chaps

Orrrrrr... it could be a complex combination of outsourcing, an over-reliance on degrees, LLMs, a lack of "apprenticeship" mentoring, etc etc etc.

I was very fortunate to get a job in a NOC a little bit after high school where I learned things one'd expect to learn in an entry level job. The team I worked on was all about mentorship, learning, and building people to the next level.

Haven't seen that attitude elsewhere in my entire career except in the non-profit world where I reside these days. It blows me away that people are surprised that these industries have failed to build entry level positions.

Yes, and that's exactly why the curl|sh exists; you don't need to know the weird esoterica of a 26 year old piece of software. Accessibility matters.

Played a lot of Worms Armageddon when I was a kid. WMD is the best one by far and carries Armageddon's spirit. The others lost the script trying to make cooler games.

You're missing the trees for the forest, friend. I know how to troubleshoot this stuff. I wouldn't expect some random schmo who's just learning ubuntu for the first time to be able to.

This, "just run these three commands" attitude is exactly the reason why these curl|sh "installers" have become popular.

You're right about all of that up until the point any one of those commands doesn't work and you get a garglblargl amount of incomprehensible error messages. You've been in the sauce for so long that you've forgotten what it's like to start fresh in these things.

You're not wrong about the appearance of sketchiness of that, but.... dude, come on. "It's not hard" is only true because you already know how to do it.

Are fax machines designed within a tight feedback loop specifically between law enforcement?

(Actually yeah. Chicago Police uses an on-prem 3rd party blackbox fax service to avoid those records being FOIA'able. But that's beside the point.)

This is a broad, broad statement about journalism that's just... untrue. Local investigative journalism is wonderful and you should consider donating to a local newsroom to see more like it.

As someone who's pushed on a technical law change.... "easily" DEEPLY, DEEPLY misstates the challenges of getting the law changed. Fun fact: people who oppose something tend to get in the way.

> Well, I did write out a couple of paragraphs about what I thought I learned.

> And further, because of the highly contrived nature of the game and it's uncanny closeness to the material world, it might be actually harmful: it encouraged me to pretend I am ethical when in fact it has brought me to do literally nothing with other people.

I think you're underselling the second paragraph here as not learning something! "what I thought I learned" includes this lesson.

> I'd trade your "enjoyment of video games" for "my parents' failures as 'professional' musicians" any day of the week.

My dad used to be a traveling musician before he joined the army for reasons he won't tell me until I'm older (he told me that in my 30s so hmmmm), so, I totally get this.

Anywho, great chat. I appreciate the heck out of your perspective.

Jam on!

TBH the "don't call yourself a programmer" part of this blog is the least interesting part of it. It's decent or awful advice depending on the person.

The more interesting part, to me, is the 15 year old recognition that programmers' jobs are to replace other workers. It's definitely not a new thought at all, but it's interesting to reflect on considering how the dynamics are starting to turn the other way around.

Saying this as someone who knows many programming languages... but I don't consider myself a programmer because that's too job-oriented. Like.. I write code for fun and "programming" isn't fun.. it's a living. This approach has let me follow multidisciplinary paths by framing my career away from the code-as-my-product mentality.

"Code was never the hard part" misses the point but so does this blog post. This blog post from 2011 is worth reading and really cuts into the middle of the dreads-of-programmer.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

  Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.”  If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired.  You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company?  Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual customers “You know those programmers you have working on your internal systems?  If you used Salesforce, you could fire half of them and pocket part of the difference in your bonus.”  (There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way.  You’re in the business of unemploying people.  If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.)

I mean, ICE is already sidestepping transparency by delaying FOIA requests to the Nth degree. Have a look:

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?page=1&per_page=100&agenc...

  In the same way that I have to think about how to respond and think about why you have a negative reaction to what I wrote, I also have to struggle with a reasonable way of communicating why I think you don't understand what I wrote.

I think the point that you're missing from my post is: I don't think anybody actually says that guitar hero is like playing a guitar so I'm confused about where this idea comes from (that people think practicing guitar hero will productively lead to being able to play that). I just don't understand where that seemingly rigid argument comes from because I've not met a single person who actually believes that.

The only people who are saying that way are people who have negative feelings towards the game in the context of music. To me, that's pretentiousness because it assumes the thoughts of the people who play the game. It reminds me of people talking shit about Chicago who've never been to Chicago.

But ultimately I think my point is that people are going to flail, but we shouldn't immediately assume that people don't get anything out of them. You seem to have an absolute position that it's all or nothing -- surely you don't actually think you've learned NOTHING from playing Fallout? Nothing about yourself? Nothing about game mechanics? There's much more to learn than what's "formally" presented and each person gets something different.

