not to enforce gender roles but a computer should NOT fucking have apps okay. if I wanted an app I'd go on my phone my laptop is for Programs. I mean this.

bringing the ancient meme back

really glad to see hate for this concept.

count me among the haters. i've been a hater since i first encountered this conflation of many different well-defined concepts into one ill-defined one

it's part of the general trend of hiding the inner workings of computers from the user, which is something i hate since it tends to promote computer illiteracy which tends to promote incompetence and dysfunction in society as a whole

coding got me saying shit like “target the child” “assign its class” “override its inheritance” like the third wife of a dying oil baron discovering his of-age son born out of wedlock

There was a paper in 2016 exploring how an ML model was differentiating between wolves and dogs with a really high accuracy, they found that for whatever reason the model seemed to *really* like looking at snow in images, as in thats what it pays attention to most.

Then it hit them. *oh.*

*all the images of wolves in our dataset has snow in the background*

*this little shit figured it was easier to just learn how to detect snow than to actually learn the difference between huskies and wolves. because snow = wolf*

Shit like this happens *so often*. People think trainning models is like this exact coding programmer hackerman thing when its more like, coralling a bunch of sentient crabs that can do calculus but like at the end of the day theyre still fucking crabs.

non-sentient crabs that can do calculus, even

That's the thing we learned about genetic algorithms back when, too. They're waaaaay better at hacking the criteria than solving the problem.

(There were a bunch of other issues, too. They were good for some specific things, but... aggressively not, for others.)

Telling young zoomers to "just switch to linux" is nuts some of these ipad kids have never even heard of a cmd.exe or BIOS you're throwing them to the wolves

remember when you were 10 and you would hang out with your friends in order to Look At The Computer together like you went to their house and experienced the information superhighway together. and then leave

How fucking old are you people?

normal amount

You see, there used to be a time (not all that long ago) when being offline was the default. And going online was the rare and wonderful thing that we (briefly) enjoyed.

It even came with happy modem noises.

They weren't happy noises.

They were polite and reasonable noises! The sound of protocol being followed! Negotiation and compromise!

The box would scream

Fixing Windows 11 - A Masterpost

Windows 11 is absolute crap for a good bunch of stuff so yeah, have a masterpost with most of the things I've found around to fix it haha (they're not all here because I did stuff around and I don't remember what)

Stopping W11 from making you create an account/setting up your computer without internet (with a way to create gpedit.msc if your version doesn't have it)

Fixing the Taskbar (in case you also don't like the grouped Battery/internet/sound)

Fixing the Start Menu

How to show all options right away

How to remove Copilot if you have it (I don't, but it might be because I'm in Europe??)

Other stuff not specifically related to the shit W11 did

Changing the size of the scroll bars

The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.

So, if anyone hasn’t encountered the concept of the library of Babel, the idea comes from a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which is set inside a seemingly infinite library which contains every possible combination of letters, periods, commas and spaces that fits within 410 pages.

So like… It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.

But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.

But chances are no one browsing that website is EVER going to see any of that because for every book we would consider useful, interesting, or even intelligible there are millions upon millions upon millions more that are just completely full of gibberish from cover to cover.

Every single thing I will ever write (barring punctuation marks that arent periods or commas and the letter ñ) is already contained somewhere on that website.

I have a volume from the Library of Babel! it’s one of my most treasured books.

on the second to last page, about halfway down it reads “OH TIME THY PYRAMIDS” a singular grain of order in the sea of chaos.

The library of babel contains every book to ever exist and moreover it contains all information that can be encoded in a finite string of characters from its alphabet.

I cannot overstate how much I love the Library of Babel. it’s wonderful, it is my heart and soul.

at last we created the perplexing nexus, from the novel “wouldnt it be weird if there was a perplexing nexus?”

Computers are very simple you see we take the hearts of dead stars and we flatten them into crystal chips and then we etch tiny pathways using concentrated light into the dead star crystal chips and if we etch the pathways just so we can trick the crystals into doing our thinking for us hope this clears things up.

AFAIK The only technologies that are more advanced are artisanal, small batch type manufacturing done explicitly for research and development purposes.

Semiconductors are the only mass-manufactured product that regularly has to take quantum mechanical effects into consideration as part of day-to-day operation, as far as I know.

