hdndjsbbs

The junior engineers at my job have a terrible problem of writing AI "proposals" to problems. The proposals are all extremely detailed and verbose to a thought-terminating extent. It takes a lot of effort and self-control to parse out the actual "ideas".

I think of the Dwight Eisenhower quote: "Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable."

The process of thinking through a system and communicating your design to other humans is a core part of software engineering. You want to build the right abstractions and communicate the right level of detail. Delegating all that thought to an LLM means your proposal isn't clear to the target audience, and it's not helping the author to understand the problem.

The goal of modern fast food restaurants is to eliminate dining rooms. They're moving towards walk-up windows and drive thru only where I live.

Having a dining room attracts "undesirable" people who hang out inside and use your bathroom. By killing dining rooms businesses will eliminate one of few remaining third spaces and reliable public washrooms.

If compensation for software devs was in line with other profession there wouldn't be bootcamps. The problem is it's an easy job that gets paid a ton of money

Let's say some racial ones (including hard-r n-word) and some ableist ones? Guy also talked about jerking off a lot and joked about rape.

Yeah it's an awful place to work unless you're a far-right bro. My old director used to use slurs and vape in the office. The founder hires pro gamers with no technical expertise because he thinks they're cool.

The bigger problem, for me, is that knowledge work has become stupid. If you want to write code by hand and do a good job, you will be ruthlessly replaced by your boss churning out "good enough" LLM code.

The CEO at my company tried to PR code to my repo. It didn't make any sense but it was a whole political thing to make it go away.

The industry has always been stupid and selfish and short-sighted but now the ICs at the bottom of the pyramid are themselves being commoditized like all the workers they "disrupted".

The problem is anyone can point to examples of good CEOs and bad CEOs. John Sculley and Rory Read also got paid a ton of money. It's not clear what you need to know a priori to actually pick a good CEO.

Agreed, I can't even remember to wear my prescription eyeglasses that help me see and not get a headache. No chance I'm going to wear worse, heavier, more expensive glasses so I can take pictures and have AI talk to me 24/7.

I guess I'll move to a cabin in the woods.

Job sites don't want downtime. Companies aren't going to futz around with a bin of spare replacement glasses if they freeze or the battery dies every four hours.

Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables. This limits the number of ISPs. By contrast there is no natural limit to how many AI companies there can be.

I would prefer if we just nationalized this stuff but if we have to let private companies control limited resources we can at least enforce anti-trust rules. That's effectively what net-neutrality is - preventing the monopolists from colluding with sites to provide uneven access.

Did your 30s coincide with the COVID pandemic? I've had a similar experience the last 6 years, and it feels like a combination of aging (I'm 35) and Long COVID. I am trying to get out of the software industry altogether because sitting and looking at a screen all day makes me feel like shit now

Unfortunately I haven't gotten a lot of answers about treatment but just putting it out there, if you don't have a characteristically tick-borne illness like alpha-gal it might be COVID-related.

"room temperature espresso" was the first thing I thought of - espresso is meant to be drunk hot, right away. If you let a good shot cool off and compare it to a bad shot you're not going to notice the difference as much because you made them both worse by letting them sit and cool.

For industrial processes it probably doesn't matter - look at how nescafe is manufactured.

This is just the authors explanation to explain how to encode where a card ends up. The cards don't actually have barcodes, they have a binary-encoded number where a 0 indicates the left pile and 1 indicates the right pile during a specific round of the shuffle. The number encodes the journey that card makes during the shuffle. It's not an actual barcode.

200W is pretty good FTP for an "untrained" cyclist. FTP is the maximum you can sustain for a single hour, but you're not going to do multiple back-to-back.

Obviously the peloton crowd is biased towards people who will have better endurance and higher FTP, but basically the upshot is you could run one card for one hour with the effort of a 100km long ride which most recreational cyclists do once a week.

Being the rockstar doing all the technical work can also be performative. I'm currently working on a CTO team that is supposed to "disrupt" a big org. There's a lot of emphasis on demoing and sketching things out a mile wide and an inch deep. I think there's some merit to it but a lot of it is kayfabe.

Ultimately the "last 80%" of boring business logic actually needs to get built and the day to day operations have to happen. It can't be all AI prototypes and vibe coded demos.

Why does anyone participate in VC funds or PE at all then?

Why the fuck not? This is such a stupid perspective, "we shouldn't make things better because I imagined a way it could be bad".

The people who have private investments in SpaceX pre-IPO definitely have access to investments I don't have access to.

