Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • multi select with shift and control

    There are cases where manually-selecting from a list of files to perform an operation on is desirable, but there are ways to do so in a terminal. Myself, I’d use dired on emacs: hit C-x d and select the directory in question, then tag the items you want (various tools to do this, but m will mark the current item) and then ! to invoke a specified command on all of them.

    There are other terminal file managers out there including Orthodox File Manager-type programs like Midnight Commander and others like ranger. I don’t use those, but I’m sure that they have similar “manually build set of files to perform operation on” functionality.


  • I try to use terminal versions of programs whenever possible. It’s a lot more pleasant to work on a system remotely in the terminal than using graphical programs, and generally automation is better. If you’re accustomed to a workflow centered around the terminal, you can take advantage of those benefits.

    I’ve worked on systems over X11, VNC, RDP, etc, but you’re just generally going to have a better time using a remote Linux system, especially with any appreciable latency or limited bandwidth, over mosh or ssh.

    I also get a lot of mileage out of the fact that I use terminal-only emacs for a lot of things, and it has packages to cover a lot of areas. Long learning curve there, though.

    That being said, there are some categories of software where there aren’t really competitive terminal alternatives. For most image-editing or Web browsing, I’d use a GUI program.

    Most users also won’t run into this, but for sysadmins in particular, having access to a system via a serial console even when nothing else is functional is not uncommon. If you don’t know how to use a system via the terminal, you’re going to have a harder time of it.

    While it doesn’t have to split along terminal/GUI likes, a lot of terminal software uses text files for configuration intended to be edited as such, and Unix has a long history of powerful tools to manipulate text. Store configuration in a git repository, migrate it to a new system, view and merge configuration changes, search through config, etc.

    Also, the GUI has a tendency to be reinvented by people every few years as they hop on some new paradigm or similar. Maybe they decide that they want a unified UI for touchscreen and mouse — one such example that happened — or something like that. That can being benefits, but it also throws out a user’s experience with an existing UI, which is really obnoxious. Linux is better about letting users continue to use their favored GUI interface than, say, Windows is (“Microsoft says you use Windows 11 UI, end of story”), but there’s still some pressure. The terminal is a pretty mature environment. Yeah, okay, it’s changed to some degree over time, but most of the experience I accrue continues to be pretty directly usable as time goes on. I think that the last significant change I made was switching from GNU screen to the pretty-similar tmux. I generally want UIs to be left alone by software developers unless they have a really good reason to change things.

    Related to the above, I’ve also seen a lot of GUI widget toolkits come and go over the decades. From a maintenance standpoint, 30 year old terminal software generally is pretty much good to go, whereas some GUI toolkits are dead and the GTK and Qt people are constantly changing things and doing new major releases that substantially change things. As a developer, I don’t really want to keep having maintenance inflicted on me by the UI guys.

    So, in short, from a user standpoint:

    • Better remote operation.

    • Better automation.

    • Ability to use systems in a fairly-broken or limited state.

    • Fewer disruptive changes to UI over time.


  • Hmm. While I don’t know what their QA workflow is, my own experience is that working with QA people to design a QA procedure for a given feature tends to require familiarity with the feature in the context of real-world knowledge and possible problems, and that human-validating a feature isn’t usually something done at massive scale, where you’d get a lot of benefit from heavy automation.

    It’s possible that one might be able to use LLMs to help write test code — reliability and security considerations there are normally less-critical than in front-line code. Worst case is getting a false positive, and if you can get more test cases covered, I imagine that might pay off.

    Square does an MMO, among their other stuff. If they can train a model to produce AI-driven characters that act sufficiently like human players, where they can theoretically log training data from human players, that might be sufficient to populate an MMO “experimental” deployment so that they can see if anything breaks prior to moving code to production.

    “Because I would love to be able to start up 10,000 instances of a game in the cloud, so there’s 10,000 copies of the game running, deploy an AI bot to spend all night testing that game, then in the morning we get a report. Because that would be transformational.”

    I think that the problem is that you’re likely going to need more-advanced AI than an LLM, if you want them to just explore and try out new features.

    One former Respawn employee who worked in a senior QA role told Business Insider that he believes one of the reasons he was among 100 colleagues laid off this past spring is because AI was reviewing and summarising feedback from play testers, a job he usually did.

    We can do a reasonable job of summarizing human language with LLMs today. I think that that might be a viable application.



