Hang on now...

...is it, just maybe, possible that the industry with the largest fractional job losses¹ to LLMs to far could be troll farms?²

I mean, I'm not sure how we would tell. Even if a few countries have some employment data that covers the case, there's no way the big players are putting it out there. But it seems like a really good use case: take a small model that produces good output in the few to few-dozen words range, post train it for your ideological bent and let it loose. If you need to, you can use something a little smarter as the agentic driver. The task is requesting web pages, parsing out threads, and posting or replying (more HTML events). This is stuff there are skills for all over the places.

It's not like it's good news even if it's true: it makes a bad problem and the people in charge aren't the ones getting hurt.

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¹ Real job losses: not dog-and-pony-show we "cut" jobs we wanted to get rid for stock-price manipulation purposes, say it's AI, than hire as many roles back again as soon as we vest or get the bonuses. As a side note: if you've offered one of those "oops, AI isn't ready just yet" positions you should drive a very hard, very expensive bargain.

² You know, the people that rouge states, criminal organizations, or political parties that you don't like and so on pay to spam opinionated, wrong, and non-constructive comments on social media.

Paging Generative Freud. Dr Freud, you are needed in the psych ward

I had a brainstorm today about a possible prompt to test the edges of LLM conpetence. It's longer prompt than most of the ones I use and demands a longer answer, so context lengths have to be expanded and it runs slowly on available hardware. As a result I've only begun investigating it.

But it triggered an idea for another "off the wall humor" type question which is quite succinct. The thing is that when I started asking models about that one I got a surprise, and thinking it might be perculiar to a particular model family I tried some others; and the surprise persisted. What. The. Absolute. Heck?

There is an old saw that a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into, which is not the core of my prompt but has a similar flavor. What I'm actually asking the models to react to is a pair of definitions of two classes of boats in terms of how they make you broke. If you've spent anytime in boat-owning circles you've probably heard it. The joke is funny because (a) it acknowleges that boats are conspicuously expecnsive to own, and (b) it distinguishes between motor boats and sail bots, and you can order the definitions so your audience feels good about not being in one category until you hit them with the definition for the class of boat they own. Then it's rueful smiles all 'round.

Only ... model after model has wanted to interpret it as some kind of financial metephor. The difference between spending big for lots of velocity and binding your time doing things right in the hopes of achieving a better outcome. Or something like that.

Where are they getting that? Does their training data inclue lots of articles from the popular business press? Or something?

Weird.

Oddly it seems to come outstronger when models are allowed to reason.

The limits of manipulations for "their own good"

It's OK, because Duggee has his gas-lighting badge!

It's an endless question for parents about their children, isn't it? How much pressure and distortion can I, legitimately, use to teach them things,¹ to buy a little space, and so on? Some, I suppose, but it must be an ever moving target as the kiddo grows, develops, and just gets better at seeing through our BS. We try to keep in mind that the kiddo must one day stride forth to meet the world with her own skills, opinions, and point of view. We'd like that to go pretty well, so the scaffolding must be dismantled and some kind of model of good-person-in-a-hard-world needs to be offered.

I'll just get right on that.²

But, wait! There's more! My wife and I are smack is the middle of the sandwich, so it's also applies to interactions with our elders. And the answer to that, too, will be an evolving thing. Right now it's just one set, but there is every reason to suspect the others will need support sooner or later. So that's a whole different take on the same kind of questions.

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¹ In my prior, professional life, it even had a name: "lies to children".

²I wonder who in their right mind would sign off on our being parents in the first place?

Just where are you from, anyway, my good mammal?

I've been packing for a short trip, and I found some paperwork from our last short trip. The one to Carlsbad Cavarerns. We were prevailed upon in the gift shop and "adopted" a bat (i.e. made a donation, but the kiddo liked the idea).

Only I see in the paperwork that it is a Brazilian Free-Tailed bat (one of the many speicies found in the park). Brazilian. In America.

No one tell Trump.

I'll just add that to my list of "Question you don't want to hear"

My wife has been browsing online home listings from time to time lately. To be aware of the market because, while we're not looking now, we expect to be looking in the near to medium future. And, just maybe, also because she finds it fun.

Yesterday she looked up from her laptop and said "How much remodeling do you want to do?".

Did I say that Deepseek-R1 is a tedious windbag?

That's only because I hadn't met QwQ yet.

SHUT UP, already!

Irony writ large

This is a rant that's been bugging me for a long time and has just recently boiled over.

My work computer runs Windows. I wouldn't have chosen that, but there are good reasons for it. I'm told. Whatever. I'm a technology pro, and I take my daily dose of copium so I can deal. But there is a fact of life about my working environment that amuses and frustrates me in equal measure: certain applications are just really bad at window placement on returning from sleep mode.

Now, this is actually a hard problem for three reasons. First, I work for a contracting firm so I actually sit at three sites (home, company office, and client facility) and due to hot-desking at the client site maybe seven different desks.¹ Second, I'm a programmer and I prefer to work with multiple monitors. Five of those seats supply an external monitor to pair with my laptop's screen, one of them gives my two externals, and then there is the "sad" seat. Finally, I'm an older programmer and modern displays have lots-n-lots (tm) of itty-bitty-teeny-weeny pixels, so I use auto scaling to make everything easier to read.

