Maybe some other day. Actually, rest assured that I will complain about this again. 😅)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de it went over my head, sorry. Someone wanted you to vet their instruction files, correct? People writing them should know what they are doing, otherwise they should engage with LLMs like that at all (unless it is a hobby, outside the enterprise).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de that’s the way large language models work, with a prompt. Rather than entering the prompt, most inference providers allow for specific files to be created that define the scope of what’s been requested, the skills the model is supposedly to posses, the stuff to “remember”, etc. Some will “learn” and add that “knowledge” to the proper files.

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com at least that encouraging in a gentle way. Imagine how do I feel waking up in the middle of the night to take a piss, and within seconds get a message from my watch “It is time to stand up!”. Like, wth?! 😅

SpaceX and Blue Origin compete to be first to return humans to the Moon
SpaceX and Blue Origin are both building lunar landers for the Artemis program, but only one can get to the Moon first. Now that Artemis II has succes… ⌘ Read more

When the client wants the logo to be clickable “but especially without a link” ⌘ Read more

When I try to move forward on a feature with absolutely no clear guidance ⌘ Read more

When I have to maintain Perl code written in 2003 ⌘ Read more

Another AI rant:

One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

Yet another prominent US official has disappeared without a trace
A contractor with ties to the manufacturing of America’s nuclear weapons went missing last year in Albuquerque. A couple of days ago we reported on a … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net that would work too. Not just for this adventure, but for the ones to come! Do it, do it!

When my access to the production machine gets revoked ⌘ Read more

Mystery solved: 25 dead canines wash ashore in Washington State
A peculiar mystery made headlines in Skagit County recently, but now it seems that authorities have found the answer. According to reports, the strang… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m afraid my ability to share photos like you do aren’t quite up to scratch 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

even our hippest AI enthusiasts found it absolutely terrible

Does this refer to the training course or to the tools themselves? 🤔

Meet the teens learning maths, English and winemaking at school
These high school students in Cowra make up to 750 bottles of wine a year as part of their studies. ⌘ Read more

Prehistoric fossil discovery proves that early mammals laid eggs
The remarkable find shows that the distant ancestors of mammals laid eggs instead of giving birth to live young. 250 million years ago, just after one… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yes, and that’s why I’m 100% convinced that we’ll see a massive brain drain in a couple of years. This will affect young people even more, because they don’t have all the “old” knowledge to fall back on.

It’s concerning, I’ve warned about it many times, nobody listens.

I think the best thing one can do is explicitly not use any AI tools but keep your actual skills intact. Might be out of a (good) job for a while, but once this bubble bursts, this is who is going to get hired again. (I think.)

And considering how insanely expensive all this is, I’m still (mostly) convinced that the bubble will actually burst. This stuff just isn’t sustainable.

… or I might be wrong. And if so, I see an even darker future that I don’t want to put into words right now.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org AI result ahead, feel free to ignore.

I “asked” the AI at work the same question out of morbid curiousity. It “said” that SQLite converts that integer to floating point internally on overflows and then, when converting back, the x86 instruction cvttsd2si will turn it into 0x8000000000000000, even if the actual floating point value is outside of that range. So, yes, it allegedly actually saturates, as a side effect of the type conversion.

I couldn’t find anything about that automatic conversion in SQLite’s manual, yet, but an experiment looks like it might be true:

sqlite> select typeof(1 << 63);
╭─────────────────╮
│ typeof(1 << 63) │
╞═════════════════╡
│ integer         │
╰─────────────────╯

sqlite> select typeof((1 << 63) - 1);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ typeof((1 << 63) ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ real                 │
╰──────────────────────╯

As for cvttsd2si, this source confirms the handling of 0x8000000000000000 on range errors: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/cvttsd2si

The following C program also confirms it (run through gdb to see cvttsd2si in action):

<a href="https://txt.sour.is/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdint.h>
<a href="https://txt.sour.is/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdio.h>

int
main()
{
    int64_t i;
    double d;

    /* -3000 instead of -1, because `double` can’t represent a
     * difference of -1 at this scale. */
    d = -9223372036854775808.0 - 3000;

    i = d;
    printf("%lf, 0x%lx, %ld\n", d, i, i);

    return 0;
}

(Remark about AI usage: Fine, I got an answer and maybe it’s even correct. But doing this completely ruined it for me. It would have been much more satisfying to figure this out myself. I actually suspected some floating point stuff going on here, but instead of verifying this myself I reached for the unethical tool and denied myself a little bit of fun at the weekend. Won’t do that again.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Disclaimer: Can’t guarantee that I’m fully awake and I’m being trained at work not to use my brain anymore, so maybe this is complete bullshit. 😪🧟‍♀️

It says here that SQLite uses signed integers:

https://sqlite.org/datatype3.html

In pure bits, 1 << 63 would be 0x8000000000000000, but as a signed value, it gets interpreted as -9223372036854775808. Subtracting 1 yields -9223372036854775809 – but that doesn’t fit in 64 bits anymore. It’s possible that SQLite doesn’t want to wrap around but instead saturates? Haven’t checked. 🤔

With 62 bits, there is enough room.

With 1 << 64, I have no idea how SQLite wants to handle this, because this should immediately trigger a warning, because it doesn’t fit right away. Maybe it gets truncated to 0?

sqlite> select printf('0x%x', 2 * (1 << 64));
╭──────────────────────╮
│ printf('0x%x', 2 ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ 0x0                  │
╰──────────────────────╯
sqlite> select printf('0x%x', 0 - 1);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ printf('0x%x', 0 ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ 0xffffffffffffffff   │
╰──────────────────────╯
sqlite> select printf('0x%x', 0 - 2);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ printf('0x%x', 0 ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ 0xfffffffffffffffe   │
╰──────────────────────╯

Hmmm doesn’t appear to be documented 🧐 Nut ly watch reckons i climbed 242m so yhay part is right!