This is what financial capitalism and "democratizing finance" has meant in practice. Rich people have access to different types of investments, and by the time those trickle down to common investors the juice has all been squeezed out. Whatever the trend is, by the time you hear about it the market has already been arbitraged by faster investors with more resources.

We are not going to come up with a market-based solution to fix income inequality. The solution, as much as people in the dwindling middle class resist it, is a strong social safety net coupled with a hard reset on taxation and housing policies. Nobody should be homeless, nobody should be allowed to starve, but you might have to accept that your 401K goes down in exchange for a government guarantee of housing and food.

This is hard for people to accept because they currently have equity in their home or a 401K to save them from starving. But those are transient, individualistic solutions. You can lose your house. You can lose your 401K. Society should be taking care of each other in a broader way than letting everyone accumulate a little, private pile of money.

Extremely verbose and unpleasant to read.

Oh no, a sci-fi series making a character a woman? Like that famous train wreck Battlestar Galactica?

The government needs money to buy products from the market. If the government controlled the means of production, they wouldn't need money because they would just make things themselves.

In a hybrid scenario where there is still a market, we would ... collect more taxes to pay for this stuff? It seems like you came up with a pithy response and tried to back up into a critique that doesn't make sense.

I like the New Deal! My point is that the realpolitik of the court being subservient to the other two "coequal" branches goes back almost 100 years.

Marbury v Madison established judicial review in 1803 but there is no enforcement mechanism. The switch in time shows that practically the Court is subject to the political pressure of Congress and the President.

The Clinton impeachment and the lack of Trump impeachment show (imo) that there is effectively no rule of law in the United States anymore.

Congressional representation is subject to gerrymandering for partisan and racial reasons, and majority control of Congress gives you broad power to pass laws and punish political enemies. Controlling both Congress and the Presidency gives a single party the ability to completely ignore any constitutional boundaries.

America's experiment in multi-racial democracy has failed and their international influence will continue to wane as it has since the 80s. It seems like something that happens "slowly, and then all at once", like bankruptcy.

Yeah, in my experience the people who want niche stuff are willing to work with you and have a "high touch" experience. Where the people who want entry-level stuff want turn-key, sane defaults.

The annoying thing is people with lots of money and no experience who want the special expensive thing but they want it now and they don't know what options they want. I'm sure other fields are good at separating fools and their money but niche hobby retail isn't the Audi dealership, we're not just trying to upsell you for fun.

TFA says he's using it for storyboarding. This doesn't seem like a huge deal, but film is a visual medium! The closer your pre-viz and storyboarding looks to reality, the more you're going to tend to stick to it when you're actually filming.

You want your rough drafts to have a roughness that conveys your level of confidence. If your AI first draft looks polished people may feel more pressure not to deviate.

I find these hand-drawn Taxi Drivers storyboards very charming even though they obviously don't map cleanly to shots in the film. This is what you're giving up if you just tell an AI "give me a close up of Travis Bickle's face"

https://boords.com/blog/martin-scorseses-hand-drawn-taxi-dri...

Even if there's no door charge, you know that this is part of an ongoing effort to eliminate any place where the "wrong people" might congregate. Eliminating third spaces for youth and poor/homeless people. It's like putting a bar across the middle of a bench so people can't lie down - it's meant to punish poor people and it also makes things worse for everyone else, but our society finds seeing poor people to be the least comfortable thing possible.

I run a niche retail store and there are two sides to this.

Most of our business is selling low-price, entry-level products. There's a 80-20 distribution of people getting into the hobby versus people upgrading after a couple years. Consequently most of our floor space and inventory is devoted to high margin, quick turnover, entry-level products.

In my experience the floor space is less of an issue for high end products than the capital expenditure to bring in the inventory. On the consignment side we only take products aimed at the remaining 20%. These are specialty items we wouldn't have in regular stock. It's a win-win because we don't have to deploy capital to bring the product in-store, but we do have space to showcase some higher end used product.

The myth of the Supreme Court having any check on executive power was disproven by the "switch in time to save 9", where Owen Roberts agreed to stop obstructing The New Deal so FDR wouldn't implement court-packing and term limits. That was almost 90 years ago.

If the government guaranteed basic human needs are met for every person (food, shelter, healthcare) there would be less of a need for giant pools of public money (pensions, insurance) sloshing around.

Mass index fund investment is basically socialism but stupid. My retirement money is going to get invested in the SpaceX IPO against my will. The market is not efficiently allocating capital, it's structured to allow elites to skim off the top while forcing middle class people to subsidize them.

I had a customer do something similar with a thousand-dollar product. They had signed for delivery and provided no evidence, but banks always side with the customer.