coldcode

For years I got those emails all the time. If I had printed them out they would have made great fire starters. I could not ever imagine working for FB even though they paid a lot at the time.

Congress won't act, the Executive isn't permitted to do much even with what they were given by Congress, and the People are powerless to do anything unless 100% of them vote, which never happens, and even then may be overruled in many places.

No future for any of us I guess.

When I start as a mobile lead at GiantNonTechCorpYouWouldKnow, I was looking at one of the two apps I would be leading part of, just to get familiar I looked at all network connections it made and found it called Facebook. I asked product team why we pinged FB given the app it just for our business; they had no idea we even did that, and it was immediately ordered the FB SDK be removed from the app. I never did discover why it was there in the first place.

Persuasion was better than Powerpoint in every way; but even when Adobe bought it from Aldus, it could not compete with "free" i.e. PP being part of Office, and did not last long in the 90's. Office also basically killed word processing innovation and spreadsheet innovation for a long time.

Today almost no one remembers any of these types of apps that existed before Office. I remember since I was involved in several of them.

Minority Report as well.

Over my 4 decades writing software, security (and "bugs" over a longer timeframe since network connections were rare early on in what I worked on), most organizations I worked for either considered them unimportant compared to delivery, or followed a finger in the dike mentality: when you find a hole, just fix the hole and move on.

What I found for myself that it made more sense to spend enough time on the architecture/design/whatever of the dike so that holes were unlikely plus always consider that even rare possibilities needed consideration.

That attitude costs money, and often it's difficult to convince people to spend money with no immediate gain. I was able to do it right sometimes by taking advantage of how unknowledgeable leaders often are about technology.

Reading things like this make me wonder why the company did not hire someone like this person to check their code + hardware + processes first.

But sigh, doing the right thing that costs $ ahead of disaster is rare. Over time I've seen this too many times...

As a public company, are they not required to plan layoffs in advance? i.e. does the WARN act not apply here?

I've always thought Lisp-ish would be great for building web apps, but I have so little experience in Lisp-ish I really have no idea if it works.

When I was working before my retirement I routinely had to work 60 hr weeks since I was lead (went to every meeting) and wrote code full time along with my team. Most of our projects started with a hard deadline (estimates were only used for budgeting, the time was predetermined) and constant change was endemic during every project. No way this would fit in 32 hr weeks. Yet we still had sprints (which assumed 40 hrs of effort) and burndown charts (which is antiagile and idiotic given all the changes). The real issue is institutional insanity, assuming you can direct engineers like they were machines.

Until you fix the institution you can't change the hours.

The problem comes that even with extremely good deepfake detection, political operations can still use the deepfakes to fool the average voter into believing that is it real, irrespective of any successful analysis. You and I might not be fooled but we don't matter if 10000X people are fooled and affect our lives anyway in a negative way.

I bet I could give a phrase to a collection of art students in some university and DALL-E, and the human art would likely be more creative than a single run of DALL-E. What distinguishes the humans is that you can tell them to make art of their own choosing and they will, but DALL-E is unlikely to create anything interesting with no input.

Van Gogh invented Starry Night without any prompting despite it not being a real scene (much less anything he had ever seen and such abstraction was very rare in the 1880s). Picasso made Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907; it was so radical even his fellow artists were unable to comprehend it.

It doesn't change the fact that DALL-E is pretty amazing tech, but it's still as far behind human ability as any AI is today. It is way way better than what came before, but that's true of most technologies.

If you ran it 1000 times and picked the best, you might get all good ones. I would want to see all 1000. It's like stock picker ads (person who called the market says XXX) where you only show the lucky ones.

iOS app can only get your location data (or other data) if you give it permission. Current iOS OS's also give you the option for a wide area location which is basically useless for selling to anyone.

People assume software is just like engineering a bridge, but it isn't. Software changes all the time, due to market needs, due to attacks from the outside or inside, due to legal changes, due to executives who want to be promoted, due to technological changes, due to etc, etc. Bridges do not change, as gravity and wind and temperature and chemistry and physics are in the real world while our software exists in a world of our making, generally built in myriads of layers, often from multiple vendors, and have to interoperate with myriads more other worlds that are also continuously changing over networks which we may not have any control of.

Since I started in the early 80's every generation thinks they can standardize things, license programming, make things from perfect reusable parts that work perfectly, and generally turn programming into recipes. Every generation fails.

In reality software is a mess because none of those things are possible because complexity is inherent in what we do, and what is expected of us, and there has never been any way to satisfy everything we are asked to do with some magical silver bullshit, err, bullet.

Even if you wanted software "Professional Engineers" to be a thing, how would you even do that, with 100's of programming languages, operating systems, software environments and industries all with different needs, and in an industry that changes every single day. Bridges have been built for thousands of years, software has changed radically and continuously since I started in 1981. As soon as you defined some standard to test against, it would be obsolete.

