Will

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems I think there's a serious argument that the vapor-compression heat pump is actually the greatest invention of the industrial era. It's not a shoe-in, but I think it's inarguably a contender.

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems Alright, I've been thinking about it (never a good idea), and here's an attempt at that argument. Note that I'm not an expert on industrial revolution history or any of the technologies I'm about to discuss, so… y'know. Of all the inventions of the industrial era, the vapor-cycle heat pump was the closest to optimal at its inception and has remained essentially unchanged to the present day, *and* is a completely essential technology to modern life. It's probably not the most *foundational* invention (the steam engine probably takes that crown), but I assert that it is the *greatest*. For example, the steam engine is a dead technology today. Or for another example, consider the piston-driven internal combustion engine. Foundational, yes, and ubiquitous in the modern day; but thermodynamically, it's just fundamentally inefficient. We've milked damn near every possible joule of heat recovery out of it, but the only thing it's really good at is low-power efficiency; for essentially every other purpose, the gas turbine is superior. In contrast, *nothing* is superior to the vapor-cycle heat pump at pumping heat. (The gas turbine, an incredibly simple and effective technology which in its most basic form has *one moving part*, is another contender for greatest invention, but… the externalities of combustion are inescapable.) So yeah. The refrigerator emerged in the mid-1800s and is essentially unchanged since. Advances in chemistry have greatly improved refrigerants, but the basic structure is still a compressor, condenser, and evaporator all in a loop. It's effective, efficient, free of inherent externalities (the nastiness of fluorocarbons aside, in correct operation they're not *supposed* to leak refrigerant, and simple propane actually works perfectly fine), and *massively* impactful to modern life. (Just think how much of our food is utterly reliant on refrigeration, and we don't even think about it.)

@ifixcoinops@retro.social Back when I used a WYSIWYG word processor, I vehemently disliked Word and used WordPerfect (probably just dated myself pretty badly there) because it had a "reveal codes" mode you could use to interact directly with the formatting codes and e.g. figure out if the spaces surrounding your bolded words were bold.

@ifixcoinops@retro.social Okay, the thing that Gets My Goat about typing into a thingy with a Bold button is this. You've got a document. It's got a bit of bold text in it. You place the cursor next to the bold text. Will the next thing you type be bold, or not? (The answer is always "whatever would be most obnoxious". I have no idea how they have such good predictive technology for the sole purpose of making things bold when they shouldn't be and not bold when they should.) Sometimes this is a case of "is that space bold or not" (something I always want to have to wonder about), but sometimes it's literally whether placing the cursor on a formatting boundary puts it inside the formatting or not. When you're writing markup, you're screwing around with markup, but at least you don't have to deal with any of That.

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange I use the word "prefix" sometimes (e.g. "prefix modification"), since that's exactly what it is: an LLM is a statistical prefix continuation machine, and all of the system prompt, user prompts, and any subsequent model/user exchanges, are part of that prefix. This doesn't anthropomorphize the model and satisfies my desire to be pedantic, but probably doesn't clearly convey that this is an inherent vulnerability: if a user controls any part of the prefix, they effectively control the model's output.

"'Disregard that!' attacks" [1] by Cal Peterson is an excellent discussion of the issue, and the name is pithy, but IMO falls into the same trap you're trying to avoid of treating malicious prefix modification as an "attack" rather than the intended and literally only possible behavior. It does include the sentence, which I love:

Guardrails seem like total hokum and indeed they are.

Indeed.

[1] https://calpaterson.com/disregard.html

@ifixcoinops@retro.social Look, a colleague of mine brought djungelvrål back from a trip to Sweden and I ate some and survived, so I'm not scared of your British weird foods. (Djungelvrål is salt licorice, and the salt in question is ammonium chloride, and yes, you can absolutely taste the ammonia. In fact, it basically drowns out the thermonuclear licorice flavor which would otherwise be overwhelming. A thoroughly unpleasant eating experience, 9/10 on the "why would you put this in your mouth" scale, after only ultra-hot peppers.)

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems I looked through the pictures first and I was like "yeah, the fishtank as TV stand is definitely kind of weird", but boy, that's not the half of it, is it

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange I've always liked this as an interview question: ask an applicant to rag on one of their top listed techs or tools for a few minutes. It is *shocking* how many ostensibly-senior engineers couldn't find anything bad to say about *Java*, of all the half-baked tooth-up-rakes of a programming language. When *I* was asked that question, I had to warn the interviewer to cut me off at some point so I didn't rant through the entire timeslot.

