throwanem

I can understand why zero isn't a valid entry, but it should be. That is an entirely plausible result for a federal income tax calculation.

That is, indeed and of course, okay. I feel myself bound to note that such behavior as his is very much par for the course here on the "orange website," whose culture is strange even among its cohort. It's part of why the design makes all comments public. But it's just a website and no one can reasonably dictate how someone else feels about it. (Not that that would stop many here from trying! But it also isn't quite perfectly true to say you stopped engaging, is it? Posting a meme isn't the same as posting nothing, and acknowledging when someone else is due the last word is also a skill I find worth having.)

This is a strange website even among websites. At different times here I have been accused, quite in earnest, of being a paid influence agent of FSB and of MSS - that is, of the Russian and Chinese foreign intelligence services, respectively. That was a pair of positively comedic conversations! I've been told that I'm insane, that I'm evil, that I'm a criminal for working, that I'm a criminal for talking critically about my work, that I don't deserve a livelihood, that I shouldn't talk about my childhood abuse, and oh, good grief, I'm sure I'm forgetting far more than I am likely to recall before coffee.

In spite of all that, and often enough in spite of itself, I have found this place more or less worth the effort. Among other things, it has been a splendid arena for the bareknuckle practice of that ancient and worthy science called rhetoric. But, contra Mr. Gackle, who I think suffers the verderer's easy failure to notice the borders of his forest shrinking over years, this place really isn't what it was thirteen years ago, or even five. (No blame; it's an accurate reflection of the industry. And feel free to review my comment history, of course. I think it is a reasonably good illustration of what it looks like when someone spends ten years 'learning in public;' what I no longer agree with I now know better than, and - even though I say so myself - there are lots of good parts.)

I do not at present have a blog. My previous one [1] is now of beloved memory, but do feel free to check out what was there. Where I stood to take that cover photo, it was even more beautiful than my camera made it look. In that place now stands a self-storage unit, full of garbage some American consumer pays to store who does not want it and fears to lose it. So it goes. Maybe in fifty years we'll make tires there again.

As to whether I will have a blog, I'm sort of in two minds at the moment about Internet publishing - which is a hell of a thing for someone to have to say who built his first website, and took his first paycheck for that work, in 1995.

Frankly, I'm no longer sure I see the point, or at least not as a primary medium. That isn't primarily a statement about AI, either. It's just...well, it's kind of hollow, isn't it? Messages in bottles, constructs of light and shadow, ships failing even to pass in the night. Nothing human, nothing even evidence that humans were here, because what is here? Where is there a here to be?

I'm not talking about AI, but I am talking about why AI is so much more fluent here than humans, I think. John Perry Barlow was an idiot and a madman, a liar and a mountebank: there is no place here. Nothing but words, 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' That soliloquy is the obituary of a cowardly man for his own soul. To quote it here, in this no-place where nothing is ever more real than a word, feels condign.

I'm happier writing in my diary, which as of last night is 3150 pages long. (It takes up a shelf!) I'm happier taking snapshots with a shitty Samsung phone camera whose only destination is on paper: I literally print them at 4x6 on an Epson Ecotank and put them in cheap little plastic albums, just the same as you would get from your local one-hour photo in 1993. I'm happier making things, I find, than frowning at flickering lights and fantasizing.

I would much rather spend a day every month making paper booklet newsletters on my guillotine cutter and saddle stapler, and send them around in physical correspondence among we who enjoy writing and reading such, than spend one more mortal hour fucking around with CSS in order to make something that doesn't even properly exist, you know? Or not more than a thought unrecorded.

Oh sure, I'll put shit on the Internet eventually, maybe. But it's not going to live and die there.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230326154310/https://aaron-m.c...

The author discusses this in his third paragraph, and states explicitly in his fourth that he considers the result faulty for its unrealistically narrow definition of elementarity.

(I'm not a mathematician, so don't expect me to have an opinion as far as that goes. But the author also writes well in English, and that language we do share.)

> Would the certification require someone to take an official certification test for the framework used?

