hackers.town: 2023-05-31 Wed 09:57

Found out Steve Yegge is involved with Sourcegraph Cody so I went straight over to try it out. It’s got a chat interface, but also some recipes. I tried the “code smells” recipe on the code Copilot helped me write.

I figure let the AI assistants argue with each other.

hackers.town: 2023-05-31 Wed 10:00

Okay yes all Cody’s doing here is a friendly lint, but I like it. If I’m gonna add MegaClippy multidimensional Markov, I kind of prefer the Cody approach helping me figure out how to understand and improve my code to Copilot’s approach of helping me write someone else’s code.

hackers.town: 2023-05-31 Wed 13:31

Did a phone screen and it was good but oh gosh I was On the whole time and now my brain has melted.

hackers.town: 2023-05-31 Wed 13:34

@mjgardner I’ll take a look at those. All I know so far is from Yegge’s posts:

hackers.town: 2023-05-31 Wed 17:28

#BloomScrolling #BeeButts

hackers.town: 2023-05-31 Wed 18:10

@jacobydave why argue with tradition?

hackers.town: 2023-05-31 Wed 20:44

Trying Hyprland full of nervousness about the whole Wayland on Nvidia (3060 Ti) and so far so hey where’d my mouse pointer go

hackers.town: 2023-05-31 Wed 21:05

@mcgrew apparently Nvidia still keeps a lot of information under lock and key, so environments like Wayland are left guessing about bugs.

hackers.town: 2023-05-31 Wed 21:56

Making progress.

hackers.town: 2023-05-30 Tue 10:36

getting tiny nibbles fishing for jobs today and making sure to keep the responses appropriate to the context not too much not too little not too strong not too soft

like i learned from every fishing minigame

hackers.town: 2023-05-30 Tue 12:11

Thought I’d revisit Windows to see if the update that “didn’t go as planned” and rolled back would apply yet.

Nope. And every time it rolls back it wants to try again.

But apparently I should be glad. That particular update has been problematic once installed.

Windows 11 KB5026372 is causing a lot of issues, how to fix it

Scuttling back to Linux where I am trusted to break the system myself rather than waiting for officially blessed breakage.

hackers.town: 2023-05-30 Tue 12:13

@WuMargaret The town I live in is full of aggressive drivers. They were unprepared for metropolitan passive-aggressiveness.

I heard my mom’s voice in my head “this is a good way to get shot at” but then again so is anything else you do in this country.

hackers.town: 2023-05-30 Tue 23:18

I can deal with the condo in Vancouver BC with four conflicting view of downtown Seattle but apparently flying your helicopter over a state park, crashing it —prompting a search party with network news coverage — and then just waltzing home without paperwork or a bandaid for that nasty gash was all a step too far for me.

I’m enjoying it. I just needed to breathe for a sec.

hackers.town: 2023-05-29 Mon 00:01

https://hackers.town/users/IamMrsGeek/statuses/110450531193865857

hackers.town: 2023-05-29 Mon 00:01

@IamMrsGeek that’s just wow.

hackers.town: 2023-05-29 Mon 08:30

@ovid @sjn Not great with Raku. The autocomplete was silent and the suggestions functionality in VS Code gave me Python code.

Not just that, the Python code was barely acceptable, using idioms more appropriate to the 2.x era.

I’ll try again later, but for now Copilot’s path of least resistance is porting code from one popular language to another popular language.

hackers.town: 2023-05-29 Mon 08:35

@sjn @ovid bookmarked from an earlier suggestion by Ovid!

My plan is to putter with it a little later today.

hackers.town: 2023-05-29 Mon 08:39

@sjn @ovid I might turn my experiences into a blog post later, but quick capture of my initial impressions poking at Copilot in this thread:

https://hackers.town/@randomgeek/110427334545613573

I just need to get over my depressed initial thought that it encourages mediocre code in mediocre languages and I’ll continue experimenting.

hackers.town: 2023-05-29 Mon 08:46

@mjgardner @sjn @ovid In fairness, it’s more of an autocomplete than a copy machine.

Of course, we all know how ducking fantastic autocomplete has been.

hackers.town: 2023-05-29 Mon 08:58

@mjgardner you may want to take your photocopier into the shop. It’s not supposed to hallucinate.

