@abstractcode fuck I hope not

If you're going to make me choose between our friendship and my love of abruptly ending interviews, this interview is OVER

@jonny all is fair in love and ai, it would seem

@ethanschoonover Oh wow. Those books bring back memories. I wonder what happened to mine. They must've been near the top shelves when I had a fire.

I haven't read those since... the 70's.

TECHNOLOGY: How secure is your password? Put it to the test with our password meter, click here: https://secure.english.mnnhnews.longyearbyen.herad.sj/wp-content/password.cgi

@tsupasat @sundogplanets

Of course.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pBbDxDOV6J4

@timbray There is a slightly different - I think - usage context where I think it is meaningful: Making harder arguments against compromised, broken or dishonest systems.

Because defenders of these systems will conflate purpose with effect.

I can say "This new employee reward system is dehumanizing and hijacks positive interactions" and give examples and refer to literature, but be countered with "It is there to increase positivity and reward positive interactions. We have a problem with negativity." And further "Why do you argue agaist a positivity improvement system?"

Maybe it is partially or fully the purpose and intent, but the discussion is helped by rejecting it:

"The system causes people to send each other inane positivity notes. It causes people to expect positivity notes. It takes the place of genuine ThankYous and makes all public praise look calculated. The purpose is what it does. *It is a system to break interpersonal trust.*"

Now it's on them to argue effect instead

Thinking about this a bit more, the reason that this confuses me so much is that it's not asking me for anything. It's not the spam I'm used to that's trying to scam money. It's like... it's trying to be helpful (in the most mansplainy way possible, but whatever). But it's a program, a racist pile of linear algebra (as "The AI Con" so beautifully puts it).

Is it trying to get me to reply and train on my email responses? This is so fucking weird.

Anyway, fuck AI, time to snuggle goats.

@monoidmusician it's okay if you're not sure what I mean because I'm not either. I started writing a blog post about it ages ago, got sidetracked, and forgot most of the details I'd intended to write down.

but, this might help: imperative programs without recursion, if they're limited to making control-flow decisions based on input that you can think of like an external stream of events, are equivalent to DFAs. to get NFAs, imagine JavaScript or whatever extended for non-determinism with operations for "fail the current thread" and "try both of these branches in separate threads".

but when threads that previously split reach a common state again, if you can merge their local variables using a semiring-style + operator, then you can merge the threads back into one. as long as the program isn't recursive, that means the maximum number of threads is linear in the length of the program, and the worst-case memory usage for a given program is constant.

https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html introduces a bytecode virtual machine for regex matching with these non-determinism operators, and talks about bounds on thread counts and state size. I guess I'm wondering, what if that VM was closer to a full programming language?

"A Play on Regular Expressions" (https://sebfisch.github.io/haskell-regexp/) is the paper that introduced me to two other relevant facts: if you extend a regex matcher with recursion, you get a context-free matcher; and a lot of the usual behaviors of regex engines can be expressed by parameterizing matching over a semiring used as match state. then I figured out that unusual behaviors can also be expressed with semirings: https://jamey.thesharps.us/2023/07/04/breaking-ciphers-with-regular-expressions/

I think there is a way to synthesize all these things into a new programming language with first-class non-determinism in which everything looks like a parsing problem. I don't know if that's useful, but I think it's at least novel?

@jpm Kids have food poisoning?

IF

you make free software

AND

expect people to use it

THEN

you have responsibilities

got some signs delivered today

#BikeTooter #OneCity

This just came out. Free to watch on CBC Gem!

Current* conditions near Chicago, IL:

Usa e Cina, un canale di comunicazione per gli incidenti legati all'IA - Nord America - Ansa.it
https://www.ansa.it/sito/notizie/mondo/nordamerica/2026/09/26/usa-e-cina-un-canale-di-comunicazione-per-gli-incidenti-legati-allia_14d8a37b-e7a3-4ffe-92e7-9894ec109cf3.html?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into ESTERI @esteri-AgenziaAnsa

@Cdespinosa There’s a high school student that’s gonna endure a life of “Was your grandpa named Walter?”

In every community, there are predators. And how that community deals with high-status predators says a lot about them.

https://nypost.com/2026/09/24/tech/silicon-valley-sex-assault-list-with-over-100-names-circulated-warning-female-tech-workers-of-predators-to-avoid/

Car-Free Pike Place Market Pilot Deemed Too Successful to Continue: https://theneedling.com/2026/08/28/car-free-pike-place-market-pilot-deemed-too-successful-to-continue/

Y'know what, if you want to crossdress for Halloween, go for it. I trust you to be cool, and to be somewhere on a scale from "rad artistic choice" to "kinda funny to be wearing something wildly different than your normal", or perhaps even "legit exploring something, just a tad".

Speaking as a longstanding trans lady, I won't feel mocked unless you go out of you way to mock us.

@juergen_hubert the obvious one is that it would need proportionately more moderators and that's already a lot of work for a lot of volunteers.