  • Ground level parking isn’t really all that expensive, not unless you have very high land values. It does cost far more if you want to put up a multistory parking garage; from past reading, that’s maybe $30k-$50k per spot (though I’d still personally favor a parking mandate in that case, as otherwise you get people turning the street into a parking lot, which is awful for everyone, and parking illegally all over).

    In the picture shown, though, it looks like townhouse-type stuff, two stories, not high density housing, so the land value probably isn’t that insane, and they can do ground level parking instead of multistory parking.


  • At a meeting in April, xAI staff lawyer Lily Lim told employees that they would need to submit their biometric data to train the AI companion to be more human-like in its interactions with customers, according to a recording of the meeting review by the Journal.

    Employees that were assigned as AI tutors were instructed to sign release forms granting xAI “a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, royalty-free license” to use, reproduce, and distribute their faces and voices, as part of a confidential program code-named “Project Skippy.” The data would be used to train Ani, as well as Grok’s other AI companions.

    Huh.

    I wonder if xAI has transexual employees, and if so, how socially-conservative users feel about conversing with a composite AI incorporating said data sources.


  • tal@lemmy.todaytoProgramming@programming.devUsing Vim is Amazing
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    when I started using vim mode in zsh.

    I’m an emacs user myself, but if you’re not aware, readline — which handles a considerable portion of the “prompt for text” stuff in many terminal programs, like input for bash and such — can be put into vi mode.

    https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/rluserman.html#Readline-vi-Mode

    In order to switch interactively between emacs and vi editing modes, use the command M-C-j (bound to emacs-editing-mode when in vi mode and to vi-editing-mode in emacs mode). The Readline default is emacs mode.

    When you enter a line in vi mode, you are already placed in ‘insertion’ mode, as if you had typed an ‘i’. Pressing ESC switches you into ‘command’ mode, where you can edit the text of the line with the standard vi movement keys, move to previous history lines with ‘k’ and subsequent lines with ‘j’, and so forth.

    Or, in ~/.inputrc:

    set editing-mode vi
    

    To set the default.






  • tal@lemmy.todaytolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldNew EU directive drop.
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    Ed is kinda-sorta great-granddaddy vim.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(software)

    ed (pronounced as distinct letters, /ˌiːˈdiː/)[1] is a line editor for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It was one of the first parts of the Unix operating system that was developed, in August 1969.

    Dennis M. Ritchie produced what Doug McIlroy later described as the “definitive” ed,[5] and aspects of ed went on to influence ex, which in turn spawned vi.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_(text_editor)

    Vim (“Vi IMproved”) has many additional features compared to vi, including (scriptable) syntax highlighting, mouse support, graphical versions, visual mode, many new editing commands and a large amount of extension in the area of ex commands.

    I’ve never used qed, but it sounds like that might be considered even one step back:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(software)

    Many features of ed came from the qed text editor developed at Thompson’s alma mater University of California, Berkeley.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED_(text_editor)

    Initial release: 1967

    I guess TECO — which I also have not used — would kinda-sorta be the emacs analog:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor)

    TECO (/ˈtiːkoʊ/[1]), short for Text Editor & Corrector, [2] [3][4] is both a character-oriented text editor and a programming language,[5][6] that was developed in 1962 for use on Digital Equipment Corporation computers, and has since become available on PCs and Unix. Dan Murphy developed TECO while a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

    It was subsequently modified by many other people[7] and is a direct ancestor of Emacs, which was originally implemented in TECO macros.

    EDIT: Actually…hmm. Now that I think of it, I might have briefly used TECO on a DEC VAX/VMS cluster. IIRC, I mostly used EVE, though.

    EDIT2: Hmm. Apparently someone has ported TECO to Linux:

    https://www.almy.us/teco.html

    TECO, that grand old text editor your father used when he was young, is still available! It is powerful and compact precursor to EMACS and has a completely nongraphical user interface. This is based on Pete Siemsen’s TECOC implementation, and comes with a copy of the original DECUS TECO documentation.

    Do I need a paper tape punch and reader to use TECO?

    No. Modern TECOs will also edit text files.

    Is TECO fast?

    Yes, it’s probably the fastest editor available

    While I’m maintaining the files as I had worked on them and downloads here, Blake McBride has taken the source code, added the video/scope mode, fixed bugs and improved the speed (not that it is slow!), documented the changes and has it available in GitHub. Go here for his work https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC

    tries building it

    Hah. It takes under a third of a second to compile on my system:

    $ git clone https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC.git
    $ cd TECOC/src
    $ time make -j32 -f makefile.linux >/dev/null 2>&1
    
    real    0m0.296s
    user    0m2.341s
    sys     0m0.874s
    $
    

    Hmm. Yeah, I don’t remember how to use this at all, if I did use it. Looks like the command syntax is a little like ed’s, but you whack Escape twice to execute commands. Each press of Escape displays a dollar sign.

