tombert

I don’t know about office, but there have been several major leaks of the Windows source code. It seems pretty reasonable to think that that leaked code has made it into Claude or Codex in some form.

They already have a CAD thing, so I think that’s a safe bet.

Damn! I was in the process of doing this after I heard about Artcraft. They beat me to it!

This is cool, but I have to admit that I clicked on this because I thought that the Qt GUI framework had some weird post-quantum stuff and I was curious what the hell that even meant.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I think that routers are a pretty geeky thing that most people don't want to hear about. I had offered to buy and set up a pfsense router for my parents for a few years ago and they were decidedly not interested, even after I tried explaining the merits of it. Pretty much anyone who is going to be interested in DD-WRT is going to be someone who can set it up themselves.

pfsense can sell for a relatively high price, I think, because they market themselves more towards businesses and big corporations.

When should we expect our corporate overlords to block out the sun just to fuck with us? [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/L3LbxDZRgA4

Sure, I'm not sure he made it "worse", just think it's fine to blame him for making no significant effort (as far as I can tell) to fix it in the ten years he was in office.

But that's kind of what I'm getting at; I don't concede that he was effective.

paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

Non-paywalled: https://web.archive.org/web/20180103141201/https://www.nytim...

> The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.

> “Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”

To be fair, a lot of the bullshit slush-fundiness of the MTA predates Cuomo. Still, this article was 2017, six years after his tenure started and since the MTA is the states responsibility, it was his responsibility.

ETA:

That particular anecdote appears to be from 2010, so admittedly before Cuomo took power. I still think it's fair to blame him for the subway not significantly improving in the nearly ten years he was in office.

It was still under his role that the MTA became the strange slush fund that it is today.

I guess I don't concede that he did anything competently, or at least more competently than any other politician would be.

No, he was clearly always a corporate shill his entire time as governor. He tried to get NYC to pay for half the subway without giving us increased power of how it's run [1].

Then he lied about the COVID numbers so he could write a shitty book about how great of a governor he was around that time. That seems decidedly ineffective to me, unless the goal was to kill people I guess. He sucked, we're good to be rid of him.

He sucked. He probably still does.

[1] If the city actually ran the MTA I suspect it would be competent.

Oh I don’t disagree with that, I was responding to the very specific point made by OP about companies being “forced” to use the cloud.

I have no doubt that Google and Microsoft will increasingly do things to force us to provide more data so they can do awful things to us.

> Yep. To the point it makes you wonder if the "AI bubble" is totally misunderstood. It's less "AI bubble" and much more "Monopolize computing". Buy up computers until most companies have no choice but to use cloud.

Unless prices get categorically higher, I don't think that's likely. Like 10x more than it is now.

Companies were buying computers for all their employees in the 90's, where a mediocre laptop could pretty easily cost two grand in 1990s money. My mom just bought a middle-of-the-road laptop for about a thousand dollars in today-money, and that was a consumer buying it; companies can generally spend more. "No choice but to use the cloud" feels like it's way too strong of a conclusion to draw.

I know, but even given that I really don’t think it’s that hard, and certainly not as hard as regular pre-AI software engineering.

We all like to act like “the hard part was figuring out what we want”, but I don’t think I really buy that anymore. Even when I really half-ass Claude prompts, it still usually figures out what I want well enough, and when it doesn’t it usually does once I give it correction.

Yeah, I am fine with that. What I have on there is pretty low-stakes and everything I care about on there is backed up regularly with Restic to my local server. If they decide to do murder it, that will suck, I will be annoyed for like twenty minutes, and then I shall move on. It’s not like I paid for it.

Interesting!

That’s actually how I have it set up because they kept running out of capacity in the credit-card-less account and someone on Reddit mentioned that loophole.

I agree that prompting is a much shallower skill than engineering, and I really hate the term “prompt engineering” since I feel it puts something that (by design) is easy to learn on the same level as something relatively hard to learn.

There is admittedly a bit of skill to use these tools, but they’re really not hard to use. For the most part Claude can decipher my typo’d-to-hell prompt and figure out what I want, and even if it gets it wrong the first time I can usually correct it. The hardest part is determining some objective test for Claude Code to test against and “anchor” it, but I still think that’s easier than writing a bunch of unit and integration tests.

I like these tools; I think Claude Code is very useful and even if I didn’t like it I would still use it because it’s clear that’s where the world is headed and I want to stay competitive.

For personal projects I actually care about, I still write code by hand. I do think I write better code than Claude but I would still do it by hand even if I didn’t, just because I realized I was losing my intuition about software because I was outsourcing to Claude for everything.

There are plenty of things that I am honestly fine losing my intuition with. I don’t really derive much enjoyment from reading dmesg logs, and I am more than happy to let a robot have its fun with that, but it can take the mathey shit from my cold dead hands now.

As far as I can tell, there really isn't one. I haven't paid Oracle any money since I started and the machine appears to work fine. I think they treat these things as loss-leaders in hopes that you bother your employer to get the more expensive non-free plans.

