This satirical blog post really illustrates the problem with a lot of technical writing. Amazing technical writing is so good and then everything else reads like this
“Hello! I am a developer. Here is my relevant experience: I code in Hoobijag and sometimes jabbernocks and of course ABCDE++++ (but never ABCDE+/^+ are you kidding? ha!) and I like working with Shoobababoo and occasionally kleptomitrons.
I used to be a technical author (I have a CS degree and I'm now a full-time novelist) and this EXACTLY reflects the state of technical writing today, i.e., it's mostly written grudgingly by people who flunked English in high school and would prefer to monologue at a webcam for YouTube.
(Writing a tutorial for on-boarding new users is deathly difficult: you can't reliably reconstruct their state of naivety in your own head if you've been using the product for >1 year.)
@cstross we had a semi retired colleague with a long history in tech before it was tech. He'd written manuals for nuclear devices, that sort of thing. So we'd hand him the draft and the laptop and say "Nick, setup the robot will you?". Always eye-opening.
@grumpydad I just want a Linux distro (or UNIX-oid OS—looking at you, macOS!) that refuses to use any software that doesn't have a properly formatted well-written man(1) page to Brian Kernighan or Dennis Ritchie's standards.
@cstross @dahukanna For my GitHub repos I ask Claude to write a human testing guide that shows step by step how to run it, including the expected output. It usually finds a few bugs and things in wrong directories.
@MitchW @skinnylatte Oh, I ran into Robert Sheckley in 1996 when I was visiting a tech startup in London. He was working as an author there. (Admittedly it was TDV, which was owned by one Douglas Adams ...)
We literally saw/heard him say, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way," ("Nice station you have there. It would be a shame if something was to ... happen to it...") and that Disney must "take action" on Kimmel "or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead."
FCC chairman unconvincingly claims he never threatened ABC station licenses Brendan Carr would like you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
Given what I *really* do all day as an engineer, an uninformed observer could be forgiven for concluding that I have a degree in Numbering and Naming Things...
"Investigators have reason to believe that the majority of funds came from criminal sources."
Oh, really? what's the reason?
"This type of platform, which doesn’t require users to identify themselves to make an account, hides the source of funds. This is a common tactic used by criminal organizations"
So your reason to believe the funds are illegal is that private citizens don't want you to know their business?
"The transaction data obtained from the platform will be analyzed and charges may follow. The investigation is ongoing."
So you had *nothing*, and decided to go on a fishing expedition? Got it. I guess cops everywhere are fascist assholes, not just here in the US.
So I've been posting about these new cars and their "secure" door handles, and how they're killing people. Everyone has pooh-poohed me. They *had* to save the world by buying Teslas. Well:
When the left was in charge, they wanted to police "hate speech" as they defined it. Now the right is in charge, and they want to police "hate speech" as they define it. "Hate speech" means saying anything the regime currently in power doesn't like...
Attorney General Pam Bondi: "There's free speech and then there's hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society...We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech."
Last week this man stated that the current regime could kill any terrorist they liked with no due process. Today, he revealed that the government believes it can designate any American citizen as a terrorist, also without due process.
Hey, anyone have any experience with an asset management firm in SF called 'TPG'? Apparently they just bought me, and I'd love to know what kind of corporate raiders they might be...
Hey, anyone have any experience with an asset management firm in SF called 'TPG'? Apparently they just bought me, and I'd love to know what kind of corporate raiders they might be...
"A 2021 report from Chainalysis revealed that in 2019 about 2.1% of all cryptocurrency transactions accounted went into criminal activity. This is roughly $21.4 billion in transaction volumes. Meanwhile, the UN estimates that between 2% and 5% of global GDP (that is between $1.6 and $4 trillion in fiat currency) goes into illicit financing and money laundering every year. To paint a clearer picture, criminal activity using fiat currencies is 160 times more than its crypto counterpart."
