syntheticnature

Fuller obituary: https://www.hillandwood.com/obituaries/Mark-Stephens?obId=49...

I think this is why consider the willingness to say "I don't know" a trust signal

Exactly. I'd rather have a quick "I don't know" than wait for them to generate a reply that is likely to be wrong because I already asked the same models myself before consulting a human. If they generate a reply, I get to tell them exactly how the response is wrong, since the core content is usually the same. Only then do I get the "I don't know."

There are a few people I can tell are better at prompting than I am. Them, I'll tolerate this from, though most of them do more than function as an AI proxy anyhow and usually will say "I don't know, I'll check X" first.

Seems like an even worse time investment; warn people about the fabulist, yes, but never expect there will be some change of behavior like you might get in a children's show.

(2020)

I'd hope anyone who saw "Plane Crazy" would know better than to back a Robert X. Cringely Kickstarter, and I'd expect anyone who followed his tech takes for a bit would have acquired some salt to take with any claims he made.

There seem(ed) to be a number of folks absolutely obsessed with hounding Cringely (apparently dead, I know) over the Kickstarter in his irregular posts. Given the highest tier was $200 and the whole of the Kickstarter was $35.5k USD, seems like a lot of throwing good time/energy after a bad Kickstarter call. I'd be overjoyed if that was the worst case of someone walking off with my money I'd ever faced.

They are, or were I guess, free to do so, but it seems wasteful to spend the amount of time in his comments they did.

It's a full-up Android phone, they want to make sure no one complains versus Their Favorite App not having enough RAM.

I know some of that found its way to http://textfiles.com/ whose owner is associated with the Archive Team -- though it's focused on text rather than executables, of course.

Huh, looks she has an entire food line. Wonder if this is planned to be an income stream for some of her charities, similar to Newman's Own.

Hey Slack, how about making workflows less of a pain in the neck to use? In them there is no ability to have branches rejoin to a common path. Worse, an item isn't found in a list it just throws an exception instead of giving me a null item, which oddly I can test for in an if even though it will never happen?

I think I spent more time figuring out how the character save files worked in the original Bard's Tale CRPG than actually playing the game; I certainly made more progress with doing so!

As a kid I modified DONKEY.BAS for my younger brother who wanted to play as a donkey avoiding cars. It was a clumsy modification, I didn't account for the differing size of the pseudo-sprites, but it made him happy.

They'll clean up instances that aren't doing enough for them to notice, even -- I used to run an XMPP server on one, used daily but not with many users, and they kept shutting it down at random multi-day intervals with little warning. Stopped using it.

It confused me at the time, mainly because I had a class with written-out C and one with written-out Pascal in the same semester. The Pascal prof wouldn't mark off for C syntax but the C one would would mark off for Pascal syntax.

Yes, this is extremely common, both as a continuity means and/or as a localized password manager. Know someone who uses a Rolodex for hers, which is funny and yet it works.

Doesn't work well in office environments, but at home the local threat model is largely fine with this.

In the end everything is delayed trash. Some trash is recyclable/compostable/etc.

Indeed, a new hire should be able to use Google to find https://puttygen.com/download-putty#Download_PuTTY_on_Linux_... in short order

evil grin

Unreliable/stupid is worse than malice, here.

You sound likely to have dysgraphia, based on the fact I have all the same aspects and a dysgraphia diagnosis.

I didn't send it very high up the chain (and was looking for a job at the time anyhow) but mostly got back snickers from peers and an "I know, but this is a directive from above"

Versus my sibling comment to yours, I actually sent that to some internal folks after the bit about AI+total lines committed was said.

When I was at Amazon last year, the bragging (from the AI poo-bah in my section of Amazon, note) about AI included "look at the total line count of commits from the heaviest AI users!"

So if AI screws something up and re-writes it and then screws it up again, needing another re-write, that counted as more positive than if it was done correctly, and simply, the first time.

This is why I evaluate if a tool type needs to be cordless when buying. Drills, impact drivers? You want cordless, or to have the option. For a circular saw being used by a homeowner for most DIY purposes, it's worth any arrangement issues to have corded. The cordless ones tend to take less common blade sizes and eat batteries even with the provided extra-lightweight blades.

In my free time, I help maintain the web presence for a small non-profit org with memberships. The original system when I started helping was a bespoke system that was smart in many ways (essentially a static site generator with membership control years before SSGs were cool, with regular automated tests), but the guy who wrote it absolutely insisted on storing passwords in plaintext and could not be convinced otherwise. Eventually he had to drop the volunteer position due to other things in life, and the first thing we did was correct this issue.

I thought archive.is were the ones squabbling with Cloudflare (extreme simplification)

Haha, good one. Much like Makefiles, patch format precedes a lot of more modern things (by decades!) and is good enough to stick around. Unlike Makefiles, I've never seen tool gain any acceptance at all to replace patch.

3 days? Wow. Can't say I think much of this senior member of your team, who seems to be the anti-social one here. I'm sure it breaks flow for them, but a big part of being senior is amplifying the best in those less so, and helping them improve.

3 minutes, 30 minutes, sure, I've discovered a lot of junior folks would figure things out on their own when I couldn't get back to them immediately, and tended to add some delay just to encourage trying a little harder before contacting me. I would say even 3 hours has value. Buy yourself a rubber duck and have a heart-to-heart about your problem.

3 days is going to result in lots of folks getting stuck in local minima, likely confusing themselves in the process. To be clear, sometimes a problem requires a deep dive, or there is no one who can provide useful help. Even then, some guidance just to get outside perspective is helpful.

The person I mentioned in my story upthread had the one-year suspension followed by the interlock requirement for another year

If it's as flaky as my experience upthread suggests, maybe it was just that. At least, that's what I hope, for the sake of those on the bus

I once helped someone get their car home after one of these was installed. Their license would not be returned until it was installed, but they weren't allowed to leave it on the lot. Someone else drove it there, and then I got to experience the breathalyzer to drive it home.

The interesting part is how bad the interlock was. First off, it can apparently randomly not work, so you get three tries. Worse yet, per the official documentation, apparently they can misdetect an ignition while driving at speed, and when that happens you have to pull over and blow within thirty seconds. Now, this is not something you can do while driving, as you have to look at the camera while you do it, on top of needing to have a deep breath. There's no motivation to improve this, because the customer is the legal system, not the person who has to have it installed

Or, in actuality, the Dell business model will be designed for repairability. I tend to always advise friends who want Windows/Linux laptops to buy from the business lines, especially if a 1- or 2- year refurb will work.