Interesting. I just signed into my machine and checked

    ubuntu@instance-20250824-2334:~$ free -mh
                   total        used        free      shared  buff/cach  available
    Mem:            23Gi       3.5Gi       768Mi       7.7Gi        19Gi        11Gi
    Swap:             0B          0B          0B

I must be grandfathered in to the old one. Also I really need to add a swapfile lol.

I use the "Always Free" Oracle instance for a lot of my cloud stuff. It's a pretty sweet setup, with a quad core CPU and 24 gigs of RAM though I suspect that given memory prices they might start limiting that.

I use it mostly to host a Minecraft server and to host a dumb website I vibe coded to share 3D Movie Maker movies. https://showbo.at/

ETA:

Looking at downstream comments, it looks like it's limited to 12 gigs and 2 cores now. Still a pretty good deal for free but not quite as good as it used to be.

I used Superpowers for awhile, but I don't feel like it gave me significantly better results than just raw-dogging it. It did however burn through my tokens significantly faster.

Maybe I'll come to miss it now that I removed it, but I certainly don't yet.

> Never assume malicious intent when incompetence.

I like Hanlon's Razor, but I think sometimes people will use it to fully dismiss the idea of someone being evil because they're stupid, when in reality plenty of people are capable of being both.

> None, without people like us in their families who are able and willing to help.

I am able and willing to help my parents get off of a lot of the spyware bullshit they have throughout their house, but they don't want to hear it. They liked the connected stuff and I think that they think I'm a little weird when I push back about why we can't trust corporations like Google or Microsoft to do everything.

It could be that because we can rapidly generate customized programs that the dedicated software industry shrinks, but companies might stop buying/licensing software and instead bring more software engineers in house.

That's what I'm hoping at least.

I still have problems, but my life categorically improved once I got diagnosed and treated for obstructive sleep apnea. I focus on things much better, I'm better at juggling tasks, and I'm just nicer to people, or at least my fuse is considerably longer than it used to be. Also I'm sure my wife is grateful that I'm not snoring or gasping for breath every night.

I would highly encourage anyone who can get a sleep study done to do it. Most insurance companies will at least cover the sleep study and sleep sleep apnea can lead to a lot of considerably-more-expensive issues later down the line. It's not very invasive anymore, all they had to do was have me sleep with a pulse oximeter for a few nights and apparently that was enough.

Extremely tangential but I'm feeling a bit rambley today.

Pretty early in my software career I had a job at a very awful company [0]. They wanted me to use the software "Weblog Analyzer" to analyze Apache logs and create reports that no one actually read. I was to do this twice a week. It wasn't hard and it only took like fifteen minutes so I didn't really mind doing it.

Initially I had a 30 or 60 day trial for the software, but once that expired the software (understandably) stopped working. I went to the director of technology, asking him to buy me to the software, and he responded back with "whoooa, hold up, that's not within the budget". To be clear, this software was, I believe, less than $100.

I responded back with something like "Ok, well then I'm not going to make these reports anymore". He acted surprised, like I was starting some kind of fucking mutiny, and he asked me why I'm being difficult. I said something to the effect of "I don't make that much money as it is, and I'm not going to spend my own money to make your company more money". [1]

He responded back with "Well [my direct manager] never asked me to buy this software", to which I responded with "Well [manager] is a moron who doesn't know anything".

Like a fucking sitcom, unbeknownst to me my manager was right behind me and heard the entire conversation. The next day I was fired. I don't completely blame them, it was admittedly very mean to say that about my manager even though I did (and still do) believe it.

I later found out that my manager had actually asked for the software years before, the director had said no and forgotten, and my direct manager had just bought the software with their own money.

Point is, at least some employers seem to have no issues making employees pay for their own tools, even for tools that they very specifically want the employees to use.

[0] This was a W2 job, not a contract gig.

[1] I even offered to try and find some alternative free software that might give us something similar, but he immediately poopoo'd that idea because they really liked these very specific charts that they never actually read.

I hate the Trump administration and I don't know that I agree with this latest thing, but at least if they're outsourced to India then at least the company has a bit less leverage over you. I think in the current system employers can hold your H1B visa over you like a Sword of Damocles.

I've never had to worry about visas, so this is just stuff I'm getting from visa-holding friends, but that always seemed a bit scary.

I am mostly happy with Neovim with an LSP integration. I'm not going to say it's "lighter" or anything because rust-analyzer isn't exactly "small", but it is a simpler, and IMO "cleaner" interface. Also completely free.

I think it's because it's more plainly obvious if someone is taking photo if they're lifting up a phone to do it. Someone taking a photo with glasses can be done more covertly.

Where did I say it didn’t count as a crime? Of course it’s a crime, and of course there should be consequences. I just have some uneasiness about killing people when they were still basically children, but as I said I am pretty anti-capital-punishment regardless.

I think the last time I ran anything Redhat based was Fedora in 2014 or so? I remember facing some issues with my graphics driver rendering Gnome and so I ditched it and went to Arch.

I think every server I have ever used at work has been Ubuntu or Debian based. Every time I go to these cons I am always flabbergasted that Redhat has such a presence when even a massive dork like me never uses it.