- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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Everything is a file
I mean, with virtualization that’s pretty much true
What about a process? File gone wild?
I’d call that a file loaded to memory
Most files are loaded to memory in order to make any kind of use out of them. I.e. read/write operations.
That’s true! I supposed it would be more precise to say that all processes are files loaded to memory, but not all files loaded to memory are processes. Sort of like the whole arachnids / spiders situation.
Why not? Represented in /proc? exec() and fam? Read and write to it?
Files are just streams. Everything is just a stream, in real life too.
What about a folder?
Pregonte file
Is that how babby formed
how to mkdir
If you can open it in Vim, it’s a file.
You can open me in Vim, Greg. Am I a file?
I think both are fine. Regular people don’t need more than “app”, but professionals still know and use other words too.
Does your app have an app for its app?
I hate that this meme never explains what application meant ‘back then’
I get that it’s a problem now, but if it had a clear enough definition back then, maybe this couldn’t have occurred the way it did?I always understood “application” like a gadget in the software world that just resolved one specific problem, and had that own definition till got distorted
The meme is good and all, but seeing it makes me feel irrationally annoyed because the first place I saw it was a rascist pleroma (fediverse software; mastodon but rasict) instance that had it embedded in the frontend. This just reminds me of it.
Then: Books, Movies, Videos, Blogs, Articles Now: C O N T E N T
Then: Fire, Rocks
Man, I hate the word content.
Product is a word I hate.
I have a warehouse full of product.
I mean unless you’re a drug smuggler… Then that’s fine. But using it for random lawn mower parts is dumb I think.
Haha thank you for that.
I’m content with it
Me too. Ever since I read Richard Stallman’s words to avoid article. I kinda wish I hadn’t read it now lmao.
Man, what a nice read
I’ll definitely read it start to end when I have the time later, for now this is my favourite part of the article (Of the parts I skimmed through):
“Bullshit generators” is a suitable term for large language models (“LLMs”) such as ChatGPT, that generate smooth-sounding verbiage that appears to assert things about the world, without understanding that verbiage semantically.
Yeah, me too. What the fuck is content? Content means contained in something. Contained in what?
Also, “content creator” = OnlyFans
Contained in the app you use, video you watch, article you read, page of a book, sentence in a paragraph, etc.
It’s not the word, it’s the reductionism.
We used to call all those media except people naturally didn’t want to lump them all together.
Web browser? “app”. Web page? “app”. Dialog box? “app”. Phone app that’s just a thin shell for the web site? “appapp”.
Appetizer at Applebee’s? “app”
This one probably drives me the most crazy.
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You folks still say bot? I my company, we say AI.
Um excuse me the preferred term is “AI agent” if you want outside investment
Wait until they call it an agent
I had a (non-technical) manager come to me one day and say he wanted us to start using this hot new technology he had just read about called an API. This was in 2010. He showed me the article, which somehow never even attempted to explain what an API actually was. I just laughed and said I would make it an action item.
APIs have been around since like the 90s, right?
The term dates to 1974 (1968 if you accept “Application Program Interface”). The concept is decades older than that. My boss was just a fucking moron.
In similar cases I’ve passive-aggressively intentionally misunderstood and/or acted confused. E.g. “Yes, we can set ut up an API between X and Y, but what exactly do you want the bot to do?” Then let them elaborate until it’s clear they’re not asking for a bot.
This is really, “what techs call it” and “what non-techs call it”.
As a tech, I usually know what someone means when they “app”.
It’s “glitch” that drives me mad though. Glitch sounds like a ghost caused the error one tine only, versus some lazy coder.
To be fair i would consider a glitch to be closer to a ghost causing it than a lazy developer.
I consider a “bug” to be something caused by the code (bad error handling, bad logic, etc) and a “glitch” to be something more random or environmental
Yes! Agreed. But for some reason, the only word everyone uses these days is “glitch”. And I don’t know why, but that really fries my grits.
Vitally…
App is actually correct for all but the OS.
I also hate the way “algorithm” has taken over the public consciousness. You can find people unironically saying “I don’t want any algorithm in my social media feed”, which is a nonsensical statement.
