fcatalan

This has been my experience with a recent try to guide the LLM to a complete implementation of a small internal tool. I had in an hour what would have taken me 4 or 5 to write. But after that, it was an endless loop of the LLM adding logging code to find some bug and failing to fix it, only to add more logging code and ineffectual changes and so on. The problem is that even after it's lost at sea, it's still answering in a completely confident and self assured tone, so when you decide to take matters in your hands you might be too far gone from sanity and have an unfixable mess in your hands. I guess I can go back to where it strayed and retake it from there, but by now the experiment seems to be a failure.

My wife has been receiving medical appointments, test results, event tickets, package tracking numbers and so on destined to a few old ladies for years. I once tracked the sons and nephews of one and told them, and they apparently thought I was some kind of scammer and didn't return messages after a couple exchanges, so to this day she still receives all those.

I was studying Physics, not out of particular interest, just because it was challenging, so I was doing badly.

I then discovered a small room that had two unsupervised computers hooked up to some mysterious world-spaning network, and made friends there, ended up leaving Physics for Computer Science.

My first job and every job in my 20s came from people I met in that room getting jobs themselves and calling me to see if I would go work with them, or someone from the previous jobs calling me back. I've never done a real job interview or sent a CV.

But then I formed a family and my social life plummeted. I'm also bad at really nurturing relationships that don't self sustain, so in retrospect I can see how my career ossified since then.

I don't totally regret it because even if I'm now underpaid and underemployed, I earn more than enough for my lifestyle and have loads of free time, so it balances the pang for greater things.

But yeah, networking is very important.

This is so myopic. I feel it's similar to the scrapping of Philosophy from the common high school curriculum here in Spain. It was thrown away as the uninteresting rants of beardy old men, to make space for things like some trite dabbling with Word and Excel billed as "digitalization". So now things like History, Literature and many STEM subjects feel completely ungrounded. When my kids have some trouble understanding things and they ask me, the answer is very often something I learned studying Philosophy.

So now let's also not do any research on for example... Social Networks. It's not that they are a relevant aspect of modern life worthy of careful observation. Don't dare look closely into what the overlords are doing.

I've seen my 15 year old use ChatGPT for her homework and I'm ok with most of what she does.

For example she tends to ask it for outlines instead of the whole thing, mostly to beat "white page paralysis" and also because it often provides some aspect she might have overlooked.

She tends to avoid asking for big paragraphs because she doesn't trust it with facts and also dislikes editing out the "annoying" AI style or prompting for style rewrites. But she will feed it phrases from her own writing that get too tangled for simplification.

Also she will vary the balance of AI/own effort according to the nature of the task, her respect for the teacher or subject: Interesting work from a engaging lecturer? Light LLM touch or none. Malicious make-work or readable Lorem Ipsum when the point is the format of the thing instead of the content? AI pap by the tons for you. I find it healthy and mature.

I've always seen a dilemma with increased bureaucracy driven by corruption prevention:

Systems too focused on defeating corruption as a main objective tend to miss their original intent, and become overly restrictive, to the point of having to rely on rule breaking to actually perform their function.

But once a particular rule is OK to break, every other rule is in jeopardy.

This way you end up with systems like the Spanish access to public jobs: extremely punishing for the participants that are subject to humongous nonsensical competitive examinations, ostensibly to select the very best strictly on their merits, but still rife with corruption.

Programming doesn't happen in a vacuum, and experience and institutional knowledge can account for many orders of magnitude of performance. A trivial example/recent anecdote:

The other day, two of our juniors came to see me, they had been stumped by the wrong result of a very complex query for 2 hours. I didn´t event look at the query, just scrolled down the results for 10 seconds and instantly knew exactly what was wrong. This is not because I'm better at SQL than them or a Carmack level talent. This is because I've known the people in the results listing for basically all my life, so I instantly knew who didn´t belong there and very probably why he was being wrongly selected.

Trivial, but 10 seconds vs. 4 man hours is quite the improvement.

Things like this brought me into computers, but along the way I fell for the easy and boring life of glueing libraries, endpoints and corporate bullshit that leads to burnout. Perhaps some day...

Small Twitch communities do it for me.

I'm quite of an introvert. And all my long term friendships have faded or my friends have moved cities or countries.

But around lockdown I took up miniature painting and started watching a bunch of 50 to 100 viewer channels about the hobby. With those numbers the streamer knows you by name by the second time you show up and you soon bond with others in chat.

This got me in contact with the small local hobby club, but also by the time I could attend an in person nationwide convention my family was astounded: dozens of people they knew nothing about were greeting me, stopping for hugs and chats, giving me stuff from their stands...

I've seen both romantic and business relationships emerge in that environment.

Hard to measure the quiet quitters, but they are there, sullenly drawing their check in exchange for their minimum viable productivity.

He's confused, he thinks he should be always winning because he's better.

And sometimes he does, for example he can talk himself into a promotion while I silently do all the work.

But I always win in the end, because he needs me more than I need him.

Until I switched to Postgres 8 years ago I knew a lot about MySQL. I barely know anything about Postgres

Not really assigned at birth, but at the time you first request the card. It's a very very very crappy database ID number:

-There's a significant amount of duplicates, enough that if your database is big enough you will find one sooner or later.