The good news is that modern external display buses give the OS enough information that it can "remember" setups and restore all your settings. Yeah! But still, my machine is repeatedly going to sleep with one setup and waking up to find itself connected to another. How operating systems applications should respond to a changing display environment like that is far from trivial, but I feel like things have finally settled out a bit in recent years.

Still not every application is good at this, and my work environment features a few regular offenders.

In third place is that dancing-to-a-different-drummer perennial, Emacs. Particularly Emacs running from a WSL Linux (running from msys it seems to be fine). Every time you wake the computer at a new display location you can expect WSL Emacs windows to migrate to the virtual desktop that was active when you put the machine to sleep. And sometime to unnecessarily switch to the main display as well. Sigh.

Second place goes to Microsoft Teams which seems to jump virtual desktops on an intermittent basis. Often when you've missed an appointment. Maybe? But it also occasional does that when you're just working normally, so it's not clear that it relates to sleeping or to changing display environments at all.

And the biggest irony is Microsoft Edge. Which just can't seem to recall where it was or how big it was. More or less ever. At all. I mean, I re-size and reposition this POS a dozen times a day. What the #&|!, Microsoft?!? Honestly, if a major Microsoft product team can't figure out Microsoft's own interfaces for this stuff why would you expect anyone to get it right? And what does it say that many other application do a pretty good job none-the-less?

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¹ At least it's just one physical computer, which limits the issue of file synchronization to the usual domains of software repositories and shared drives.

When I grow up I want to be...

... organized, detail-oriented, and thorough.

I imagine that will be happening ::checks watch:: any day now. Right? Right?!?

ODR? Fuggedaboutit!

I was hacking together a thin patch at work today. Tyring to get the logging calls from a library to play nice with the rather hacky logging infrastructure of a legacy project we maintain. Basic translation worked fine, build support took a couple of tries but seemed to be coming together, but then there was the matter of Level enum and getting string representations for the values ... so I shoved a copy of the original enum and a definition of levelText(Level level) into the header.

Yeah, the definition. In the header. I should've know better being, as I allege I am, a big-boy programmer. Well, nature took it's course and the compiler complained: I was violating the One-Definition Rule (oh, holy of holies!) on a massive scale.

But I was ready to go to lunch and I didn't want to deal with hard problems like where in the project tree to put the source file that ought to hold the implementation and how to add it to the build system and so on. It was at this point that some rebel-without-a-cause, burn-it-all-down inner-self threw up a suggestion: why not try something like:

template <int=0>
std::string levelText(Level level) 
{ 
    /*...*/ 
}

I mean, what could it hurt?

Rhetorical question, of course, but let's list some of the failing of this cutesy little trick (which compiles):

Hacky, non-idiomatic, confusing

Any C++ prgrammer who sees a template declaration will expect you to do something with the template parameter, which we don't. Time will be spent look for the use and trying to suss out what the paramter might mean. Worse, if they're experienced they'll notice that it's a non-type parameter and be expecting some kind of clever (read tricky) metaprogramming, which there isn't.

Contibutes to slow build times

Evey template read takes a little more time and little more working set. So does every template instantiated. I menetioned that this is a legacy project, right? It already takes 12-15 minutes to build on a fast hexacore machine with lots of memory.

Contributes to bloated binaries

Every template instantiation creates a separate bit of code. We're writing that function for every source file that includes the header.

Once I'm fueled back up I can go back to the office and do it right. But now I know a new stupid C++ trick. Yeah!

If incompentence seems unlikely may I assume malice?

I've mentioned before that I generally keep my project source directories at work in a place where there are accessibly from the host (Windows) operating system, my msys working environment, and my WSL (linux) instances.¹ Some IT trouble recently has seem me migrate off my usual work machine onto a loaner and now back to the (freshly re-imaged) original. Which has meant re-building my working environments a couple of times.

Now, with one thing and another my re-imaged machine came back to me without a stand-alone X11 server,² so I though "Now'd be a good time to see if WSL2 really is better than WSL1; what with the wslg display adapter meaning that WSL2 doesn't need X11." Anyone familiar with this domain will know that WSL2 has been a thing for quite a while now, but the combination of (a) inertia and (b) reports that access to the host-filesystem access was slow on 2 had kept me from moving forward.

Anyway, I tried it today.

The virtual machine actual runs noticably faster which is nice, but "slow" doesn't even begin to describe the productivity bottle-neck that is access to the host filesystem. Holy deity-figure-on-a-pogo-stick, Batman! This performs like something offered as a minimum viable product from a failing startup run by kids who really should have stayed in school. A sloth dying in a tarpit moves faster than a cmake configure over that channel. I was longing for the heady days of running autoconf on a pentium. I had time to muse about the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of tapes as delivered by continental drift.