~Prosecutors failed to secure an indictment against a man accused of throwing a sandwich at a federal agent.~
“The grand jury's rejection of the felony charge was a remarkable failure by the U.S. attorney's office in Washington (DC) and the second time in recent days that a majority of grand jurors (ordinary citizens) refused to vote to indict a person accused of felony assault on a federal agent.” 👀
Prosecutors Fail to Secure Indictment Against Man Who Threw Sandwich at Federal Agent:
It was a sharp rebuke to the prosecutors who were assigned to bring charges against those arrested after Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents to Washington.
It’s no longer a hypothetical: Anthropic has discovered a hacker using its AI chatbot to plan and execute a large-scale data extortion campaign that targeted 17 organizations last month. pcmag.com/news/anthropic-warns…
The hacker 'used AI to what we believe is an unprecedented degree' by harnessing Claude to automate large parts of the data extortion campaign, Anthropic says.
OK, 'The Left', I'm not trying to be harsh, but given that the criminal regime holding the US hostage has started moving military units into our cities in clear preparation for consolidation of power and full dictatorship, are you maybe considering that the five decades you have spent disarming yourselves were a mistake?
Reading glasses can't be shipped from Amazon to my state due to local laws or Amazon policy. I can not even imagine a set of circumstances that would explain this!
Reading glasses can't be shipped from Amazon to my state due to local laws or Amazon policy. I can not even imagine a set of circumstances that would explain this!
Sometime in your life, you might encounter an entitled insufferable controlling and abusive busybody, who has to intrude with overly judgmental accusations and deranged attempts to punish you over simple disagreements or nothing at all
@benroyce The thing I can think of is a little break of the 4th wall…. “You getting all this? Is my beard okay? Is it over the top? No? Okay, hold on…”. Then going back to wailing and writhing on the ground.
I love doing this sort of thing when kids are being bratty or overly entitled. 😀 Behaving like a total idiot is the best way to snap back to reality sometimes.
Personally, I feel they are overreacting. It is not really a big deal. And the person that said it was an Alfredo because they added butter and substituted Parmesan for Pecorino does not understand Alfredo at all. They have no leave for comment after a statement like that. Though being French I do understand why they get so upset. I just do not agree with it. 😉
ChatGPT users shocked to learn their chats were in Google search results OpenAI scrambles to remove personal ChatGPT conversations from Google results. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
still do not understand how fucking #apple could put their credit on firm like #openai in case of #ai in #ios its outrageous. #openai steals everything and now put it to the #web , no #surprise
I'd say I told you so but I gave that up a while ago. If poeple don't see it for themselves you'll never convince them with all the knowledge and insight in the world - whther it's AI, right wing politics, climate change - you name it. That's why we're all going to burn.
@edutooters if privacy in your education space is important, this is worth reading. This will continue to happen in various forms, since the core of a public LLM has no notion of private data. Privacy is an afterthought, not baked in to the design.
Harrassment, Wrongful arrest, Police brutality, and a victim who actually knew how to handle the confrontation. And *my* taxes will pay off the lawsuit...
"Our findings suggest a link between malevolent (aversive) personality and conservative political ideology... and that persons with malevolent personality dispositions view political figures with malevolent traits favorably"
Is there any company selling custom config Piholes? I have no idea if I could afford that, but I've just realized that the prospect of spending hundreds of hours reading howtos, debugging, being told how stupid I am on a reddit forum, and generally having to give it way more attention than I can spare sounds... Revolting. I'm too old for this shit!
Is there any company selling custom config Piholes? I have no idea if I could afford that, but I've just realized that the prospect of spending hundreds of hours reading howtos, debugging, being told how stupid I am on a reddit forum, and generally having to give it way more attention than I can spare sounds... Revolting. I'm too old for this shit!
"Donald Trump makes perfect sense if you realize that sometime around 2012, he was captured by a foreign intelligence service and programmed to suddenly believe that..."
Concept: Donald Trump makes perfect sense if you realize that sometime around 2012, he was captured by a foreign intelligence service and programmed to suddenly believe that he could never be truly…
Basic security flaws left the personal info of tens of millions of McDonald’s job-seekers vulnerable on the “McHire” site built by AI software firm Paradox.ai.
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