dgfitz

This seems… quite reasonable.

You’re comparing 27 countries with 27 governments and a combined population of 450m with 1 country, population 340m.

> I want plug and play, but consoles have their own problems and limitations.

How so? A console is literally a gaming PC.

I can see the point of “need multiple consoles because game X isn’t on console Y” or “I’d like to play an RTS/MMO that isn’t on a console” but since you mentioned gamepads that point mostly dies.

I also haven’t ever had a PS5 or Switch controller lose link from a console because someone walks or stands between myself and the console.

Goalposts moved.

I’ll never drive a car that in any way takes control of the steering or brakes. Full stop. If I need to modify the car to disable that feature, I will.

At least I’m honest about it.

Pass all the laws in the name of good ideas for the children. If I disagree with it, I’m not going to obey it. I’m not unique in this.

I’m fucking tired of being told “I’m smarter than you and this is actually in your best interest, trust me.”

Did you know that child labor actually increased in India after laws that tried to eliminate child labor?

Let’s keep patting ourselves on the back that we can feel good about passing laws though.

If you’d meet me halfway on this, it’s not some bizarro-world scenario. It really isn’t.

It’s so funny to me that people think just because a law is passed, that fixes problems.

“This wasn’t illegal and now we made it illegal, we fixed the problem!”

How’s that been working out?

You can take a blind curve at 15 miles an hour and not have time to avoid debris in the road.

Use some critical thinking.

To be fair I do not know, never driven one. Seems like the slippery slope has already been paved with good intentions though.

I don’t think the dead guy will be in the courtroom.

Clever try though.

I will buy used cars that don’t auto-anything for me until I literally cannot find one anymore. Then I’ll buy a tune to remove the feature.

I’ll be sure to tell that to the poor person on a bicycle in the middle of the road in front of me when I come around a blind curve and can’t jump lanes so as not to hit them.

“So sorry I squished you, my lane assist wouldn’t let me move out of the way in time.”

Nailed it.

Mostly the selfishness part. The whole idea of being courteous with other people on the road just doesn’t exist.

Sadly, this also extends to bicyclists. Entitled instead of courteous.

I’m re-reading hitchhikers, this made me chuckle.

> working in legacy parts of the codebase

This is why most of us get paid what we do, I’m sure you realize that. There is immense value in having engineers on a team/at a company that can do this.

> anything that requires boilerplate that can't be code genned

It is important to understand the boilerplate. It is also important to understand what is boilerplate and what isn’t. After these things are grasped, usually it’s a copypasta.

> actually writing the code of unit tests (the fun part is making code testable, and coming up with what to test)

If you don’t know how to write unit tests you don’t know how to write testable code. If you do know how to write unit tests you understand the value in maintaining them when you make code changes. Passing that off to a statistical next token predictor renders the tests largely useless

> fixing lint issues that can't be auto fixed yet

You should be thankful you didn’t write code in the 80s if this is a real stance. More thankful still that you rarely need to interact with code sans a linter or autocomplete. There are lots of technologies out there where this isn’t possible. Off the top of my head would be yocto recipes.

> removing old feature toggles

I’m not clear what this even means? You mean, doing your job?

> building a temporary test harness

Generate one, I don’t care. You’ll never know if it’s any good unless you go over the whole thing line by line. At which point, you didn’t save time and didn’t “level up” any skills

s/confidently//

Because “ai” is fallible, right now it is at best a very powerful search engine that can also muck around in (mostly JavaScript) codebases. It also makes mistakes in code, adds cruft, and gives incorrect responses to “research-type” questions. It can usually point you in the right direction, which is cool, but Google was able to do that before its enshittification.

s/AI/LLMs

The part where people call it AI is one of the greatest marketing tricks of the 2020s.

One of my only stipulations when buying a SFH for just myself at the time, 15 years ago, was no HOA. Sure I also wanted 1 full bath, a driveway, and a not-awful commute. HOAs were an instant “nope” for any listing I came across.

As a sw engineer, I’m going to tell our customer that the thing they claim they want they do not need.

Because I’ve done this enough times, they’ll listen to me and we won’t waste time on it.

You should try it, instead of designing soggy ice cream cone caps.