(I know you’re going with extrapolated functionality and I’m being painfully literal but my brain’s stuck there and I found it amusing)

hackers.town: 2023-05-29 Mon 10:55

@mjgardner I tend to adopt domain jargon pretty quick. Related to neurodivergent masking. I got used to terms having different effective definitions based on context.

Part of why I adored #Perl right away.

hackers.town: 2023-05-29 Mon 13:03

Lunch with the family. @IamMrsGeek checking an email real quick.

her daughter: Are you working?

She: No, I’m telling $coworker she’s full of shit.

Me: Just because you enjoy it doesn’t mean it’s not work

hackers.town: 2023-05-29 Mon 15:13

@zkat I know he deleted the tweet and apologized but I find it frustrating that anyone still makes the diversity hire claim. It was old and tired in the 1980s. Downright fossilized in 2023.

hackers.town: 2023-05-29 Mon 19:07

Waiting for a green light at the intersection. Car comes up behind me and starts honking. Light turns green, I start going, they keep honking. So of course I gotta slow down to make sure nothing’s wrong. They honk more. I slow down more. They pass me and extend a hearty thumbs-up to thank me for my caution.

Might not have been a thumb.

Anyways, stick your horn up your ass dickwad.

hackers.town: 2023-05-28 Sun 09:43

Setting up Copilot in Neovim so I can continue my explorations in the cozy familiar terminal.

hackers.town: 2023-05-28 Sun 10:37

@masukomi well that’s kind of annoying.

hackers.town: 2023-05-28 Sun 13:46

I refer to yard work as “violence” because it is an accurate description of my approach.

I broke a hoe today.

EDIT: no no hoe H O E it’s totally a different thing I would never break a uh anyways

hackers.town: 2023-05-28 Sun 13:52

@bitprophet I can no longer imagine this scenario occurring in real life.

hackers.town: 2023-05-28 Sun 13:57

@bitprophet avoiding discovery of Community Problems.

Getting into new tech is no problem at all, though rarely the tech venture capital firms want me to get into.

hackers.town: 2023-05-28 Sun 19:56

@ieatkillerbees I watched broadcast no skips, that’s good enough for me.

hackers.town: 2023-05-28 Sun 20:01

@ieatkillerbees oh I’m out then. I barely have the endurance to watch a movie these days.

hackers.town: 2023-05-28 Sun 20:06

Right ear’s been plugged up and ringing over a month now. Been through through the insurance company’s phone advice line, antibiotics, an abundance of OTC solutions. Next up is getting a referral to a specialist.

Meanwhile — music, movies, shows, and conversations are all — challenging I think is the word?

old man sigh

hackers.town: 2023-05-27 Sat 10:15

Copilot suggestions are based on vast swathes of code harvested from other projects. Licensing issues aside, this provides a whole new level of convenience.

Now I don’t even have to go to Stack Overflow to get mad at other programmers.

hackers.town: 2023-05-27 Sat 10:40

@baldur You think it’ll take five years? I suppose that’s a reasonable estimate.

It smells so much like NFT to me that I expect it to have a similar shelf life. But I need to remember that these particular pushers have deeper pockets.

hackers.town: 2023-05-27 Sat 10:50

@baldur For my part I know I’ll be following the FOSS implementations and data sets. LLM is interesting tech, and when local open versions become Good Enough, I’ll be a little bit happier with the idea.

hackers.town: 2023-05-27 Sat 10:50

@thomasfuchs Large Language Mention

hackers.town: 2023-05-27 Sat 12:45

Walking the dog. Sun came out. Not sure I approve.

hackers.town: 2023-05-27 Sat 15:39

@vmbrasseur Have you evaluated ClickUp? It’s more of a tasks / tickets view of project management.

Or Smartsheet? No personal experience, but I know a fair chunk of folks using it for managing personal and small team projects.

Both of those offer multiple views including kanban board.

hackers.town: 2023-05-27 Sat 18:23

dang but #CSSTricks has sure gone quiet

hackers.town: 2023-05-27 Sat 22:05

https://hackers.town/users/IamMrsGeek/statuses/110444559335917220

hackers.town: 2023-05-27 Sat 22:05

@IamMrsGeek I know I know technically I’m not allergic to kids.