Nothing any of us do today will exist in 500 years, but I suspect Beethoven's Ninth will continue to inspire.

It is expressly illegal in Florida.

Fentanyl test strips are illegal in Florida, the legislature refused to decriminalize them for some reason.

I was accepted into a Chem PhD program in the early 80's, but knew it would pay crap for years, so I figured I could work as a programmer for a couple years and save some money. 40 years later - I never went back to the PhD.

I've been fortunate in finding a remodeling contractor that hires people who know what they are doing and pays them minimum of $30/hr and is insured/licensed. So far most of them have done excellent work. Some are purely carpenters, some are mostly painters, some have multiple skills. I talk with them and most could work for large construction companies building hotels and apartments (lots of that going on here) but prefer working 40 hr weeks working on people's homes. The carpenter (now retired) did a bunch of work in my house and was amazing to watch.

I check everyone I follow (mostly artists) to see if they are posting art generally, and look at most of the people who follow me to see what they do before following them back. There are a few (legit) retweeting bots and I have ignored a bunch of people because they did not seem real. I remember a set of accounts followed me that had (1) no tweets (2) avatar pic of MCU movie actor and (3) hundreds of followers.

In my final job (unless I unretire) I worked the last year at home. Most of the people I had to be in meetings with were on another coast, so most meetings were zoom/etc anyway. We did have some meetings locally but not too often. We were just as productive WFH as in the office. What I missed however was social interaction, eating lunch together with my team, occasional movie outings, etc. Living by yourself and not seeing people most of the time is not great for everyone. I'd rather see it be optional.

If you are experienced then WFH is easy to do, but for new people being in person makes it much easier to learn a complex business/code environment like we had. I could draw on a white board our crazy world much easier than try to explain it online.

Also the insistence by some people for cameras in zoom calls drove me nuts, I hate cameras so I never turned mine on (also my bandwidth was never great so video often made the audio fall out, a good excuse).

Yes the data was not really there, I knew how enough to build the search part, but without sufficient raw data (i.e. not scraped or just via API without being able to search it directly) it would not have been possible. But that was a long time ago now. Oh well it was only a week...

Sure there is always some on both sides; but the Russians were considered a superpower and Ukraine's military was considered much weaker on paper: the Russians are the ones moving backwards and losing all the time. Winners go forwards. Propaganda is mostly useful to the loser trying to convince their population that all is well. Goebbels kept saying Germany was winning even as the Russians and Western allies were already in Germany.

You can say the same thing about stocks, gold, bonds, commodities depending on what year you are in. Everything goes up and eventually down again. Oil futures even went below zero not that long ago, now the cash price is over $100 a barrel. I saw the crash in 1987 and yet here we are, at all time highs recently. Crypto of course has less economic meaning as it's just bits, but anything that is traded goes up and down in value, even pointless things like baseball cards. Value is whatever people will pay today for something hoping it either goes up in value or provides them with some benefit (like a house).

Complaining that crypto is stupid is fine, but lots of things in history were stupidly valued (tulips, beanie babies, bored apes) and eventually the market did or will change. Crypto is worth whatever people will pay for it. It's not inherently evil.

I tried to start a travel company once. It didn't even get started at all because it I begin to plan the first week of Sept, 2001. Sometimes bad timing is as bad as a bad economy. In retrospect what I was wanting to do was impossible anyway; building a search engine for vacations using raw airfare/hotels/cars data + geographical info (I had experience with reservation tech and high volume search). Oh well, I never tried again.

When I was a lead before retiring last year, I went to all the meetings instead of my team, but always kept them in the loop via Slack as to what was important during the meeting. I also wrote as much code as they did so was always understanding how the meeting decisions might relate to our codebase and future efforts. Of course it added a lot of extra hours to my workweek doing both, but I never had much issue over my career multitasking.

It's not easy or fun sitting in too many meetings though as I always asked a lot of questions to ensure product/design/execs could adequately explain what they were asking for; asking enough questions like this made sure we didn't waste too much time doing things that were likely to change. Meetings can be useful if you participation helps the workload; but it can drag down you and your team's productivity if it does nothing but waste time. Often people whose entire life is going to meetings don't understand how they can affect success simply by sucking up huge hours every day.

Incredibly interesting chart, or whatever the presentation is called.

As an artist who does digital abstract art, I've always loved Monet's (and Van Gogh's in a different style) ability to create a mood with from close up what appear to be random brush strokes and dabs. It's a magical ability I could never even vaguely approach. The ability to paint outdoors and capture fleeting lighting effects a camera would have trouble with (since a photo is only an instant) is also amazing. If I had $10M to spend and had an option for a Monet or Van Gogh, or a Bored Ape, how is that even a decision? 100 years from now people will still love the former, and the latter will be remembered alongside Pet Rocks if at all.

I can't the article it puts up some BS unusual activity warning.