ngl. Stuff like this makes me want to write a TUI. Is there a UI that I need? No. Are my existing needs met? Yes. But this stuff looks so cool.

Bottom right.

That was an interesting Planet Money episode.

From the interview, it sounds like the DOGE employee (Sahil Lavingia) joined up based on the assumption that government departments weren’t already trying to modernize their IT infrastructure and fight fraud. In his case, he discovered that the VA was modernizing and preventing fraud, but it was hard, and time consuming.

It sounds like Dunning-Kruger at work. Musk and co think they know IT, so it should be possible to waltz into a large organization, throw some opensource/AI projects at it, and save a tonne of money. When they get inside, they discover that the systems are really complicated, and that there are existing initiatives to do exactly what they want. It turns out that most of the easy wins have already been won, and it’s only the hard tasks that are left.

It’s an interesting counterpoint to the modernization program that was started during Bill Clinton’s term. They took years to understand the systems they were trying to improve, and built incentives for people inside those systems to propose improvements.

The developers building Lemmy are very different from the folks building bots. I’ve got a half-assed repost bot working, but there’s no way I have the time or inclination to work on Lemmy itself.

Generally speaking, a bot needs to meet a much lower quality/reliability bar than the server does.

I think I’m one of the few users that enjoyed Reddit’s random bots. Seeing the Accidental Haiku bot restructure a comment as haiku, or the Consecutive Number bot point out a number progression was fun.

As long as they’re polite, and respect community boundaries, I think they’re fun.

People can post from anywhere, but need to be physically present to show up to a parade. And it’s easy for a single person to post multiple times. FWIW apparently the weather sucked too.

Weirdly, I haven’t seen news outlets provide estimates of the number of attendees. The closest I’ve seen is

attendance appeared to fall far short of early predictions that as many as 200,000 people would attend

from CBC. It sounds like it was low turnout, but I’m not clear how low.

Assuming the photos are legit, the No Kings protests clearly got a lot of people out.

I worry that training myself to be mean will bleed over into other parts of my life.

How you doin? Still got the dot?

Is it orangey yellow? I bet it’s orangey yellow.

Finally, I know who to complain to.

When are the bidet advocates gonna show up? This post has been up for like an hour!

EDIT: the bidet people have arrived. Thank goodness. I was starting to worry that my instance had been defederated.

It sounds like you’re asking about algorithms, which are (sort of) language-agnostic.

You’ll find some neat stuff if you search for bubble sort, Dijkstra’s algorithm, tree sort, hashing, complexity theory, and number theory. The last two are more theoretical.

To my knowledge, Introduction to Algorithms is the standard textbook used to teach university students about them. When I was in uni, it seemed to be the standard. Some people find it accessible. I did not.

Hanlon’s Razor is all well and good as a heuristic, but tends to lead to people discounting malice much too often.

There’s definitely scenarios where that is the case.

Also, I really didn’t say we were “under attack”

I would describe a massive influx of spambots as an attack on a social media platform. It’s my characterization. I didn’t mean to imply that you said it.

Agreed.

Lemmy is a federated system and these stats are self-reported by user maintained systems. Rather than a sudden influx of users (bots or otherwise), a misconfigured system or hiccup in stats collection seems more likely.

Generally, Hanlon’s Razor, add applied to computing: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity user error.

There’s a lot of malicious systems out there, but there is little corroborating evidence indicating that we’re under attack.

u r g*d

I’ve got a lot of unassigned schadenfreude I could put to this.