I’m allergic to their dander.

hackers.town: 2023-05-27 Sat 22:38

@solder_on if you see Mastodon on the road, kill it. Right?

hackers.town: 2023-05-26 Fri 07:28

Barry has the high ground.

hackers.town: 2023-05-26 Fri 08:58

Okay, today I’m using Copilot with Go, a language where if you took out the boilerplate you’d have nothing left but whitespace.

And it’s pretty good! I don’t trust the autocomplete suggestions blindly, but it gets a fair chunk of the structure that I need for a given expression or block.

hackers.town: 2023-05-26 Fri 09:00

So hypothetically Copilot would also work well for TypeScript, which exists mainly to put a nice suit and tie on JavaScript. (in other words, loads of boilerplate)

hackers.town: 2023-05-26 Fri 09:01

(also also I gotta stop trying to convince myself I don’t know Go. I know it enough to know when Copilot’s wrong.)

hackers.town: 2023-05-26 Fri 09:06

@yirggzmb @WizardOfDocs been revisiting some neglected titles in my library: lots of Shapez but also Webbed, Bear & Breakfast, Spirit of the North.

Subnautica and Valheim are routinely in rotation as well.

hackers.town: 2023-05-26 Fri 12:26

@ovid @mjgardner @cavac@social.cavac.at hm yeah copilot is pretty cool but for the rest of us it’s an extra hundred bucks annually. Every time I see a tollbooth incorporated into a gatekeeping process I already dislike, I get a certain pyro urge.

hackers.town: 2023-05-26 Fri 12:36

Copilot probably saved me an hour on typing this code but there’s a logic bug in here somewhere I have spent the last three hours trying to isolate.

hackers.town: 2023-05-26 Fri 12:50

Aha!

That false argument was supposed to be true.

We’re back on the road! We’re nearly out of gas now, but we’re on the road.

hackers.town: 2023-05-26 Fri 13:25

Ah. Hm.

Well anyways it’s progress.

And this is all on me. Copilot doesn’t know about the gg library yet.

hackers.town: 2023-05-26 Fri 14:09

@mattwelke That’s pretty much what I’m expecting and eagerly awaiting. We’ve got Dolly 2.0 for the general-purpose LLM, though it’s still pretty restricted in what it can reliably process.

hackers.town: 2023-05-26 Fri 14:47

I fixed it!

Now to break the rest of it

hackers.town: 2023-05-26 Fri 20:17

@brion I prefer MutterMBR but I’m old school like that.

hackers.town: 2023-05-26 Fri 21:14

@CoralineAda That is fantastic! Enjoy!

hackers.town: 2023-05-25 Thu 11:01

Well yay started getting unemployment security now I can grab something else from my list of things to worry about.

hackers.town: 2023-05-25 Thu 11:04

Windows didn’t want to update and the next day Microsoft is promoting MegaClippy and I’m suddenly real happy Windows wouldn’t update.

I like LLMs. I just hate everything about how they’re being pushed, who’s pushing them, and how the pushers are acting like multi-dimensional markov will solve the world’s problems.

hackers.town: 2023-05-25 Thu 11:42

Was about to snark about some BS I saw but then I remembered that snarkily sharing BS is still sharing BS.

Need to remind myself about the three sieves: is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?

but uh i will allow myself two out of three for any given share

hackers.town: 2023-05-25 Thu 11:52

https://hackers.town/users/lori/statuses/110430828582898088

hackers.town: 2023-05-25 Thu 12:17

Trying out “Activities” on KDE instead of my more familiar virtual desktops.

So far they seem roughly the same.

hackers.town: 2023-05-25 Thu 16:02

@freakazoid Careful! So are their ticks.

hackers.town: 2023-05-25 Thu 21:36

Reading “Mazes for Programmers” by Jamis Buck and it’s good but noticing that I’m typing the code instead of really thinking about it.

