There's nothing irrational about that.

What is the purpose of technology,? Why do we have it? It's not an inexorable force of nature, marching forward, regardless of our interests. It's meant to serve us. If it does the opposite of that, then it is a failed technology.

Tea in the Sahara.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRkl...

Unless you're using a password manager, in which case you can use very long noise passwords. But, even if you're doing that, these websites have no way to signal these ridiculous restrictions to the password manager, so it tries to generate passwords that you can't even use.

May only contain these three special characters, and must contain at least one: @#$

Incredibly, this company's newer system doubles down on this. They somehow made this even worse.

Must contain at least one of these special characters: ! @ # $ % ^ (limited to these characters)

This is a completely ignorant password requirement.

Think of a password as a combinatorial space. REQUIRING a special character is already a problem, because it actually narrows that space. Restricting it to a small specific number of potential characters narrows that space even more.

Maybe I could do it as a wiki.

I keep thinking about starting a website for documenting all the steps for this kind of cleanup for everything, everywhere, but then I realize how exhausting it would be to maintain it.

Critiquing tools so we can improve their safety is a perfectly normal thing. That’s why circular saws have guards.

Yeah, it's actually really bad in a lot of ways that I haven't even gotten into.

Do their long-term business plans factor in the inevitable future increase in compute costs? Probably not, because they are basking in the warm glow of faith. Surely, it will all work out, somehow. God will provide.

You might think that adoption of gen-AI tech represents adaptability, but what you're seeing above in this thread is zealotry, and zealotry is fundamentally anti-adaptation.

Two traits that keep a new company alive are adaptability and sustainability. Adaptability is about changing as the world changes -- recognizing that maybe your plans aren't working, and you need to pivot. Sustainability is about thinking long-term, recognizing your limitations, and not overhiring.

These folks have a singular focus on this paradigm shift because they think it's going to give them a huge edge over companies that aren't doing this. But, that is, frankly, a faith-based position. They don't really know if it's going to pay off.

Habib knows token consumption is a gameable metric. She knows some employees will use tokens for personal projects. She knows that not all the tokens will end up driving value for the business. But she’s OK with all of that. “The second you start thinking about the individual business [return on investment] of one agentic action, you will never do anything agentically,” she said. The broader goal is a mindset shift. And offering incentives to employees with a leaderboard is effective, she said.

May Habib even acknowledges this, but she's like, meh, whatever. It's fine to waste all this compute as long as you're reorganizing your brain to think agentically.

For those less familiar with these systems, it's trivially easy to game your token usage numbers by doing pointless things. It's an even more worthless productivity metric than lines-of-code.

Why Some Companies Say AI ‘Tokenmaxxing’ Is Key to Survival Leaderboards that rank individual employees’ AI token usage have garnered recent criticism. But some say they’re vital for adapting to the AI age.

These people sound increasingly unhinged every month. www.wsj.com/cio-journal/...

@portfolioday.bsky.social decides the schedule, been the same since the start. Every second Tuesday of January, April, July and October

Since my call to follow artists did such great numbers, I’m going to put in a word for #PortfolioDay! This hashtag is a great place to find artists to follow, and since today is the very day, it’s the perfect time to have a look around.

a stuffed monkey wearing a green shirt and overalls is standing in front of a body of water . Alt: That monkey nervously looking to the side meme.

The funniest thing about being Gen X is watching people talk about how bad passive screen time is for childhood development.

Well, yeah. Cradle Catholics don't want a bunch of smug crusader fantasy LARPers bogarting all the Krispy Kreme doughnuts out in the parking lot after mass.

A TRS-80 Model 1, displaying Microchess 1.5.

128x48.

With 23 years of continuous work as a letterer, and over 30 years of print/production experience, I’m now unable to find any new lettering work in comics.
Please keep me in mind when staffing your creator-owned projects and please consider requesting me on your WFH projects 🙏

I learned things studying Computer Science in the 1990s that are still relevant today. Yes, in Computer Science! If a University is always chasing the new hotness, you don't get that kind of lasting value.

The Stepford Wives, except instead of men making "perfect" android versions of their wives, the wives are making "perfect" android versions of themselves, so they can escape these assholes who still expect them to maintain 1950s standards of housekeeping.

These computers aren't even good for teaching computer literacy. They are often configured for such shallow, constrained use that there isn't much to learn from them.

I don’t think people talked about it much outside of the industry. Publicity risked making the harassers feel like they were being heard.

Oh goodness no, it was definitely bad in MMOs long before that whole thing. There were big, ugly harassment campaigns. Someone called in a bomb threat that grounded a plane. It all took a serious toll on the devs.

An example of “wine mom” or “live, laugh, and love” fonts. There are two hand-lettered style fonts — one, condensed capitals, and the other, a sloppy script font with irregular baseline.

I don’t know, man. Making my people endure wine mom fonts for a whole development cycle might violate the Geneva Convention.

I offered to teach my little brother at one point, and he told me he thought it was tedious. But, years later, he changed his major to Computer Science, and got a degree. Some folks just need to find their way there on their own.

Yeah, once I got really rolling on something, it was hard to stop. Especially since I had to save things to cassette, which was a pain!

I was even worse with electronics, though. I'd literally forget to eat while I was working on a board.