@phooky@hexa.club @mcc@mastodon.social As long as he makes it there without passing through Troy, NY, it'll probably be fine.

@isol@mastodon.au @bonkers@nerdculture.de @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social @jamesthomson@mastodon.social If you do thread them together, make sure to alternate directions, otherwise there's a risk they all make contact and put eighty volts through your belt buckle.

@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place We need to go back to "surprise inheritance from an unknown rich relative" fantasies so the beneficiary doesn't have to behave in a financially-suboptimal manner.

@aeva @pupxel The guy started with the classic mistake of trying to reproduce a viral success and (accidentally?) turned that into a transition from "musician" to "niche youtuber". I guess it's going pretty well for him, but yeah, I was much more interested in his music. =/

@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social I would find it a lot funnier if I were watching from outside the blast radius.

@foone@digipres.club This is probably not applicable to your specific problem, but I really *really* dislike colored emoji glyphs, so I install a mono font with (some of) them on my system. Problem: Firefox ships its own emoji font rather than using a system font! Solution: I'm installing Firefox through apt, so I set up a dpkg diversion to automatically move the emoji file into /tmp for cleanup on the next reboot on every install. In sum, I bet you can still fix your problem, you just haven't applied enough hacking to it yet. ;)

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems later: "okay, of the 256 possible checksum bytes, three of them matched"

@glyph@mastodon.social To be fair, it appears what you're doing here is pulling the lever over and over again waiting for it to give you *bad* results.

@CliffsEsport@mastodon.social @whitequark@social.treehouse.systems Ah, I was referring specifically to the reciprocating-piston steam engine as found in e.g. old rail locomotives. My post was long enough already, so I didn't clarify. You are of course correct that steam *turbines* are ubiquitous.

@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place This anecdote makes me unreasonably angry. (Or maybe reasonably angry, I dunno, judge for yourself.) I have a four-year-old who was chattering about differentials because we had to replace one on our car, and he switched fixations (as four-year-olds do) but I was *absolutely* prepared to dig the Lego differential out of my childhood Mindstorms kit in the depths of the basement to demonstrate it to him. I certainly don't expect everyone to go to that sort of length to satisfy his curiosity, but if I heard of someone *attacking* him for it, I would be very, very upset. =(

@mborges@mastodon.social Me: Why in the world would an oscilloscope manufacturer use Windows XP as firmware, that's the most idiotic thing I've ever heard You:

@jalefkowit *yells across the office* "Github's up! Get your PRs in quick while you can!"

@jacob@social.jacobian.org At least you're all set up to pump electrified mud into your rain barrels now!

@ireneista @aeva @pupxel Oh, I surely don't mean to imply it seems like he's *enjoying* himself. Just that, based mostly on production values, Youtube seems to be a lot more financially lucrative than being a musician.

@charlotte This is greatly improved by the (I assume) typo "hand", suggesting #7: spelling. (cf. "referer")

@ifixcoinops

A dragon doesn't curl its tail round a pile of spreadsheets, you get me?

IIIIiiiiiii meeeeeeeeeannnnn…

Okay, hear me out a sec. Dragons hoard things other than gold (and certainly other than just coins), right? Jewelry, precious gems, enchanted items (why else would PCs keep harassing them), priceless artifacts.

Artistic masterworks?

Perhaps… anything fungible of high enough value?

And if they'll take anything fungible, surely stock certificates to a successful company count. And if they'll hoard those, then surely a virtual representation is acceptable as well. (I mean, the stock certificate is already a representation)

All I'm saying is, Tolkien's pastoralism is arbitrarily limiting dragon lore.

(Justifying why dragons should care about human valuations is left as an exercise to the alert reader.)

@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place @mcc@mastodon.social I am not at risk of buying a Framework laptop, but it's for "management is funding fascists" reasons, not technical reasons, so I at least would be interested in your buyer's remorse rant.

@glyph@mastodon.social

10kmAh

this unit hurts me in the soul

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place OCaml is my favorite language I've never written anything in. (I did quite enjoy the small amount of SML I've written, though I'm not sure I would want to write a whole application in it. This will probably touch off a holy war, but I feel like in functional programming, SML is C to Haskell's C++? Simple and focused on the conceptual underpinnings, rather than being a framework for everything-and-the-kitchen-sink. And I guess in this metaphor, OCaml would be… Java? *ducks*)