Like, I've been playing with cipher mechanisms with LLMs... and after getting frustrated with all that, I'm now learning how to draw so that I can make my own similar cryptographic puzzles. Wouldn't have gotten there if I hadn't stumbled blindly for a bit. So in the same way that you wouldn't invalidate my path towards music, I'd hope you wouldn't invalidate my path towards drawing. There's a middle point somewhere in between that you seem hesitant to intellectually venture towards.

No true musician got their start in Guitar Hero, eh?

I got my start in drumming from playing on Rockband. When I mentioned it to the folk that I bought my first e-kit, they rolled their eyes. Fine, whatever, I expect musicians to be pretentious.

But yanno what? I still learned a lot. The controller itself was midi-capable so I was able to hook it up to my kit and play the game while practicing my form and timing. Was it perfect? Fuck no; it sucked. But it guided me into recognizing that I wasn't as good as I wanted to be, which led to lessons and many many hours of practicing.

I owe a lot to rock band because it opened a world of play beyond the game itself.

Anecdata, friend. Two old friends became extraordinarily good at guitar hero and even won competitions. They're also some of the best guitar players I know. One of them is an extremely good drummer and can do improv piano like a beast. They'd both agree that guitar hero helped them play better.

What are your thoughts on games like Keyboard Hero?

Thanks!

Totally. But I just gave one example of the anti-camera activism from the UK at the time! There was a lot more than just this.

Is anyone actually arguing that it conveys creative skill though?

The paragraph in-question:

  Sure, it’s all gamified and fun and even addictive, but at the end of the day no outside, transferable skill accrues to the player. To do that, you have to set the controller down, pick up an actual guitar, and start another, entirely different journey. And perhaps some Guitar Hero player did or will, which is awesome. It means at some point they were not satisfied with pretending to play the guitar, following someone else’s rules and set-up. They still started, effectively, at zero. There was a whole new skill tree to be learned that had very little to do with the game, outside of the shape of the controller. 

I get the point, but I think it's not great. A lot of what's said here can also be said about cover bands or learning to play other peoples' music.

Not the argument you're looking for, but I've been playing drums for over ten years now because of Rock Band. Even used the sticks that came with it on my first e-kit. The game didn't teach me how to drum, but it taught me that I had a much deeper interest in playing drums than I'd ever imagined. That led into years and years of practice and I've actually become pretty good.

FWIW, CCTVs in the UK weren't exactly loved either: https://www.wired.com/2007/12/burning-british/

  "Motorists Against Detection, the vigilante anti-speed camera group have announced a summer of MADness which will see them target for destruction all speed cameras in the UK. It’s now going to be a period of zero tolerance against all speed cameras, said their campaigns director Capt Gatso. (((A remote descendant of General Ludd, I reckon.)))"

Great! Glad you were able to take off your rose tinted glasses, even for a moment. Peace.

I'm aware of what they're good at. I got claude 4.6 to run linux as a native postgres module inside linux inside postgres inside linux inside postgres on a mac. It was impressive then and it's still impressive. IOW, I really think you're misinterpreting my comments as significantly more inflammatory than I actually mean. And you seem to be taking it personally.

But what I'm interested in is in the edges of their failure modes because those failure modes prop up frequently in pernicious ways. For a similar reason that I want to understand the edges of my own intellectual failure modes by regularly challenging myself. This conversation is an example of that.

It seems like you're just not interested in discussing the edges and failure modes. You call that a "silly metric", I call it, "understanding your tools".

For those interested in FOIA lawsuits, there are many, many attorneys out there who'd love to take on a pro bono FOIA case. Lots of it is quite boiler plate and pushing back on arguments that the courts decided on years prior.

Because I find what you have to say interesting. Sorry about that, I'll try to consider you less interesting.

What things have you tried that didn't go well? At this point, that's more interesting.

If you want to have a whack at a hard problem, have a try at the cryptographic puzzle in Noita if you want to see the silly failure modes of these systems. Lots of people have tried to solve it with AI and nothing's budged. If you can solve it, great.

My point is just that you're talking past people and being an asshole in the process. Not everything is about winning an argument. Lower your temperature and you'll have more productive discussions that revolve around disagreements.

Cheers.

If that's what you got from it, then I hope you have a good life.

Be kinder, friend.

"you should probably get your eyes checked."

Don't be a jerk. A lot of people have had bad experiences with these systems from people basically saying exactly what you're saying. This "you should get your eyes checked" mentality is pervasive with the nerds who confidently say that their analysis is solid when it's... not. It's a big problem in communities that have non-conventional videogame puzzles for example. Someone will come in, announce some novel solution.... leading to a four hour fight about the efficacy of LLMs, only to find a mistake in their code the next day.. never to be seen again.

Mind you, I'm not saying that these systems aren't great at reverse engineering and whatnot. They're spectacularly good at that. But RE is a relatively constrained problem because everything is still right in front of you. For complicated problems where the signal is mixed between noise... less so.