So. Yea.

i thought my laptop was on its last leg because it was running at six billion degrees and using 100% disk space at all times and then i turned off shadows and some other windows effects and it was immediately cured. i just did the same to my roommate's computer and its performance issues were also immediately cured. okay. i guess.

so i guess if you have creaky freezy windows 10/11 try searching "advanced system settings", go to performance settings, and uncheck "show shadows under windows" and anything else you don't want. hope that helps someone else.

hey this is apparently helping a lot of people! adding that on top of this you can also go to settings > personalization > colors and turn off transparency to also boost performance. this wasn't the Big Fix for me but might as well do that too if you're trying to optimize.

past a certain note threshold on tumblr posts you unlock a bloodborne-esque insight and the strange lives of this site's users become visible to you

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

They really don't. They grew up on tablets and phones and other closed systems that are completely different and much more simplified then a personal computer. They don't have the knowledge because it wasn't taught to them and they never used it in day to day life.

I work in tech support and I can back this up with personal experience; they're as bad as boomers are only instead of not understanding tech at all, they refuse to learn or dig into the tech. They can use it but they don't have the curiosity to understand it. And when tech breaks, they don't have the know-how to fix it on their own or to even look for how to fix it (a task made all the harder by the enshitification of the internet and AI articles that litter search results)

They consistently act surprised when 'turn it off and back on again' actually works because that's become a meme and not understood to be a valid first troubleshooting step.

The blame lies with the big tech companies, and how strongly they've pushed hardware and software that has been designed to be obtuse at best.

Things that will make your computer meaningfully faster:

Things that are likely to make internet browsing specifically meaningfully faster:

Things that will make your computer faster if you are actually having a problem:

Things that will make your computer superficially faster and may slightly improve your user experience temporarily:

Things that do not actually make your computer faster:

This post is brought to you by the lady with the 7-year-old laptop that she refuses to leave overnight for us to run scans on or take apart so that we can put RAM in it and who insists on coming by for 30-minute visits hoping we can make her computer faster.

There are people saying "what does this mean" so:

Meaningfully Faster

Faster Browsing

Faster if you are having an actual problem

Superficially Faster

Will not make your computer faster

If you are using an older computer and it is tortuously slow and you can't upgrade the RAM or swap in an SSD but you *can* install software, I would strongly recommend installing Linux.

The vast majority of people these days use computers primarily for web browsing and occasionally use an office suite. Most people don't even store their music or photos on their computers these days. If your computer is basically an internet machine that you don't use for anything other than browsing and basic word processing/spreadsheets, then there is no reason not to switch to Linux.

I would recommend installing Linux Lite, which is a well-supported, widely-used distro that most computers built within the last twenty years should be able to run. It's called "Lite" because it is an operating system that requires minimal processing, storage, and memory to run.

To do this you will need:

Here is where you can download Linux Lite.

Here is the Linux Lite help manual, I've linked you directly to the step-by-step installation guide. If you get to a step that you don't understand, search the terms that you're unfamiliar with phrased as questions like "why do I need an ISO to install linux?" or "how do I enter UEFI BIOS on my version of Windows?"

Follow the instructions for installing Linux Lite, and then you can install software on your new OS. Linux Lite comes bundled with Libre Office, which is a free office suite like Microsoft Office that has programs similar to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. It installs with Chrome, so I would recommend installing Firefox and uninstalling Chrome as soon as you're able to get on the internet.

After that you can pick and choose from a wide variety of linux-compatible software and you can use your computer as a regular computer. I'd say that it's probably a good idea to be picky about what software you install, and to try to keep your computer as lean as possible if you're trying to get a longer life out of an old device.

There are a lot of people in the notes who are saying "my computer can't even load four tabs" or "my computer can't even open the software I need to do this" and if that is your computer I think you've pretty much got nothing to lose from installing Linux. If your computer is essentially unusable in Windows then it's probably not going to be *less* functional in Linux, unless you're keeping the computer the way that it is for some very specific software you're using.

A lot of people think that they can't uses Linux because it's entirely in the command line or doesn't have a graphic interface or something, but most linux distros only look about as different to users as windows does to mac or vice versa.

This is what the Linux Lite default desktop looks like:

It's got a start menu and a task bar and folders on the desktop, same as any other computer. It's very easy to use and has the help manual installed right there as soon as you're up and running so that you can troubleshoot your way through any issues.

Really, seriously: if your computer is slow as fuck and all you use it for is web browsing, this will make your computing experience significantly better without having to buy anything but a thumb drive.