> And therefore we’re only allowed to use frameworks which have certification tests available?

When it's safety-critical, yes, absolutely. A service that handles sensitive PII, such as the one whose "engineers" should be prosecuted for this incident, is definitionally safety-critical.

If you're afraid in that world you'd be unable to work, maybe you deserve to be.

I haven't said that I'm not interested in video games! I admit these days I go deep rather than broad, but that's not the same at all as saying I don't play them.

That said, while I can't tell with whom you mean to find yourself arguing, I can see by now that's not me. I'll leave you to find an interlocutor better poised to provide the kind of discussion for which you're looking; enjoy your day!

On reflection my prior reply here may have come off unintentionally insulting, for which I apologize. The "stupid and misbegotten ideas about AI" to which I referred are those of putative employers at this time, no one else's, certainly not yours as my construction carelessly implied.

That's the one! Space oat opera, I suppose I should have said.

Good grief, I wonder if it's held up. Oh, early Whedon, it's sure to have that "creepier than Tarantino" vibe at times, but maybe it'd be an interesting rewatch. Seeing a young Nathan Fillion is its own reward, certainly.

More than that evidently is non-obvious here. I am mainly concerned about the ruination of people. The fate of some niche and subparadigmatic school of ludic theory moves me little by comparison. (Of course I agree we need the humanities, but these are complex times when difficult choices may have to be made.)

But I appreciate this is more an article for the - what did they call it, for five minutes on Reddit a couple years back? "Shapecels?" That crowd, anyway, the ones who excel at abstract symbol manipulation yet reliably struggle to signify.

These days, with machines automating away the entire market for oldschool, artisanally human "shape rotation," faster than most members of any prior generation would even dare imagine - well, if this were the only thing I thought I could do well, I think I would be very worried.

It gets easier with time.

Try not to develop AI psychosis before it does. I have had the regrettable privilege of seeing that close at hand quite recently, and it looks like something that can get to be extremely difficult to come back from. Like digging a hole so deep, you end up pulling it in after you.

World of Warcraft damaged lots of people. My own circle saw a couple of casualties - jobs lost, marriages failed, promising professional careers left by the wayside, all for the sake of more time with that grind.

The fellow I knew who hit it huge in EVE Online was a casualty of another kind. But then, I did know him before, and he really was always pretty much that way.

Ah, the real Marxist constant finally rears its head. Thank you for so well demonstrating the primitive contempt for humanity which your ideology requires. What a shame none of you has actually read or studied any of that "theory" you prate about.

You know, I had come away with the impression of you as someone able to take embarrassment with good grace, to "walk it off" without either crumpling under the weight of unhandled insecurities, or letting your ego insist on turning it into an escalation dominance (0) contest. There is always something to learn from the experience of having made a fool of oneself (1), and you struck me as someone prepared, imperfectly perhaps but plainly in earnest, to do so. That is a rare and always welcome capacity to encounter in anyone.

Disappointing me shouldn't make much nevermind to you; you don't know me from Adam. But think of the people in your life who care for you and vice versa, or of the kind of folks you would like to be there. Wouldn't you rather behave so they may regard you in the way I just described?

It's hard to acknowledge a situation like this one, especially in its moment, especially when you're young. Being able to do hard things, well and gracefully, is another skill we do very well to cultivate. You were putting in some good practice, and the other gentleman (esq.) has offered some good advice in consequence.

In short, up to now you were doing a pretty solid job of ameliorating your embarrassment by recovering your mistake - a little awkwardly, sure, but that improves rapidly with practice. It'd be a shame to ruin all that here at the very last moment, don't you think?

(0) This phrase seems to have been made to mean something new of late, which doesn't actually make a lick of sense. I use it in its original or "RAND Corporation" meaning, describing a readiness always to retain the initiative in a conflict by threatening to escalate its severity, a tactic which relies for its chance of success on the opponent being unwilling or unable to match it through further escalation. In that sense the foreign policy of North Korea in the early 21st century is a good example of how a successful strategy may be built around escalation dominance as a core tactic.

