NotAwfulTech

found this kicking around on one of the feeder sites a few days ago and only got to read it now

kinda neat. it's the sort of thing that you used to find quite a lot with keygens and other things prone to easter eggs, and that I don't really know of being as prevalent in more recent gaming and such

skeet: https://bsky.app/profile/kezz.io/post/3kpzm7ya6tb2g

from back when AI hallucinations were hallucinatory

found via someone running a server at revision

retro fun. quite slick, too!

Invite up at https://2024.revision-party.net/blog/04-invitation/

~2 weekends away (who cares about the week)

Prepare for watching mathematical black magic!

Amaranth is a simple-but-expressive hardware description language (the type of language you use to define integrated circuits for FPGAs, ASICs, and similar hardware) implemented as a Python DSL. I'm not the biggest Python fan, but Amaranth is worth it -- even though it's in heavy development and its documentation is incomplete, it's by far the most comprehensible HDL I've ever used, and I've tried many of them.

its documentation is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its language guide is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and its tutorials are written for an older version of the language (sometimes called nMigen) but are still excellent -- in particular, Robert Baruch's tutorials combine design fundamentals with formal verification (which itself is usually considered an advanced technique, but Amaranth streamlines it), and the Vivonomicon RISC-V tutorials are worth a read too

You could get a robot limb for your blown-off limb

Later on the same technology could automate your gig, as awesome as it is

Wait, it gets awful: you could split a atom willy-nilly

If it's energy that can be used for killing, then it will be

It's not about a better knife, it's chemistry and genocide

And medicine for tempering the heck in a projector light

Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes

Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness

We can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with

The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons, um

Technology, focus on the other shit

3D-printed body parts, dehydrated onion dip

You can buy a Jet Ski from a cell phone on a jumbo jet

T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y, it's the ultimate

the subject matter of Aesop Rock's latest album felt relevant to our instance's interests

Someone ported this 8-bit miniature Unix-like from Commodore to Nintendo.

The YouTube title is a little bit clickbaity, but the project is cool so I don't mind.

Remember how we were told that genAI learns "just like humans", and how the law can't say about fair use, and I guess now all art is owned by big tech companies?

Well, of course it's not true. Exploiting a few of the ways in which genAI --is not-- like human learners, artists can filter their digital art in such a way that if a genAI tool consumes it, it actively reduces the quality of the model, undoing generalization and bleading into neighboring concepts.

Can an AI tool be used to undo this obfuscation? Yes. At scale, however, doing so requires increasing compute costs more and more. This also looks like an improvable method, not a dead end -- adversarial input design is a growing field of machine learning with more and more techniques becoming highly available. Imagine this as sort of "cryptography for semantics" in the sense that it presents asymetrical work on AI consumers (while leaving the human eye much less effected).

Now we just need labor laws to catch up.

Wouldn't it be funny if not only does generative AI not lead to a boring dystopia, but the proliferation and expansion of this and similar techniques to protect human meaning eventually put a lot of grifters out of business?

We must have faith in the dark times. Share this with your artist friends far and wide!

Years ago (we're talking decades) I ran into a small program that randomly generated raytraced images (think transparent orbs, lens flares, reflection etc), suitable for saving as wallpapers. It was a C/C++ program that ran on Linux. I've long since lost the name and the source code, and I wonder if there's anything like that out there now?

A follow-up to this TechTakes post

Saw this live at the congress. The presentation was great and the hall was packed. It was hard to find a seat in a huge auditorium even 15 minutes ahead of the talk.

this is pretty cool. it’s a tutorial with interactive exercises that explores the Nix language as a general-purpose functional programming language, outside of its role as the configuration and package definition language for NixOS. understanding Nix better as a language makes more complicated packages easier to write (and is necessary to understand the guts of nixpkgs and the parts of Nix written in itself), but it also has a number of unique advantages as a programming language within a very specific domain.

this is in part because it's for (yet another) post I'm working on, but I figured I'd pop some things here and see if others have contributions too. the post will be completed (and include examples, usecases, etc), but, yeah.

I've always taken a fairly strong interest in the tooling I use, for QoL and dtrt reasons usually (but also sometimes tool capability). conversely, I also have things I absolutely loathe using

1. wireguard. a far better vpn software and protocol than most others (and I have slung tunnels with many a vpn protocol). been using this a few years already, even before the ios app beta came around. good shit, take a look if you haven't before
2. smallstep cli. it's one of two pieces of Go software I actually like. smallstep is trying to build its own ecosystem of CA tools and solutions (and that's usable in its own right, albeit by default focused to containershit), but the cli is great for what you typically want with certificate handling. compare step certificate inspect file and step certificate inspect --insecure https://totallyreal.froztbyte.net/ to the bullshit you need with openssl. check it out
3. restic. the other of the two Go-softwares I like. I posted about it here previously
4. rust cli things! oh damn there's so many, I'm going to put them on their own list below
5. zsh, extremely lazily configured, with my own little module and scoping system and no oh-my-zsh. fish has been a thing I've seen people be happy about but I'm just an extremely lazy computerer so zsh it stays. zsh's complexity is extremely nonzero and it definitely has sharp edges, but it does work well. sunk cost, I guess. bonus round: race your zsh, check your times:

% hyperfine -m 50 'zsh -i -c echo'
Benchmark 1: zsh -i -c echo
  Time (mean ± σ):      69.1 ms ±   2.8 ms    [User: 35.1 ms, System: 28.6 ms]
  Range (min … max):    67.0 ms …  86.2 ms    50 runs

6. magic-wormhole. this is a really, really neat little bit of software for just fucking sending files to someone. wormhole send filename one side, wormhole receive the-code-it-gives the other side, bam! it uses SPAKE2 (disclaimer: I did help review that post, it's still good) for session-tied keying, and it's just generally good software
7. [macos specifically] alfred. I gotta say, I barely use this to its full potential, and even so it is a great bit of assistive stuff. more capable than spotlight, has a variety of extensibility, and generally snappy as hell.
8. [macos specifically] choosy. I use this to control link-routing and link-opening on my workstation to a fairly wide degree (because a lot of other software irks me, and does the wrong thing by default). this will be a fuller post on its own, too
9. [macos specifically] little snitch. application-level per-connection highly granular-capable firewalling. with profiles. their site does a decent explanation of it. the first few days of setup tends to be Quite Involved with how many rules you need to add (and you'll probably be surprised at just how many things try to make various kinds of metrics etc connections), but well worth it. one of the ways to make modern software less intolerable. (honorary extra mention: obdev makes a number of handy pieces of mac software, check their site out)
10. [macos specifically] soundsource. highly capable per-application per-sink audio control software. with the ability to pop in VSTs and AUs at multiple points. extremely helpful for a lot of things (such as perma-muting discord, which never shuts up, even in system dnd mode)

rust tools:

1. b3sum. file checksum thing, but using blake3. fast!. worth checking out. probably still niche, might catch on eventually
2. hyperfine. does what it says on the tin. see example use above.
3. dust. like du, but better, and way faster. oh dear god it is so much faster. I deal with a lot of pets, and this thing is one of the invaluables in dealing with those.
4. ripgrep. the one on this list that people are most likely to know. grep, but better, and faster.
5. fd. again, find but better and faster.
6. tokei. sloccount but not shit. handy for if you quickly want to assess a codebase/repo.
7. bottom. down the evolutionary chain from top and htop, has more feature modes and a number of neat interactive view functions/helpers

honorary mentions (things I know of but don't use that much):

1. mrh. not doing as much consulting as I used to, using it less. quickly checks all git(?) repos in a path for uncommitted changes
2. fzf. still haven't really gotten to integrating it into my usage
3. just. need to get to using it more.
4. jql. I ... tend to avoid jq? my "this should be in a program. with safety rails." reflex often kicks in when I see jq things. haven't really explored this
5. rtx. their tagline is "a better asdf". I like the idea of it because asdf is a miserable little pile of shell scripts and fuck that, but I still haven't really gotten to using it in anger myself. I have my own wrapper methods for keeping pyenv/nvm/etc out of my shell unless needed
6. pomsky. previously rulex. regex creation tool and language. been using it a little bit. not enough to comment in detail yet

Rules: no spoilers.

The other rules are made up as we go along.

Share code by link to a forge, home page, pastebin (Eric Wastl has one here) or code section in a comment.

The wider community is still on Reddit, I wonder if there’s an interest to have a small alternative?

If not, what’s a good Lemmy instance for these things?

"AI for dummies" interview from Irish radio with Dr Abeba Birhane, who's on a UN advisory board about AI.

I don't really know enough about the C64 to say anything one way or the other, but this comment on youtube did okay:

@eightbitguru
1 year ago
2021: We have definitely seen everything the C64 can do now.
2022: My beer. Hold it.

and I'm posting this without even having seen the whole thing yet

having recently played and refunded a terrible “modern” text adventure, I’ve had the urge to revisit my favorite interactive fiction author, Andrew Plotkin aka Zarf. here’s a selection of recommendations from his long list of works:

• if you’re new to playing interactive fiction (essentially the modernized form of the old Infocom text adventures), check out his tutorial game and guide to IF parser commands
• Spider and Web is an old favorite; it uses the nature of the interactive fiction medium to involve the player in a game of deception
• Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home is a good interactive sci-fi short story
• Shade is an exploration into dreamlike writing and horror
• Lists and Lists is a gamified Lisp tutorial — it’s where I learned the language!

A RISC-V assembly cracking board game. Can't comment on the gameplay experience, but what a cool idea.