People are onto something though - there’s been a noticeable shift from social media just showing you your feed in a chronological manner to it showing you personally tailored content that shuffles on each refresh and aims to hook you into endless doomscrolling. I understand perfectly well what’s an algorithm, but good luck explaining to people that it’s not that specific thing.
Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way. I’m not sure if they are immune to doomscrolling and actually have gotten it to work in a way that serves them and doesn’t involve doomscrolling, or if they are doomscrolling and okay with it. But for me, I really wish I could go back to the chronological feed era.
It tends to be hit or miss.
When I started using Odysee instead of YouTube, my page was full of “women vs men”, woke culture and onlyfans-esque videos.
I realised, subscribing to a creator actually made a big difference in this case, to get them on you page, because it’s not a feed (controlled by an algo), but a simple, categorised list, with the “Following” on top.In contrast to that, the YouTube’s algorithm tended to create relations between videos (using who knows how many criteria) and showed them along with videos from the subscribed and more-often-viewed channels. It used to show some pretty useful results and it would be a crime for me to downplay its usefulness.
Sadly, by the time I left YouTube, it had started putting the doomscroll content on my page, which is probably another reason for why I stopped using it.
I would call it: Another great mechanism, ruined by capitalism.
Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way.
Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.
One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you’re doing that, though, you’re probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there’s been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?
It’s a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.
Losing content of one poster and getting double content of others isn’t a solution though.
Letting the user decide? If the user decided that they liked fly fishing 8 stars and mother-in-law 0 stars, then the algorithm would show mother-in-law once a week at best and fly fishing 8x out of 10 posts.
If we had one public social media platform that would be the best way. It would force people to filter and learn how to interact with technology. But in our world people are lazy and a platform that picks the best value of X automatically for the most people will win. Even if it’s not actually how people want to see things.
Yeah, you’re describing an algorithm that incorporates data about the user’s previous likes. I’m saying that any decent user experience will include prioritization and weight of different posts, on a user by user basis, so the provider has no choice but to put together a ranking/recommendation algorithm that does more than simply sorts all available elements in chronological order.
Other day me and my mom was talking about how TV has all shifted to be nothing but reality TV… and then she said even youtube is becoming the same way… im like uh… thats because thats because you are watching it thus it is giving you more…
If you walk with algorithm, you won’t attract the worm.
Holy shit, I just realized that’s a dune reference.
I was actually referencing Fatboy Slim referencing Dune.
Yeah, that’s what I meant. I’ve listened to that song countless times, and just now realized it’s a dune reference.
I guess Bootsy Collins was wrong … sometimes you do learn.
Seems like a pretty reasonable semantic shift to me.
I think it’s the same concept as when people say that they don’t want any chemicals in their food. You know what they mean, but in a technical sense the statement is nonsensical.
Something, something, dihydrogen monoxide, something.
Yeah, I don’t like that one, either.
Let’s not tell them that by definition both a shopping list and a recipe are algorithms.
Can you put some milk on the algorithm please?
Isn’t a shopping list more like a data structure? A recipe would be an algorithm. I don’t know, I could be wrong.
So what should we call the thing that we don’t want in our social media feeds that controls what we see?
Manipulation
An algorhythm
Jazz hands.
Engagement based personalized recommendations.
Catchy. Can’t imagine why “algorithm” caught on instead.
It’s because Al Gore invented the internet, so they are known as Al Gore Rhythms.
Depends how broad your definition of algorithm is. Is sort by upvotes an algorithm? I say no but sort by hot is.
So it is possible by this definition to have a feed without any algorithm.
This is (theoretically) a programmer forum. I use the programmer definition. By that definition, not having an algorithm is nonsense.
What if it uses a neural network to recommend posts?
So how does that neural network perform that task? There I can see only two possible options:
- magic
- an algorithm
A heuristic
Eh, please tell me how you’d implement a heuristic that doesn’t work either through magic or an algorithm.
Is sort by upvotes an algorithm?
Any sorting at all can only happen through one of the following:
- luck
- magic
- divine intervention
- an algorithm
So garbage in garbage out.
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I felt like I was alone in being frustrated at this trend. However I found a bit of relief to discover, through messing around in a Win98 virtual machine, that they were occasionally using the term “app” back then as well. Of course it wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now, but whatever.
Also I thought I’d never see the Xbox kid meme again. What an unexpected throwback!
The braces are nice touch.
