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bsoles

1,040 karma · joined November 28, 2023

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bsoles··on Do the math: How we took over ChatGPT accounts
Oh, pick and choose your own crime and punishment interpretation of the Bible. How convenient.
bsoles··on Do the math: How we took over ChatGPT accounts
Citing Leviticus for moral guidance is rich. Should we also kill people having affairs? (Leviticus 20:10).
bsoles··on How to free your email from the clutches of Google or Microsoft
> I signed up and started migrating my email. I use a free, very simple and capable service called Imapsync.

> Just enter the credentials for your old and new providers, and wait.

When will people learn?

bsoles··on Emacs Turns 50
The best thing that my PhD advisor did was to require me to learn emacs and latex, 32 years ago.
bsoles··on Emacs Turns 50
So your cat is about to get fired?
bsoles··on Tailscale SSH: Investigation and remediation update
This must be the new "Just Google it". I am pretty sure the poster is perfectly aware that they could ask an LLM.
bsoles··on Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?
Then whose role is it now to understand the code?
bsoles··on Knuth reward check
Bjarne Stroustrup did, at some point at least. I have a $32 real check from him for finding an error in "The C++ Programming Language (Special Edition)".
bsoles··on Sorry, I'm in a meeting
Stealing my data bandwidth by sending me unsolicited ads is also unethical. Profiling my online behavior and monetizing it is also unethical. YouTube doesn't seem to be bothered with compensating me for that. Why should I care about them?
bsoles··on How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs
> The second thing is that using LLMs in a useful way is a skill in itself.

Not really. I don't even bother writing complete sentences as my prompts anymore. Once the LLM has enough context on my current issue, even incomplete sentences or phrases result in the same outcome quality in LLM's responses.

bsoles··on Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
I routinely steal my wife's hairbands to tie various cables in my cable stash. You can never have enough USB cables of various types. But as Murphy dictates, the USB cable that I need now is one that I don't have in my stash.
bsoles··on Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]
As much as I like to watch Casey, Prime, etc. on YouTube, they are not going to teach anybody anything. They are just entertainment for software people with a certain viewpoint.
bsoles··on Proton Global Outage
Mine does. I am able to login to the browser extension with my password and see all my passwords. I think there was a setting to enable local caching somewhere.
bsoles··on 2,500-year-old sculpture discovered at UNESCO site in Turkey
If Göbekli Tepe doesn't count as an indication of a civilization, I don't know what does.

Requirement for a writing system is an arbitrary condition. A lot of civilizations, especially in that region, have strong oral traditions.

bsoles··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
At least in small scale, having your own git server is trivially easy. Why are organizations so eager to put a third-party layer on top of that?
bsoles··on Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
I am sure there are afficionados of these things, but $349 for a keyboard is crazy. I am not sure what you get in return for such a price..
bsoles··on "Clean" Code, Horrible Performance (2023)
This comment cannot be overstated. Armchair "software engineers" like them do a lot of disservice to the community by promoting non-workable solutions in real production environments.

On the other side, I still consider McConnell's Code Complete to be a gem.

bsoles··on Why do you suck at juggling now?
It is going to be easy this year. I'll make up some bullshit story about how I used Claude to improve my productivity, and how learned and used AI tools to speed up the feature delivery process. It doesn't have to be true...
bsoles··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
With mild (self-diagnosed) OCD, I can't even read a book with a single dog ear on it, let alone markings and writing.

This may not be you aim, but there is research out there indicating that highlighting text does not help with retention.

bsoles··on Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
Being silent about it when they fully know about it is not much different than promoting.
bsoles··on Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
> Nobody attacks children.

Ever heard of the Catholic Church? What does rape count as?

bsoles··on Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important
Are we talking about the same church where children were raped, "witches" were burned, non-believers were tortured, gays are demonized, women are treated as lower beings, ..? Yeah, so good for our souls?
bsoles··on Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
> Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect?

I would also argue that they use LLMs to learn "about" new things, but not really the thing itself. I, myself, learned a lot about complex SQL queries just recently using LLMs. But I really don't know how to write complex queries myself.

People often confuse reading about a thing with knowing the thing.

bsoles··on Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
I thought it was a myth until the junior developer on my own team responded with "I don't know" to a question about why he made a certain computation during a design review. Because the (wrong) computation was fully AI generated and he couldn't even tell the difference.

Most people don't use AI to learn new stuff. They use it to do "the job" for them and they don't even understand the result. What is the point of a person if they don't bring any value to the table other than being a "resource" to generate prompts?

bsoles··on I think I have LLM burnout
My employer literally put "effective use of AI" as a yearly performance review criteria this year. So there is that...
bsoles··on HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88
> 35 points for open source contributions

> 30 for personal projects

These are insane weights for scoring a software engineer's resume.

bsoles··on Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
I can clearly identify this kind of developers at work by their mindless enthusiasm for AI. Development is just another job before they can move into "management" and make all-knowing statements all day long.
bsoles··on Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
It is why I feel dirty after AI generates a piece of clever code: I know I am stealing somebody's IP without attribution. And the AI companies benefit from this, not the real people behind the training data.
bsoles··on How Terry Tao became an evangelist for AI in math
As much as I like Terrence Tao, I think he is entering the crackpot phase of his career. Much like Roger Penrose and many mathematicians and physicists before him.
bsoles··on I stopped tracking my time. Now I can't focus
Tangentially related, but after the mindless push in my company for more AI use at any cost, every morning I drive to work thinking to myself if today should be my last day at my job.

One reason I am not giving my two-week notice is that I don't like "difficult conversations" with my manager.

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