Happens often enough with this brain that I have a fix: implement the logic in one or more other languages as I read.

hackers.town: 2023-05-25 Thu 21:37

@snipe @thegibson good to check. Wouldn’t want to be going around enthusing about Snippety.

hackers.town: 2023-05-25 Thu 21:46

@tek automatic boost. Been too long since I listened to KMFDM.

hackers.town: 2023-05-25 Thu 22:06

@mjgardner I knew that one thanks to Robin Williams.

hackers.town: 2023-05-25 Thu 23:18

Quick symmetry fun in #IbisPaint for tonight’s bedtime #drawing

hackers.town: 2023-05-24 Wed 09:17

Saw a thing on LinkedIn about a Seattle AI Meetup and I thought damn now they’re having their own meetings skynet is way more boring than i expected

hackers.town: 2023-05-24 Wed 09:27

Wrecking our YouTube recommendations for the greater good.

hackers.town: 2023-05-24 Wed 09:53

@IamMrsGeek DEATH CHICKEN OF LOVE

hackers.town: 2023-05-24 Wed 21:03

I’m trying. I’m really trying to give Copilot a chance.

So far it’s been offering reasonable Python code suggestions. Not great, but reasonable.

Too bad I was asking it about Raku and Nushell.

hackers.town: 2023-05-24 Wed 21:41

@bjoernstaerk It sort of seems okay as a smart autocomplete for a widely-used boiler-plate language that you know well. You’d have to chop out bits, but it would get the structure about right.

hackers.town: 2023-05-24 Wed 21:44

@bjoernstaerk Of course, since I avoid boiler-plate languages and most of my favorite languages are uh artisanal? Anyways, yeah I’m gonna have to work a bit for this to be useful.

hackers.town: 2023-05-23 Tue 08:56

Windows doesn’t want to update. “Something went wrong.”

Looked up the list of actions that might solve it.

Looked at my Linux partition.

BRB rebooting and updating Linux.

hackers.town: 2023-05-23 Tue 11:41

Sudden flashback to age 10 or so, hearing the phrase “queer as a three dollar bill” from Aunt Mark, getting mad as heck, and insisting the phrase should be changed to “queer as a two dollar bill” because two dollar bills are unusual but actually exist and are legal tender.

hackers.town: 2023-05-23 Tue 11:44

Mark’s response was something along the lines of “that’s really sweet and I like the way you think but we aren’t legal everywhere.”

To which I gave the traditional 10yo evaluation: “That’s stupid.”

hackers.town: 2023-05-23 Tue 11:45

@c0debabe warms my heart. Good kid, at least in this context 😄

hackers.town: 2023-05-23 Tue 11:47

@gizmomathboy I haven’t really been feeling the urge for social gaming recently. Though I am feeling kinda isolated. Might start attending the open source coffee chats.

hackers.town: 2023-05-23 Tue 11:50

Contextual clarification: this would’ve been around 1982. Two dollar bills weren’t being printed anymore, but having one show up in a transaction wasn’t a momentous event yet. “$2? Cool!” That’s about it.

hackers.town: 2023-05-23 Tue 11:55

@gizmomathboy I appreciate the invite!

hackers.town: 2023-05-23 Tue 13:08

https://hackers.town/users/lori/statuses/110419780335303170

hackers.town: 2023-05-23 Tue 13:57

She made herself a coffee drink with coconut flavoring but it’s a bit too coconutty. So I recommended she dilute the coconut flavor with some rum.

Now she’s all set for her meeting.

hackers.town: 2023-05-23 Tue 14:49

As editors do more and more I find myself cozying up closer to stuff like #MicroEditor that does just a little bit less.

https://micro-editor.github.io/

hackers.town: 2023-05-23 Tue 17:05

Moments I lean towards “there’s probably a greater than average degree of autistic traits in this brain”: obsessing over making sure I have exactly the right process for making enchiladas — a dish firmly in the “pinch of this, splash of that, cook until it’s done” category.

hackers.town: 2023-05-23 Tue 17:23

And of course this is where a reasonable person goes “if you know this, can’t you just wing it?”

And the answer is of course I can wing it but only after I figure out what room for error I’ve got.

Proper improvisation requires boundary parameters.

hackers.town: 2023-05-23 Tue 17:30

translator: he could wing it only after he got it exactly right a dozen or two times meaning for freeform recipes he would never in fact wing it

hackers.town: 2023-05-22 Mon 11:14

Played #Starbound a little for the first time in a while last night. I think it’s unfair to call it Space Terraria now. Unfair to Terraria, that is.

Starbound’s fine. But it clearly has not received the same loving refinements over the years that #Terraria has.