dml2135

The performance really is abysmal. I started using it years ago and the change from the early days has been drastic.

I think the problem is the premise that successful movies should become effectively genres in-and-of themselves.

The problem with these franchises isn't all the reasons why they are poorly made, but rather that they exist as franchises at all.

A sequel or two can be good if you have real ideas to explore, as you described. But the idea that you should just make Alien movies forever is just creatively bankrupt.

I love my Kobo Forma except for the fact that the battery life is complete trash. I’m pretty sure Kobo did not replace the battery on the refurbished device I purchased :(

Well, we prioritize amongst the tech debt on that board and then move it onto the main board for sprint, it's not like it's a completely separate process. Things do go there to die sometimes though.

I've become something of the guy that's the main code remover at my current job. Part of it is because I've been here the longest on the team, so I've got both the knowledge and the confidence to say a feature is dead and we can get rid of it. But also part of it is just being the one to go in and clean up things like release flags after they've gone live in prod.

I'm trying to socialize my team to get more in the habit of this, but it's been hard. It's not so much that I get pushback, it's just that tasks like "clean up the feature flag" get thrown into the tech debt pile. From my perspective, that's feature work, it just happens to take place after the feature goes live instead of before. But it's work that we committed to when we decided to build the feature, so no, you don't get to put it on the tech debt board like it was some unexpected issue that came up during development.

Curious to hear other perspectives here, I do worry that I'm a bit too dogmatic about this sometimes. Part of it maybe comes from working in shared art / maker spaces a lot in the past, where "clean up your shit" was rule #1, and I kind of see developers leaving unused code throughout the codebase for features they owned through the same lens.

Of course, this is the way you need to write tests -- to test the actual logical pathways and requirements of the code, and not just finagle them together to overfit some code coverage metric.

I'm not sure where you are getting this from -- many of the poorer areas of the city, such as the Bronx, went to Cuomo.

That’s fair, I guess I just don’t have much sympathy for that person as from my perspective, they were getting a massive subsidy for a long time, and we’re all better off if we cut off their gravy train. And I say this as a former artist myself — if they need the space, they can move to Brooklyn like the rest of us.

The subway is also a basic tool to get to work, which even more people use, and we charge a fare for that. So why not for driving?

The point isn’t that it won’t negatively affect anybody of moderate or lower income, it’s that overall it will positively affect most people of moderate or lower income, because most of those people do not drive regularly into Manhattan.

I’m unclear on how $9 is not a fair price to drive a car from lower manhattan to new jersey. Public transit would cost at least that much.

> Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.

Aruguable. It’s very possible that the time saved by not sitting in traffic will outweigh the congestion charge for delivery trucks (which is what I assume you’re referring to).

> Part of that mitigation is accepting the possibility that if the Mossad want to murder you by blowing up your toaster, nobody's going to stop them.

People are not accepting that possibility, they are assuming it will not happen to them and that they are not a target of interest.

Change that assumption and attitudes toward privacy also change.

> This is no different than, say, the typical anecdote of a junior engineer dropping the database. Should the junior be held accountable? Of course not - it's the senior's fault for allowing that to happen at the first place. If the junior is held accountable, that would more be an indication of poor software engineering practices.

Of course the junior should be held accountable, along with the senior. Without accountability, what incentive do they have to not continue to fuck up?

Dropping the database is an extreme example because it's pretty easy to put in checks that should make that impossible. But plenty of times I've seen juniors introduce avoidable bugs simply because they did not bother to test their code -- that is where teaching accountability is a vital part of growth as an engineer.

You are moving goalposts significantly here -- a small CSS hack is a far cry from your docker infrastructure.

I mean, it's still a pretty good way to make money, when compared to other fields and not to other engineers at FAANG.

> Because the only thing people do on a Nintendo Switch is game.

Well, this becomes a bit of a circular argument, but certainly part of the reason for that is the only thing one can do on a Nintendo Switch is game, due to its restrictive software.

And, strictly speaking, this statement is false. The only thing most people do on a Nintendo Switch is play games, but there is a subset of people that hack their switches and install things like Android TV. The thing is basically just an Nvidea Shield, hardware-wise. Not being able to do everything an Nvidea Shield can do is a software restriction.

I do see your point re: Apple's ambitions being far vaster than Nintendo's. But in terms of controlling their own markets, they are still seeking similar levels of control.

