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zellyn@zellyn@hachyderm.io
Programmer. Square. Former YouTuber. Vaguely South African. He/him ≡𝐺𝑂
Born 331.12 ppm CO₂
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2022
- website
- https://zellyn.com
Dan, you know coin-ops, I run a small business and would like some coin-ops in there, how does that happen?
That depends on the sort of coin-op.
PINBALL
The whitest man you've ever seen hands you a business card. After mulling it over you call the number and a pinball machine shows up. It develops a fault within three days. Within two weeks you have eight machines and weekly tournaments, during which your bar is full to capacity but nobody buys any beer. Two of these machines work at any given time.
FRUIT MACHINE / GAMBLING
A large stranger turns up with a large cabinet. He places it somewhere inconvenient, plugs it in, points at the plug, says "See that? Touch that, you're fucking dead," and leaves. You mind your own business.
JAPANESE RHYTHM GAMES
These are delivered by a trans woman you met on Discord. She brings five friends to help. Setup takes longer than planned and you want to close and go home. They offer to finish the job and lock up. In the morning they're still updating firmware. Their pizza boxes attract mice. You have to remind them periodically that they're not allowed to sleep here.
ARCADE / VIDEO, GOLDEN AGE
A man in his fifties asks if you want a Pac-Man. You say sure. Next week there's a Pac-Man, all good. The week after, it glitches out, and he puts in a 60-in-1 emulation board as a temporary measure while he fixes the Pac-Man board. The 60-in-1 brings in way more money. You feel you have to persuade him not to fix the legit board. This discussion becomes far more heated than the situation warrants.
ARCADE / VIDEO, 90's
These are delivered by a green-haired guy you met on Discord. There's no firmware to update but he still brings five friends and wants to sleep there. The Japanese rhythm games lady is his ex but they're on friendly terms.
CRANE / CLAW PRIZE GAMES
These are delivered by a big hard-faced woman with places to be, but not so quickly she doesn't pause for a cigarette before unloading the truck. She explains the scam and you would prefer if she hadn't; you feel robbed of your innocence and complicit in something seedy. You ask her to set the payout as high as possible, to soothe your conscience. As she pours cuddly toys from a big black bin bag she tells you people have more fun if it doesn't win as often, but if you really wanted, she could set it to give a toy every time and you would both still make money. She smiles as she says this, and calls you "Honey." You feel dirty.
GUMBALL / BULK VENDING
Scenario 1: 
a man in his fifties with a moustache and Willy Wonka energy talks you into a single gumball machine and then two months later you're selling Pokemon cards.
Scenario 2: 
a man in his seventies arrives with a small girl in a brown vest. He says Go on honey, ask. She mumbles something about how her 
troupe's raising money and can we please put one of these on the counter please. He says good job honey. He has a kind and careworn face. Thirty years ago he told a man "Touch that, you're fucking dead."
The first Deadpool movie is crass, juvenile, and somehow sparklingly brilliant enough to make you want to stay up late re-watching the second one right now.
The second is crass, juvenile, and a bit more confused and over-complicated, but has enough moments to make you want to watch the next.
The third is crass, juvenile, and just-not-that-funny enough to make you want to skip the next, and wish you'd skipped this one.
In case this helps anyone else: If your ASUS ZenWifi AX6600/XT8 mesh routers have been going berserk and disconnecting, try downgrading their firmware to the last 3.0.0.4.386 version.
<sigh> That was a *lot* of hours just wasted…
As they say, nobody hates computers like computer people…
(Also, I think “Adrian Tchaikovsky” must himself be some kind of robot, or perhaps a writing collective, because it's impossible for one person to write so many books so fast and have them still be so good.)
Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky is so good. Hilarious and brilliant depiction of a robot protagonist, with probably the least amount of “I'm going to make them a sympathetic character by making them partly human and not actually a robot” of any robot story I can think of (I mean except murderous, paperclippy ones).
Its moral lesson eventually lands with a hell of a punch too.
So good.
Could I have done all that without an LLM? Yes. I've done it before. But it probably saved me an hour, and learning about `pwntools` was fantastic.
The other day, during a CTF, once I'd figured out the stack smashing exploit I wanted in part 1, and how to calculate the ASLR offset in part 2, ChatGPT wrote the payload for me.
I didn't know about `pwntools` before, and being able to write assembly inline like it's 1991 using Turbo Pascal again is :chefs-kiss:
I also have never really internalized x86 or ARM assembly, registers, syntax, calling conventions, etc., so I was glad it handled that.
Just incredibly, astonishingly useful.
I still see really smart programmers arguing that LLMs are not useful. I don't get it.
I think there are tons of valid arguments against LLMs, against using LLMs, against the ethics of using LLMs based on their training data, against the unbelievable hype and bullshit around AI, etc., etc.
Even that thinking should not be delegated, or that coding is not the bottleneck.
But that they're not useful? What is going on? Have they just not tried seriously?
Inside of you are two wolves:
One of them wants to be grammatically correct and put the punctuation inside "the quoted text."
The other one has been programming for 25 years and is howling at the top of its lungs, "I demand proper nesting!".
I watched the first episode of “Lioness”, until I couldn't take it anymore and turned it off and started googling "is Lioness propaganda" and apparently I'm not the only one… 
Remembering two similar-but-different things is much more than twice as hard as remembering one thing.
I swear that before I moved from South Africa to America, I never had trouble spelling or knowing words for furniture. Pretty sure that at no time between now and when I die will I understand when to say closet, cupboard, cabinet, wardrobe, or dresser.
I mean, I love Africa by Toto as much as any cheeseball who grew up in the 80s, but that doesn't stop me, every time I hear it played in a restaurant or movie, from thinking, “God my generation needs to hurry up and retire or die so their cultural hegemony can end.”
I guess the Invisible Hand sucks at making obviously logical changes to shelf restocking.
If Capitalism works so well, how come all the local grocery stores are always out of *just the Raspberry* Bonne Maman preserves?
This is what it looks like for me to be all caught up in my RSS reader except for a couple weeks of @simon 's mastodon and blog feeds 
Correction, it's CAH's Super PAC. More information at https://www.apologize.lol/
> We formed a Super PAC and bought the personal voting records of every American citizen from a data broker we found on the internet. It’s pretty f***ed up.
> you can donate as much as you want Literally no limit, because we’re a Super PAC. This is the kind of crazy shit that happens when the Supreme Court rules that “money is speech” and corporations can spend unlimited amounts of cash influencing elections.
I signed Musk's petition at https://petition.theamericapac.org/, giving $47 to Cards Against Humanity by entering MuskIsDumb@cah.lol as the email address.
PROGRAMMING TIP
avoid repeating the same 4 lines of code twice by writing 270 lines of beautiful, abstract, generic code
Watching the sadness as cohost winds itself down is so, so sad. I wish our billionaires would pour some noblesse oblige into things like keeping cohost alive and healthy.