flatline

Or the more cynical take that this is the natural course all parties take when they discover themselves atop a large pile of money. The board was just outmaneuvered.

My Jeep Wrangler has a physical volume knob that may or may not elicit a change in volume when turned within the first 30 seconds of starting the car. Which can be literally deafening if you had on e.g. a podcast at 75% volume when you turned the car off and it turned back on to the radio. Some of these things need a dedicated circuit.

I really believed this argument growing up in a white, middle class household in the 1980s. I’m more skeptical now, after two decades of helping build our current technocracy. I think there is a sweet spot between the dystopian lawlessness of prehistory and early human history, and the dystopian future of rapacious consumption and late stage capitalism.

Two then-current NIST standards (62 and 71?) side by side gave contradictory advice. It is a step forward though for sure.

That’s my feeling too. GPT models have been around for a few years now. ChatGPT and its cousins represent one specialized use that has finally come to market. I would be shocked if the big studios have not been sinking a lot of money into this for a while.

The SAG and writers guilds certainly take it seriously.

As someone who grew up in the 80s, this type of minimization of personal suffering was the norm. “You don’t know how good you have it” despite real mental and physical health struggles. You either made it to adulthood, cynical and damaged, transformed your suffering into growth on your own, or ended up in some marginalized place like a mental ward. Sometimes a mix of all of the above. I think we can do better.

I remember the first time I saw a therapist she thought I may have PTSD. I thought she was nuts and never went back. It took me another decade to realize that my mother was deeply mentally ill and physically and emotionally abusive, it’s just that no one ever talked about or recognized these things as abnormal. My dad was a high functioning alcoholic. I’ve talked to other adults who went through much less than I did and left home and lived on the streets rather than deal with their family situation. But talk to my parents, everything was “fine” and “pretty normal”. I had a “good upbringing” because we were not poor or in trouble with the law.

I also had some early sexual encounters that people would jump to classify as child abuse, but they were, from my standpoint, overall positive experiences.

I don’t know where to draw the line on what constitutes trauma for someone else. It’s highly subjective. There are always things in life we must just bear. But it’s good to recognize when things are not working and to make what changes we can, and to recognize when things have long lasting impacts, and when they don’t.

Those are good articles. I don’t think the numbers support non-monogamy as a major cause - men are not looking for “relationships or casual dating”, and things like poly communities are quite small outside of a few big US cities. The stat that 20% of gen Z identifies as queer is pretty fascinating. That’s going to be a big voting bloc in a few decades.

I’m not as worried about Joe Schmo using OpenAI services as I am about a foreign state with weaponized AI tools. Plus nobody really cares if you can show that something was AI generated after the fact, the first impression is all that counts. Remember the backlash against snopes.com? Social media plus AI is going to make this a really spectacular election season and OpenAI can do approximately nothing to curb that.

I am working on relocating to an area that will afford me more personal and professional opportunities in the future. I have been writing software professionally for over 20 years and there is not much left there to captivate me, so I’ve refocused my professional efforts towards softer skills. I spend a lot of my day talking to people, organizing schedules, planning, networking, writing proposals. Much like you, working on myself.

Given that our other principal source of extant stoic writing is from a former slave, Epictetus, I’m inclined to agree that the criticism is baseless.

Academia is a recipe for burnout. It’s like pro sports, unless you are the top 1% of the top 1% you may be able to keep eeking by but will never be in a comfortable position. There is always more to do and you do not get paid well for your time. You are surrounded by people who pour their lives into their work and it will be expected of you. The culture is extremely toxic and dysfunctional.

Your lack of imagination as to another job is part of the trap. Work can be enjoyable, pay well, and you can still have a personal life, but academia sells itself as the only possible trajectory for a certain type of person. Most people leave academia and many of them find meaningful work outside of that.

That sounds like a bad human translation from Chinese. AI mistakes are a different category.

I have kids and recognize that they will become full grown adults and should have some agency. I want them to be informed enough to navigate the treacherous world into which they’ve been born, and given the emotional, financial, and other forms of stability so they don’t turn to drugs as a crutch. When I hear opiates I think of the medical industrial complex as the primary threat vector, not street drugs. All fully legal right now. Everyone I know who got hooked started under doctors orders. I’m not against responsible recreational drug use as they get older. I’m also not against the responsible prescription of opiates, all we’ve done to curb this is make pain treatment harder to obtain for those who need it. Either way, punishing people is not the way forward.

The government is mostly just there to manage contracts, the actual work would be done by the same doctors that are doing it today. You would just pare n profit-seeking entities down to one principally administrative entity. If you wish to pay for your own medical procedures out of pocket there will be nothing stopping you. That is not to say this does not have problems.