People are reblogging just the first section of this post and asking what these things mean, so I'm reblogging this in hopes that they'll see the comprehensive update in the notes.

Susan Kare, the Artist who designed many of the fonts, icons, and images for Apple, NeXT, Microsoft, and IBM, 1980′s

#oh is it time to repost this susan kare photo again

Important addition y’all

So, the thing is, it is possible to make a translator that can do on demand translation of a conlang, or any other language that you have a complete grammar and dictionary for, that does not need billions of parallel texts to work, and which will actually be much more accurate that Google translate could ever hope to be, even with translation between English and Spanish. This style of NLP that is statistics based, that relies on huge amounts of data, is not the only kind of NLP there is, it's just the kind that is overwhelmingly favored by companies like Google and Microsoft, because it has the advantage of always being able to give an answer, even if the answer is wrong. However, there are other types of systems that don't rely on statistics, which are much more strongly based in actual linguistics, which will not always have an answer for you, but when they do have an answer it is guaranteed to be correct. Since it doesn't rely on statistics, it doesn't need all that data - it just needs a linguist dedicating a significant amount of time to manually encoding all of the rules of the language.

When I was in graduate school, I helped encode the grammar of a language into such a system. The system is called the LinGO Grammar Matrix, which allows you to encode the grammar in a coding language called tdl according to a head-driven phrase structure grammar analysis. HPSG is defined in such a way that a computer can analyze a sentence, use HPSG-specified rules to generate an actual language-independent semantic representation of the sentence, and then use the HPSG-specified rules of another language to generate the sentence in that other language that matches the semantic representation. The language I was working with was an Arawakan language called Nanti, for which very little data existed at the time - there was a grammar from a field linguist, and a few other papers that that guy had written (and now, after the work we did with it, there's another short paper on its negation system co-authored by me, and I think there may now be at least one other paper written by the guy I worked with, I know he continued to do some research there). But the point is, this is exactly the kind of language Google translate cannot handle, there are no parallel texts at all, but at the end of that course, we had a system that could automatically, accurately, translate between a number of languages of varying obscurity, including Nanti.

So, it's very much possible. ChatGPT and its ilk are never going to get there, though, those AIs are based on the compete opposite principle and will never not need massive amounts of training data to function properly. They are driving away from the ability to do things like this as fast as they possibly can.

This is really cool! HPSG was the one syntactic framework I could get behind. I wish it got more attention, because it would be great to have a tool like this available generally for the public. Would love to hear more about this!

This was almost a decade ago that I did this, so I don't have a lot of specific memories of how it all worked, but here is what I remember:

I believe that this system is basically available generally to the public, although you will probably not have a good time with it if you aren't pretty familiar with HPSG and linguistics in general. You start by going to this customization page: https://matrix.ling.washington.edu/customize/matrix.cgi You answer the questions based on how the language works, and once you've answered all of the required questions it will generate a grammar for you. If you want to complete the questions in several sittings, you can have it convert the partially completed form into a "choices" file, which you can upload again later to reenter the choices from before. However, this is still a work in progress, so the grammar it generates is not complete, and you will have to manually code a good deal of stuff after generating it.

There was a very useful book for this course that explained the tdl language, and how to define rules in the grammar, how to run a test suite of sample sentences, etc. This all ran as some kind of emacs plugin. I believe this was the book: https://www.amazon.com/Implementing-Typed-Feature-Structure-Grammars/dp/1575862603/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1688611024&refinements=p_27%3AAnn+Copestake&s=books&sr=1-1

If it's of any help, I still have the grammar I did for this course: https://github.com/faiuwle/Nanti Our grammar is in the cox folder, possibly of more use to you is the eng folder which has a very stripped-down version of an English grammar that we used for translation purposes, and frr is Frisian. The files and folder structure of these grammars are generated for you by the customization page, and building out the grammar is a matter of editing and adding to the files. The tdl language is mainly declarative and not super program-y, I think it should be easy to figure out if you're familiar with HPSG, even if you aren't necessarily a programmer. There exists a very large, far more complete English grammar called the ERG, but I'm unsure about its availability outside of academic institutions.

Okay, programmers. There’s the stuff. What can we do with this?

“Morse Coding with the D1P! 🤓💻” via @plip.works on TikTok

Til there’s Morse code for special characters like () and “”

This bitch is programming via telegram