    Intro guide © 1972: https://ia902906.us.archive.org/25/items/bitsavers_decpdp10TOandbook04tecoIntro_1457616/04_tecoIntro_text.pdf

    $ ./tecoc
    *Ihello, world!$$
    *EWtest.txt$$
    *EX$$
    $ cat test.txt; echo
    hello, world!
    $
    

    Clearly does work, though.






  • I don’t think that there’s a “too big”, if you can figure out a way to economically do it and fill it with worthwhile content.

    But I don’t feel like Cyberpunk 2077’s map size is the limiting factor. Like, there’s a lot of the map that just doesn’t see all that much usage in the game, even though it’s full of modeled and textured stuff. You maybe have one mission in the general vicinity, and that’s it. If I were going to ask for resources to be put somewhere in the game to improve it, it wouldn’t be on more map. It’d be on stuff like:

    • More-complex, interesting combat mechanics.

    • More missions on existing map.

    • More varied/interesting missions. Cyberpunk 2077 kinda gave me more of a GTA feel than a Fallout feel.

    • A home that one can build up and customize. I mean, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t really have the analog of Fallout 4’s Home Plate.

    • The city changing more over time and in response to game events.


  • From what I have read, he’s still likely to be able to line up enough votes to get his $1 trillion pay package (and the associated voting rights), despite a lot of major institutional investors being in opposition. But we’ll see when the vote goes though.

    I think that Tesla can probably get a more-effective CEO for less money, personally. Even if he leaves as CEO, he still owns 15% of Tesla and is fabulously wealthy as a result. I don’t feel like he’s getting a bad deal.

    I do think that there are some arguments that the SEC should pass some regulation to help ensure board-CEO independence; part of the issue is that the board, which is supposed to oversee Musk, has been considered to be acting on his behalf by quite a few people. I don’t think that it will happen under the present administration, though.


  • Oh, okay, I didn’t realize that you were trying to just ask people here about their search engine, rather than link to an article about Orion.

    Well, I use Kagi’s search engine. They basically do what I wish Google and YouTube and suchlike would do — just make their money by charging a fee and providing a service, rather than trying to harvest data and show ads. I use search more than any other service online, and there isn’t really a realistic way for me to run my own Web-spanning search engine and getting reasonable, private results. I don’t really make use of most of their add-on features other than their “Fediverse Forums” thing that can search all Threadiverse hosts, which is helpful, and occasionally their Usenet search functionality. My principal interest in them is from a privacy standpoint, and I’m happy with them on that front; they don’t log or data-mine.

    EDIT: They do have some sort of way to issue searches without telling Kagi which user at Kagi you are, if you’re worried about them secretly retaining your search results anyway, which I think is technically interesting, but I really don’t care that much. If a wide range of websites adopted the system, that’d be interesting, maybe.

    EDIT2: Privacy Pass. Might be the protocol of the same name that CloudFlare uses. I’ve never really dug into it.

    EDIT3: Some of their functionality (user-customizable search bangs, for example) can also be done browser-side, if your browser supports it and you rig it up that way. Like, I had Firefox set up to make "!gm <query>" do a Google Maps search before Kagi did, and chuckled when I realized that they defaulted to the same convention that I had.

    EDIT4: Oh, their images search does let you view a proxied view of the image (so that the site with the result doesn’t know that you’re viewing the image) and lets one save the image. IIRC, Google Images used to do something like that, though I don’t believe they do now, so places like pinterest that try to make saving an image a pain are obnoxious. Firefox on the desktop still lets one save any image visible on a webpage (click the lock icon in the URL bar, click “Connection Secure”, click “More Information”, click “Media”, and then scroll through the list until you find the image in question), but I’d just as soon not jump through the hoops, and Kagi just eliminates the whole headache.

    EDIT5: They try to identify and flag paywalled sites in their results, unlike Google. For example, if you kagi for “the economist American policy is splitting, state by state, into two blocs”, you’ll get a result with a little dollar sign icon. This can be helpful, though archive.today will let one effectively bypass many paywalls, which somewhat reduces the obnoxiousness of getting paywalled results just mixed in with non-paywalled results on Google.