-Format is variable: There are older 7 digit numbers, modern 8 digit ones, some people pad the 7-digit with a 0, some don't, some consider the CRC letter part of the key, some don't, some just append the letter, some hyphen it. If you deal with manual data entry anywhere, you will suffer.

-Foreign people exist: You start using their passport number, the format of your key is now completely arbitrary, can't validate it. If you were using 8 digit NIFs as keys now some countries use 8 digit passports, increasing your chances of duplicates.

-Foreign people stay: They get a resident card and they use that. Format is almost like NIF but not really so you need to account for that. Someone you registered initially with a passport now has the card and registers for something else with it. Have fun cleaning their duplicated identity from the whole system.

-Foreign people become Spanish: Now they get a NIF. If you have dealt with them for a long enough time, have fun again fixing their records for the second time.

This resonates with me. I can't have relaxing hobbies: I take them up, find some measurable/competitive/social aspect in them, smash my way from "rookie" to "advanced beginner" to "top 20 percentile" in very little time and then agonize about the ensuing plateau and how getting into the top 1% would require complete dedication or might be realistically out of reach for me.

By that time I stop enjoying doing whatever the thing is. Not fun anymore.

People will sincerely praise me and it will feel empty because I know there are millions of better painters, my laptimes are a full second off the ultimate pace, my guitar skills only good enough for playing alone in my office, my leisure programming projects all pointless and abandoned.

I envy two kinds of people: those that have found some thing they are very good at and keep enjoying it forever, but also those that can enjoy something for years even if they are realistically mediocre at it and never improve.

And the money making part is also true for me. I took up miniature painting and quite soon was at the level where people will pay you decent money to paint their miniatures for them. I started getting offers and accepted one, not for the money, probably just out of pride. It was complete hell, I hated the result and every minute I spent painting it. The client was happy, me, I guess I learned my lesson: never again.

About the remote work comms there is a widespread attitude that irks me: People texting "can we talk?" or simply "hello". No! tell me straight away what you need so I can judge how and when to respond. When people state what they need, most of the time the response is immediate and it's the thing they need or some ok followup. "can-we-talkers" I'm starting to let stew for a few minutes, because I suspect they do that on purpose to "skip my queue".

I suspect some/many of the online exam proctoring services are that way. Even some that market themselves as fully AI driven might be really AI = Actually Indians

I flew this week. There were two 737 flights at about 130€ then one with an A320 at 220€. I took the Airbus. Same reason as you.

Simply that the company had profits. This was pre dotcom crash and these were 20-something flashy MBA dudes that had been told to buy terrible money sinkholes left and right, and were seeing positive cash flow in an acquisition for the very first time. For them it was ludicrous and somewhat quaint, like an old grocery store earning money for the owners every month.

Long time ago I worked at a startup that was making profit from day one, and growing off reinvesting the profit. Zero external investment or debt. The founders finally sold it to a big corp that was on a buying spree. When the accounting people from the big corp started reviewing the finances they looked up surprised and said "These guys are fucking grocers!".

I've been running multi-server Moodle for many years. My sessions are in Redis, but you have the option to have them on the database. High traffic Moodle (mine is about 40k users) is a bit involved. You need to set up caching and also connection pooling in the database and there are a few hidden pitfalls, but it can be made to perform very decently

Can you also explain how he surrendered again what the Francoist dictatorship had already surrendered about 50 years ago?

In a way yes, an important part of the appeal of the games were the miniatures, and during the pandemic I got back into collecting and painting them and it's become my main hobby since then.

I'm glad to find my sentiment reflected in the article:

I was interested in RPGs and wargames in the early 90s. Even in my relatively backwater hometown there were events, stores or clubs were I could socialize over them.

It was all swept away by MtG within a few months, and I had the misfortune of not "getting it" myself and suddenly being left without anyone to play anywhere.

So I'm still repelled by card games to this day.

I'm kinda the Oracle at my workplace. People come to my desk to obtain answers and I google for a couple minutes and deliver them.

I thought maybe ChatGPT would replace me, but so far the same people come so I can prompt it for them.

I dropped out of Physics back in the day, because I loved computers a bit more, and now that I'm kind of fed up with computers I'd like to remove the thorn and do something like this.

But I find that so much time has passed that I would need to brush up parts of my high school maths first, and this kind of discourages me before even starting.

I run Postgres since about 2016. I used to run MySQL behind the same frontend app.

I barely know anything about Postgres beyond installation for our use case, backup and recover. I used to know loads about obscure MySQL optimization techniques, fixing broken tables, fiddling with scary parameters and recovering from hair raising situations.

I like my current state of ignorance.

Get the dudes digging trenches in front of Crimea to build those roads instead

I still treasure friendships forged that way :)

Mid 90s were fun at Uni.

Replacing a T-connector with a broken one to sabotage unpopular classes... Or binary searching it with a terminator to save one you liked...

Learning that pinging Windows 3.1 with a big payload would BSOD it and writing a script to perform a rolling BSOD of the entire lab while sitting in the back...

Sending random insults to random spots on ttys while people read their mail using Elm...

Writing a trojan to steal and then delete the MUD accounts of the dudes hogging the only 2 computers with Internet access available to undergrads...

And being caught and let go with a not so stern warning. Simpler times.

True, here in Spain WhatsApp is practically a basic utility. Nobody is not on WhatsApp.