I'm following a colleague's lead and keeping a separate source tree for the WSL image and using rsync-spawned-by-cron to keep them tracking one-another.³

And now we get around to the question of incompetence versus malice. The famous adage tells us to set our Baysean prior in favor of "Incompetence", but this is a Microsoft product on it's second version number. Incompetence simply isn't what I would expect. The usual excuses just ring hollow: the people who put this together are not beginners, they had access to as much deep technical support as they needed, and they had a v1 product out in the world doing well so there wasn't a live-or-die deadline to meet.

On the other hand, Microsoft has more than a little history of trying to leverage their market share to try to kill inconvenient competitors.

---

¹ For that matter before some "security" upgrades broke all the non-Microsoft virtualization tools on Windows (VirtualBox we hardly knew 'ya), I would use those same files from my virtual machines, too.

² Probably an oversight on my part as I don't recall saying that I needed one.

³ The thing is that parts of the host filesystem (includind the bit where I keep the source trees) is auto-backed up by IT, a feature that's very handy for the biggest part of your daily work, eh?

In which the author sits on his porch and shakes his cane at passersby

Is it just me or have UI designers taken the idea of clean and unobtrusive interfaces to the point of not actually offering any affordances at all? And if so, am I justified in suggesting that they might have missed an important point somehwere?

Neal Stephenson has it wrong

For no reason I can identify I suddenly noticed something today:

They're called "emojis", not "mediaglyphics".

Of course, he pretty much nailed everything except the name.

Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your workflow, man.

I caught some flack at work this week: I circulated an early draft of a document that I was struggling with in plain text¹ and my boss was very clear that he wanted me to use Word in the future so there would be change tracking and out-of-band comments. On the plus side those remarks came packaged up with some useful suggestions for the piece.

Once I tamped down my reflexive defensiveness and the basic anxiety that comes with screwing up at work, I pulled up my big kid underwear and moved on. Then, having decided to be an adult about this, I ran smack dab into a counter example for $BOSS's point. I received a second set of highly useful changes in the same document. Conflicting changes. I'm not aware of any good tooling to handle conflicting changes in Word, but it was no problem for me to handle the conflicts in my text document: I just opened the files in my favorite visual merge tool.² and got on with it.

Caveat time. To take the "plain text means we can use good tools" thing seriously we'd want to put all our draft work in VC repositories, and when that occurred to me my first reaction was "Who'd want to do that?" I mean, yeah that makes sense for major pieces of writing, but it's not obvious that you want to maintain a full history on every minor document you bang out day in and day out.

But then I had another thought...

Caveat on the caveat. Which was "Hey, how do people who are really committed to Word deal with the possibility of conflicting changes, anyway?" A little poking around the web suggest that my employer's answer is completely mainstream. At the management tier we put everything in SharePoint and let it enforce serialized editing, so they're already putting all their work in a repository. Maybe the whole idea isn't so silly after all.

---

¹ Now, I would never send plain text to the clients, but I often do my initial composition in text because the sense of informality helps me feel safe trying out different formulations in search of a natural arc through complex subjects.

² Meld as it happens. But not because I've tried all the options: it was just the first one I spent any time with and it's been consistently available.

Career opportunity

Desperately seaking a licensned professional to tell us that we're making good parenting choices.

DOS?

My calendar for tomorrow appears to have been the victim of a denial of service attach against my having a life (or even a little breathing room). How the heck did all that stuff pile up?

Unintentional perfection

We were following¹ a luxury car down the road this afternoon and it kept suddenly slowing to a crawl for no apparent reason before resuming normal driving for a few blissful minutes. My spouse wondered aloud if the issue came with driving an "XFinity"?

It's just as well she was driving because I couldn't control my laughter for minutes afterward. That outfit of jokers provides what I have to laugh to call our internet "service" and it behaves just like that car.

She swears it wasn't premeditated, but it was beautiful.

---

¹ At a respectful distance. This didn't seem to be some kind of "crazy Ivan" stunt.

A Modest Proposal

I believe proper consideration should be given to the benefits of creating an affirmative defense to charges of assault and battery in the case that the assaultee¹ is a telemarketer.

Now, I'm aware that some people will maintain that only the most hard-up and vulnerable of people will actually take some jobs which is a valuable point. Perhaps the defense could be limited to people of authority in such anti-social enterprises. Say, starting with shift-managers and working up from there certainly to include the technologists who support and enable the whole industry.

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¹ Note: not "victim", they are very much at fault in the whole interaction.

Idle curiosity

What was the ratio of torches to pitchforks when the mob came to make Linus pay for git submodule?

Unanticipated milestone

It's like a coming of age ritual, except not as fun.

There will come a time when your doctors describes your situation in reference to "a [wo]man of your age".

This, too, will pass

For most of my politically aware life it was possible to count on the Replublicans being disciplined team-players, while you never knew when the Democrats were going to suffer a flash resurgance of the feud between the dreamy idealists, the hard-core misguided utopians, and the just trying to get something to work pragmatists.

That's not the look we've been seeing for the last decade or so, culminating in the chaos around this year's Speaker of the House election.

Of course, falling at the last hurdle on the way to his lifelong dream couldn't happen to a better guy than Mr. McCarthy, but wishes for a centrist coalition aside I worry about the alternative.