Insurance is anti-competitive on top of that. You have a Sophie’s choice of who you want to pay to buy into this crazy system. There’s no transparency in how services are priced or provided. You as a consumer have no insight into how prices are negotiated between the insurer and providers, nor how providers are paid out. Good luck making an informed decision.

The skills I try to instill in my kids are things like: empathy, self-regulation, effective communication, personal boundaries, autonomous decision making, high-level planning, and the basics of adulting. The biggest one I think is adapting to change, because their world will be even more mercurial than the one we are navigating now.

I’m an expert software developer but have not spent time teaching these skills to my 10 year old son. He can get that from literally a hundred other places, and while I am a decent teacher, I’d rather spend our time together focusing on the things I place value on that I don’t think he is likely to get through other sources. I sometimes feel like a full-time therapist for my 12 year old daughter, what good is another A on her middle school report card when she is doing herself in trying to mold herself to meet others’ expectations? She needs an advocate more than a trade skill.

I wasn’t exactly rude about it, but they were acting as a representative of the company - probably the only one I could ever actually talk to - so I didn’t see any reason to sugar coat it either. I am often direct with sales people that I am not interested in their product, and I have been yelled at and harassed by them before. This is all late stage capitalism at its finest.

I subscribed for a few years and would renew each year when they jacked the rates back up. Finally decided it just was not worth it and went through their arduous cancellation process. Got a call back the next day asking to sign me back up and I took the customer service rep to task saying he knew perfectly well I just canceled yesterday. He gave a sheepish laugh, did not argue the point, and they have never called me back.

He named it, so is ever so slightly wrong - but all of us who have been around for a while and have participated semi-regularly in discussions without getting banned are in. Relative to the global online population this is still a very small group.

Cliven Bundy still walks free as far as I know, which I personally find mind-boggling, but there is precedence.

I like financial breakdowns like this. The thing an LLM cannot do is all the decision making that went into that. Framing the problem is harder to quantify, and is almost certainly an order of magnitude more work than writing and debugging the code. But a sufficiently good LLM should be able to produce code cheaper than humans. Maybe with time and outside sources of truth, better.

LLMs are cool and will continue to change society in ways we cannot readily predict, but they are not quite that cool. GPT3 has been around for a little bit now and the world has not ended or encountered a singularity. The models are expensive to run both in compute and expertise. They produce a lot of garbage.

I see the threat right now to low-paid writing gigs. I’m sure there’s a whole stratum of those they have wiped out, but I also know real live humans still doing that kind of work.

What developers may use in five years is a better version of Copilot trained on existing code bases. They will let developers do more in the time they have, not replace them. Open source software has not put us all out of jobs. I foresee the waning of Big Tech for other reasons.

Just another third party booking service. Last month a rental from Budget through Costco travel for a six days in CA was around $340. The same thing on rentalcars.com was over $500.

Costco travel alone has saved me hundreds if not thousands of dollars in rental cars over the past year. Easily 40% cheaper than the competition.

I worked with a non-software team that used this to build a UI about two years ago. It’s great to spin up something quickly, and worked well for a team that didn’t have much UI experience - to a point. It becomes very hard to maintain and navigate as soon as any complexity comes in - much harder than Qt, Winforms, or Swing. The styling was lackluster. Maybe it’s improved in that time, but I think its place is quick one-off UIs and rapid prototyping.

Deepness and Marooned in Realtime are his favorites of mine. Both sequels to less impressive novels imo. I like his writing in general but those two were really brilliant.

All I can get is callbacks for some places. This is newish. You can call, wait in the queue for 20+ minutes, get routed to voicemail, and leave an option for a callback. That’s it. And the CSRs won’t reveal any semi-secret info to confirm who they are, they just want info to confirm your identity. It is frustrating because “calling them first” for anything billing related has been my go-to for a decade.

Containers can run services without most of the overhead they talk about. And as everyone else is mentioning here, a service-oriented architecture is not dependent on any one tech stack, it’s just a way of designing applications.

I had a nasal infection once and tested positive for MRSA from a nose swab. The doctor indicated I probably always have it living there, I’m curious if that sounds right?

My coparent had her bike stolen. It was parked at her work - a government building. In front of the security office with a window facing the bike racks, and security cameras on them.

The cameras were not operational, the police did nothing but take the report.

I have had two very securely locked bikes stolen in years past. They were left in what turned out to be a vulnerable place for long periods of time. Depending on your habits it is a matter of when, not if. If you only take the bike to select locations for short periods or keep it out of sight, this does not apply to you.