cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 50 Posts
  • 200 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: January 17th, 2022
  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•“Can ChatGPT experience joy or suffering? Does Gemini deserve human rights?” our tech columnist asks. “Many A.I. experts I know would say no, not yet, not even close. But I was intrigued.”English
    3·
    3 days ago

    Do tech journalists at the New York Times have any idea what they’re talking about? (spoiler)

    'We’re going to talk about these stories.'

    The author of this latest advertorial, Kevin Roose, has a podcast called “Hard Fork”.

    Here he and his co-host attempt to answer the question “What’s a Hard Fork?”:

    kevin roose: Casey, we should probably explain why our podcast is called “Hard Fork.”

    casey newton: Oh, yeah. So our other names didn’t get approved by “The New York Times” lawyers.

    kevin roose: True.

    casey newton: And B, it’s actually a good name for what we’re going to be talking about. A “hard fork” is a programming term for when you’re building something, but it gets really screwed up. So you take the entire thing, break it, and start over.

    kevin roose: Right.

    casey newton: And that’s a little bit what it feels like right now in the tech industry. These companies that you and I have been writing about for the past decade, like Facebook, and Google, and Amazon, they’re all kind of struggling to stay relevant.

    kevin roose: Yeah. We’ve noticed a lot of the energy and money in Silicon Valley is shifting to totally new ideas — crypto, the metaverse, AI. It feels like a real turning point when the old things are going away and interesting new ones are coming in to replace them.

    casey newton: And all this is happening so fast, and some of it’s so strange. I just feel like I’m texting you constantly, “What is happening? What is this story? Explain this to me. Talk with me about this, because I feel like I’m going insane.”

    kevin roose: And so we’re going to try to help each other feel a little bit less insane. We’re going to talk about these stories. We’re going to bring in other journalists, newsmakers, whoever else is involved in building this future, to explain to us what’s changing and why it all matters.

    casey newton: So listen to Hard Fork. It comes out every Friday starting October 7.

    kevin roose: Wherever you get your podcasts.

    This is simply not accurate.

    Today the term “hard fork” is probably most often used to refer to blockchain forks, which I assume is where these guys (almost) learned it, but the blockchain people borrowed the term from forks in software development.

    In both cases it means to diverge in such a way that re-converging is not expected. In neither case does it mean anything is screwed up, nor does it mean anything about starting over.

    These people who’s job it is to cover technology at one of the most respected newspapers in the United States are actually so clueless that they have an entirely wrong definition for the phrase which they chose to be the title of their podcast.

    “Talk with me about this, because I feel like I’m going insane.”

    But, who cares, right? “Hard fork” sounds cool and the times is ON IT.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.ml•What was Linux like in the 90sEnglish
    2·
    8 days ago

    encryption would prevent the modem from seeing it when someone sends it, but such a short string will inevitably appear once in a while in ciphertext too. so, it would actually make it disconnect at random times instead :)

    (edit: actually at seven bytes i guess it would only occur once in every 72PB on average…)

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.ml•GIMP 3.0.0 taggedEnglish
    36·
    1 month ago

    Could anybody in short explain, what I have to understand from “it’s tagged”?

    Git is the most popular version control system, which lets developers track changes to software source code. A “tag” applies a name (or version number) to a specific point in the history.

    The commit shows that there was a longer with 3.0.0 tag before and now its just 3.0.0

    The link goes to a commit which is tagged GIMP_3_0_0, and shows the change made in this commit. This commit happens to change the version line in a file called meson.build - this file configures Meson, which is used to build GIMP. The version is being changed from 3.0.0-RC3+git to 3.0.0. The string “RC3” in the previous version number is short for “release candidate 3”, and “git” here means that there were additional changes since “release candidate 3” was released.

    What does that tell us? :D

    So far the news and downloads pages still haven’t been updated, but the version being changed to 3.0.0 and this commit being tagged tells us that GIMP 3.0.0 is about to be released: official binaries and an announcement about it can be expected to appear very soon.

    The tag means no more changes will be included in 3.0.0; if some show-stopping bug were discovered now, the version number would be incremented to 3.0.1 rather than to include a fix in 3.0.0. (Technically, a tag can be updated/replaced, but by convention it is not.)

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Ubuntu Will Replace GNU Core Utilities With RustEnglish
    11·
    1 month ago

    Clickbait. The VP Engineering for Ubuntu made a post that he was looking into using the Rust utils for Ubuntu and has been daily driving them and encouraged others to try

    It’s by no means certain this will be done.

    Here is that post. It isn’t certain to happen, but he doesn’t only say that he is daily driving them. He says his goal is to make them the default in 25.10:

    My immediate goal is to make uutils’ coreutils implementation the default in Ubuntu 25.10, and subsequently in our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if the conditions are right.

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