This is a result of there being a general consensus that video game consoles are "a thing" that we are all used to, and that the loosely-coupled movements of right-to-repair and antitrust are not seeking to disrupt the video game industry for fear of distracting from their larger goals.

It's an uneasy balance and it will be interesting to see where it goes once the dust settles on the current antitrust actions against big tech. I can't really think of a good reason why the iPhone should be a generalized computing device that is pryed open from Apple's clutches, while Nintendo, for example, can still run their own app store and would not be required to allow things like sideloading and root access while a smartphone manufacturer would. What makes one a computer, and the other an appliance?

(I'm saying this all as a right-to-repair and antitrust advocate, by the way)

I think a lot of this is a result of nostalgia, and a recognition that the business model of the video game industry has depended on this sort of control for a significantly longer than the personal computing industry. So no one really wants to kill Nintendo like they don't want to kill Mickey Mouse. Or, more cynically, no one really wants Nintendo and other video game behemoths to step into this fight on the other side, because going after Big Tech is hard enough as it is.

I’m all for critiques of capitalism, but it’s extremely unconvincing to say capitalism must go, but at the same time, you don’t know what to replace it with.

How are you so convinced that there is a better solution than capitalism if you can’t even articulate what that solution would be? How do you know that capitalism, for all it’s flaws, is not still the least-worst among an array of bad options?

Honestly I don’t remember the exact price so I may be exaggerating the cost disparity… but I am not exaggerating the pile of fridges so the disparity was certainly there.

I remember that my school rented out mini-fridges to students. It was about $150 to rent a dingy, used fridge for the year. The cost to buy a similar fridge was about $100. So of course, students would buy fridges, then discard them at the end of the year. Piles and piles of mini-fridges.

> My dad would joke that all the graduates would throw away their tie-dye shirts and go to work on wall street (not completely a joke).

I had a friend in college that did literally this. Guy sold weed throughout his time there. While he was a senior, his supplier who had graduated a year earlier hooked him up with an internship at his company's trading desk. Went to work on Wall St after graduation.

I was always amused that the marijuana business was more important to his career after school than his studies (I think he was an environmental systems major). He's a commodities trader now, which is fitting.

> Everybody talks about evironmentalism execept they don't actually practice it.

My impression is that only about half the population, at most, even pretends to care about environmentalism.

> don’t mind imposing a $180 pay cut every month to the poor

LIRR monthly passes are anywhere from $180 to $400+. Are you advocating for making those free as well, or is that different somehow?

It's new yes, but the comment you are replying to asked how it is different. It's simply another toll.

This is the same thing, except the different road is "the subway", or even the same road and "walking".

Why is it inevitable? Progress towards a goal in the past does not guarantee progress towards that goal in the future. There are plenty of examples of technology moving forward, and then hitting a wall.

> I am still trying to sort out why experiences are so divergent. I've had much more positive LLM experiences while coding than many other people seem to, even as someone who's deeply skeptical of what's being promised about them. I don't know how to reconcile the two.

I am also trying to sort this out, but I'm probably someone you'd consider to be on the other, "anti-LLM" side.

I wonder if part of this is simply level of patience, or, similarly, having a work environment that's chill enough to allow for experimentation?

From my admittedly short attempts to use agentic coding so far, I usually give up pretty quickly because I experience, as others in the thread described, the agent just spinning its wheels or going off and mangling the codebase like a lawnmower.

Now, I could totally see a scenario where if I spent time tweaking prompts, writing rule files, and experimenting with different models, I could improve that output significantly. But this is being sold to me as a productivity tool. I've got code to write, and I'm pretty sure I can write it fairly quickly myself, and I simply don't have time at my start up to muck around with babysitting an AI all day -- I have human junior engineers that need babysitting.

I feel like I need to be a lot more inspired that the current models can actually improve my productivity in order to spend the time required to get there. Maybe that's a chicken-or-egg problem, but that's how it is.

And if someone presents a plan, explains that plan, and is completely wrong repeatedly and often, in a way that makes it seem like they don’t even have any concept whatsoever of what they may have done wrong, wouldn’t you start to consider at some point that maybe this person is not a reliable source of information?

I think this is all a great argument for a strong social safety net. It’s not a great argument for keeping people in pointless jobs doing work that has been made obsolete by automation.

You don’t get 1/10 the chargers for 1/10 the money, thats not how projects work. You need to hire people, make a plan, and execute on the plan, and all of that has upfront costs. The same in government as in business — why do you think startups need investors?

That money was wasted when the project was cancelled, not before.