> Engineer, knowing how you're supposed to use the ice cream cone, objects. PM, knowing what the customer needs, insists.

That’s the kicker. They know what the customer _wants_ not what they _need_

The number of times a Jr engineer has asked me “how do I accomplish task X in technology Y, it’s really important!”

I always, always ask “what problem are you trying to solve. Not once in over 15 YoE has the solution been to use X.

A good PM doesn’t say “this is what the customer needs” because most of the time the fucking customer doesn’t actually understand what they need.

The engineer knows that holding the ice cream cone upside down means they’re trying to use the product in a way it was never intended, so they push back.

A good PM would ask “why do you want to hold the ice cream cone upside down, customer?”

“Oh well we don’t actually want to hold it upside down, we just get frustrated that sometimes when we put too much ice cream on/in the cone it falls out. So if you can make the cone hold the ice cream while upside down, the problem is solved!”

“Oh, so what you actually need is a bigger cone that can hold more ice cream?”

“Oh, yeah that would work too”

meme about Spider-Man facepalming, where Spider-Man is the engineer

> These integrate into a larger pieces of software, both of which directly generate revenue from these features.

Were these larger pieces of software _already_ generating revenue, before your features?

First dollar is the hardest one to make.

What risk was there in creating facebook? I don't see it.

Dude makes a website in his dorm room and I guess eventually accepts free money he is not obligated to pay back.

What risk?

We have been kicking the can down the road since 2008, and made it worse with all those covid checks.

The irrational/solvent saying has never been more true, and it has been irrational for almost 20 years because we never paid the piper.

First search result: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Cross_compiling_for_Windows_unde...

I wouldn't be surprised at all, make is great!

My contention is that a build script should ideally be:

sha-bang

clone && cd $cloned_folder

${generate_makefile_with_tool}

make $1

Anything much longer than that can (and usually will) quickly spiral out of control.

Make is great. Unless you're code-golfing, your makefile will be longer than a few lines and a bunch of well-intentioned-gremlins will pop in and bugger the whole thing up. Just seen it too many times.

Edit: in the jenkins case, in a jenkins build shell the clone happens outside build.sh:

(in jenkins shell):

clone && cd clone ./build.sh $(0-1 args)

(inside build.sh): $(generate_makefile_with_tool) make $1

You invoke CMake/qmake/configure/whatever from the bash script.

I hate committing makefiles directly if it can be helped.

You can still call make in the script after generating the makefile, and even pass the make target as an argument to the bash script if you want. That being said, if you’re passing more than 2-3 arguments to the build.sh you’re probably doing it wrong.

+1 for Jenkins.

At $dayjob they recently set up git runners. The effort I’m currently working on has the OS dictated to us, long story don’t ask. The OS is centos 7.

The runners do not support this. There is an effort to move to Ubuntu 22.04. The runners also don’t support this.

I’m setting up a Jenkins instance.

I’ve used it to run autonomous land vehicles. ~60 written binaries and ~20 written libraries, in additional to your bog-standard Linux distro binaries/libraries (core/more utils, ip, user management, etc)

It doesn’t need to be pidgin-holed as a glorified one-app-docker-esque platform. I would argue running a yocto distro as nothing more than a docker host might be the most powerful way to use it even, where the container also runs more than a single “thing” if you will. Just abstracts away the hardware layer from the software layer so as not to muck with the bsp.

For sure. Yocto is like playing whack-a-mole where the club is your head and the mole is your keyboard.

Very powerful, incredible capabilities. Extremely frustrating 90% of the time.

> China is also building a huge war chest of IP patents.

My understanding is that China doesn’t care about abusing patents they don’t own. Is this incorrect? Do they value patents only when they hold them and enforce them?

Asking sincerely.

And magic tricks look like magic. Turns out they’re not magical.

I am so floored that at least half of this community, usually skeptical to a fault, evangelizes LLMs so ardently. Truly blows my mind.

I’m open to them becoming more than a statistical token predictor, and I think it would be really neat to see that happen.

They’re nowhere close to anything other than a next-token-predictor.

When my grandmother-in-law passes away, my father-in-law will be about 500k+ “in the hole” because he will receive nothing, and has housed them for the past 25 years, in addition to paying for care, GIL has dementia.