Month: 11 Sivan 5783 (May 2023)

About ten years ago, the IT building for a local highschool burned to the ground.

My company donated a spare Juniper EX3200 switch to help get them back online. They had erected a small structure without any insulation, and left the switch inside unpowered for a day while the fiber splicers got them hooked back up.

They started the switch, and it immediately shutdown. They looked a gift horse in the mouth and bitched to us that our donation was garbage.

I was dispatched to assist. I connected to the serial console and powered the device up. It immediately indicated that the CPU temperature was 252 C, and shut itself down.

It was January, the outside temperature was -3 C. The Juniper device was storing temperature as an 8-bit unsigned integer value. It got so cold, it thought it was on fire.

Can’t say I ever expected to use a heat gun to get a switch to start before that day. Got it warm enough to power on, and then it kept itself plenty warm to continue operating.

Data types matter, yo.

—@nuintari

The worst part of the Reddit situation is that for folks training certain models, the data is actually worth that much and Reddit will make some money.

So we’re entering into a world where all content of any value to people will be even more locked down because of its value to AI companies.

—@brandonhorst

There’s a fediverse reddit version called Lemmy? And reddits API is about to cost a fortune and price out 3rd party apps like Apollo? It’s like the fediverse is just right there waiting every time now.
https://join-lemmy.org/

—@kittywifclaws

Uhg. AI-suggested code is fractally wrong. The function calls it gives me have the wrong arguments (like, it just uses the integer “128” instead of a memory buffer), and after I fix all that, I find that it’s calling the wrong function in the first place. It’s just making shit up.

AI gives plausible-looking answers, not correct answers.

—@AlSweigart

It’s amazing that Reddit, having watched the fallout after Twitter killed off their third party developers, would go on to say, “You know what, that’s an excellent idea and we should do it too!”

It seems their new API pricing scheme might very well be a deathblow to @christianselig‘s excellent Apollo client (along with tons of others, I’m sure).

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/

—@bigzaphod

@TheBierFrau It’s a sign of our beautiful times that advertising ruined, and made near completely useless:

1. Answering telephone calls.
2. Voicemail
3. Text messages
4. E-Mail

—@PatrickoftheG

In a meeting at work today I was explaining #Protactile and I told a story about how I used it and said “I find it really helpful, for understanding where things are in space and how they relate to where I am… Like when I’m doing archery.” And there was this shocked silence because there is a for real deafblind person telling them about how they shoot arrows. It was so hilarious. And apparently if you want to get people off of a subject just tell them you can’t see or hear but you shoot

—@Pawpower