(1) Ever shit yourself in public, right there in front of God and everybody? I did that once, about ten years ago - there was a time in this town before the health code had teeth, when eating at the wrong place or on the wrong day could just about put your life in your hands. Let me tell you, after that day - complete with an hour cleaning yourself up with paper towels and tap water in a sandwich shop's toilet, followed by the train ride home - discovering you have inadvertently said something a little dumb on the Internet falls naturally into something much more like the perspective it is due.

Little late through the door on this one, my guy. I bought OP's perpetual license and helped root-cause a bug yesterday. I do respect the hustle, though.

Someone is still needed to decide what the AI should do, and to harness and manage it. A CTO can do that with existing skills, and the resulting organization should converge quickly on near-zero need or want for human SWEs.

So goes the thinking, anyway. It's why my couple decades of experience and I still occasionally get to hear from rando cold recruiters desperate to sell someone a "pivot to AI," probably thinking they can lowball me by holding my mortgage over my head in order to screw three times the work out of me that they'd pay for.

I was in this business too long.

Are you sure? In some mythologies, the basilisk is notably birdlike, I believe.

How would you tell?

I had not known that! In a similar vein, there exists an Alice in Wonderland-themed Muppet Show episode, starring Brooke Shields, which has had to be left out of home video releases due to so far unresolvable music licensing issues. Not quite totally lost, but somewhat hard to find!

Seasonal migration from Wall Street to the Bahamas? 'Previously unknown?' A bit déclassé maybe, but...

Now you're defending games from the 70s and 80s on the basis of technology and design attitudes from today.

Your profile says you are a quantitative analyst. (I take this as reliable, since it does not also call you a rhetorician or humorist.) The fetish for logic puzzles thus checks out, but I admit I had thought the denumeration of time among the arts of number. Or had you mistaken Graham Nelson, Emily Short, and allies for Infocom alumnae?

It's just a world you've never seen. Don't take it too personally.

Those are not assumptions on your interlocutor's part. You've embarrassed yourself quite badly, I'm afraid. I know you don't understand how, but that doesn't change the fact of it.

I would invite you to notice your interlocutor's assumptions, especially as revealed in his prior comment. Look at how he misunderstands the situation:

> If you wanted to convince everybody about a vast universe of secret business and your expertise in it...

> Like if I wanted to convince people that In’N’Out has a secret menu...

You are discussing business. He is understanding you to be attempting to "mog" him, because he cannot adopt a perspective wherein the conversation represents anything other than a vacuous social challenge or "brodown."

In short, you're wasting your time.

Thank you for explaining the joke.

You're quite abjectly wrong, though. Text adventures were heavily advertised, in their illustrious and very brief moment of sunshine, as 'accepting English input' (cf. Maher, The Digital Antiquarian), which by definition constitutes NLP. They were just extremely bad at it, hence their accompaniment by a constant stream of excuses like the one you just made. (You must have had to dust it off first! That one is older than me.)

> Have you played before?

> No.

> I assume that means yes.

Yeah, that's that half-century-old state of the art in natural language processing working...

I do!

edit: Checking now I'm back in arm's reach of my laptop, I can further confirm disabling the option does resolve the issue on Sonoma. Nice catch!

Brownshirts. I believe "browncoats" refers to a now-extinct space opera fandom from a few decades ago.

I can second the issue with the automatic color selection; with my background photo it cashes out to an illegible black on black, and there's no (obvious) option to change the theme or override the computed colors.

It seems like it would be relatively straightforward to honor the user's light mode/dark mode setting, and the WCAG accessibility guidelines [1] do a good job of both discussing the importance of luminance contrast to legibility, and providing resources and advice toward programmatically selecting text vs. background colors to ensure everything stays readable.

(I did go ahead and purchase a subscription, since I was one of the people who asked for the option. I'll keep an eye out over the coming weeks for updates! Considering the immediate and extensive interest in boringBar that's been very much evident today, I'm really looking forward to seeing where development goes on this. Congratulations on your successful Show HN!)

[1] https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/contrast-minimum...