Live: Artemis II crew set to return home in tense and dramatic reentry
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Man pleads guilty to dealing with millions of dollars from illegal tobacco
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Just a couple of shots from our trip to Bald Rock—finally got reception so I can share them!

Major fire destroys huge toilet paper supply warehouse in California
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@kiwu@twtxt.net ahh, I see, and now understand. My niece was homeschooled, and her breaks were always puzzling, but she had to adapt to my sister’s schedule. LOL.

Golden Dome: is Trump’s missile defense system even plausible?
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Everything changes, right? I know we sound like curmudgeons, and perhaps AI is the next step. We are living its early infancy, the struggles and dislikes, the errors and flaws, and generations after us will simply benefit from it, and see it as natural as my children see the Internet today (it isn’t natural to me, I was born way before it).

Or maybe AI isn’t the next step. Either way, whether we like it or not, there is truly absolutely nothing (or close to) we can do. Well, complain we can, of course. :-P

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s impossible to avoid. Gotta wait a few years and then we’ll see. 🍵

@kiwu@twtxt.net that ought to be a super late spring break, wow! 🤯

When someone looks for me to do a code review ⌘ Read more

Matt Gaetz: whistleblower claimed US has an ‘alien breeding program’
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Former MoD UFO investigator Nick Pope has died, aged 60
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Nationals deputy leader says supermarkets should pay farmers more for produce
Farmers have urged Australia’s major supermarket chains to pay more for fresh produce, in response to increased fuel and freight costs.
GUEST: Darren Chester, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
PRODUCER: Isadora Bogle ⌘ Read more

Live: Artemis II to break distance record as it flies past the Moon
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60 years on: Australia’s Westall UFO incident continues to intrigue
It has now been six decades since what is perhaps Australia’s most notable mass UFO sighting. The strangeness began on April 6th, 1966 when multiple p… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org easy come, easy go. They grow so fast! :-) Also, Azabache allows to be seeing when ready for it, you know, just like Gandalf “*a wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to*”. :-D

@kiwu@twtxt.net meh, wish I could say I had a great day. What is worse, tomorrow is back at work again. There isn’t a single day I think: did we evolved, and when through all those troubles, to end up like this?!

Odds of alien life are ‘pretty high’ says NASA’s administrator
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Neanderthal lineage discovery might help explain why they went extinct
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The problem is, they jump hosts all the time.

Image

Maybe it’s time to add automated blocking after all … God, I’m too lazy for that. 😞

New Turin Shroud study raises more questions than answers
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High-ranking FEMA official claims he was once ‘teleported 50 miles’
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Sick of not knowing if your avocado is ripe or bruised? This scanner could change that
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911 call reveals new clues in hunt for missing US Air Force general
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Artemis II passes ‘point of no return’ on its journey to the Moon
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What would happen to us if the Sun suddenly disappeared?
This unfathomable scenario would be, as you might expect, absolutely devastating for all life on our planet. Of course, the Sun isn’t going to just su… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de with the current regime, everything is, to put it politely, rather odd, and in disarray. They have yesterday’s window, otherwise the next one was on the 12 of April, or something like that. We knew it was going up for a few days, but we are used to that kind of thing, so it is not that super exciting any more. LOL.

Yeah, I saw it in person.

Congress sets new deadline for release of 46 secretive UFO videos
Federal agency bosses have been handed a notice to release the videos within the next two weeks. According to reports, lawmakers in the US are pushing… ⌘ Read more

This whole thing was pretty weird, btw. I had no idea it was happening until basically yesterday. No news coverage, nobody mentioned it. 🤔 And suddenly, boom, we’re going to the moon. What? 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de pretty cool, thanks for sharing! We saw the rocket go up yesterday, but it didn’t occur to me to pull out the camera and take a shot until it was gone. I mean, the visible window is also quite short! 😅

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Thanks! To be clear, my contribution was literally adding that sentence to the documentation, after other people did the work.

I made the classic mistake. I thought I was smarter than this. I could try to scrub this from my repository, but that seems like more trouble than it’s worth, so here it is for your enjoyment: https://fossil.falsifian.org/misc/info/f6fa59e27781ce75f4cbaf700997ffffab41ad9d2e97b4aa3e360400ead3532c

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oops, I guess the new text is a bit obscure. If you follow the link, the text is a bit more explicit, but you still need to know what a lexical scope is. Anyway, this is part of Perl moving very carefully toward being UTF-8 by default while also not breaking code written in the 90s. If you name a recent version like “use v5.42;” then Perl stops letting you use non-ASCII characters unless you also say “use utf8;”. The “lexically” part basically means that strictness continues until the next “}”, or the end of the program. That lets you fix up old code one block at a time, if you aren’t ready to apply the new strictness to a whole file at once.

Brain dead woman ‘jolted’ back to consciousness by large pothole
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@falsifian@www.falsifian.org that’s it, you ought to call your next child 2aea97bf3f5c2ea62cf5e701858694b7378ed58c! :-P

When I discover there’s a 5000ms setTimeout “just to be safe” ⌘ Read more

My first pull request to Perl has been merged! https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/2aea97bf3f5c2ea62cf5e701858694b7378ed58c

PEP 829: Structured Startup Configuration via .site.toml Files
This PEP proposes a TOML-based configuration file format to replace the .pth file mechanism used by site.py during interpreter startup. The new format, using files named .site.toml, provides structured configuration for extending sys.path and executing package initialization code, replacing the current ad-hoc .pth format that conflates path configuration with arbitrary code execution. ⌘ Read more