tombert

In the most recent case of food, it was a friend's cooking. I was more afraid that I would be pressured to have more of the food I didn't like, so I told them something like "you know, I really don't think this is my thing." Every people-pleasing instinct that I had told me to lie and say that I liked the food, because it was something they worked on and I don't want to disappoint people, but I fought through that.

They didn't seem to be too upset over it, but they know me pretty well.

I'm not sure I needed a resource; I just kind of felt like I should optimize for "not wasting people's time" and "not misleading people".

> Providing feedback on the meal is useful for their next guest,

I mean honestly the last time I gave negative feedback on food I didn't like, it's because I didn't really want to feel pressured to have more.

> I do think his choice of words was a bit suboptimal. But, it got the point across.

As I've gotten older, I've grown to appreciate people who are willing to be a little rude in order to avoid wasting people's time or giving them false impressions.

For example, when recruiters reach out to me on LinkedIn now, I almost always say something like "I don't want to waste your time or mine: what is the salary range?" It might be considered a bit "rude" to immediately jump to money, but I figure that that's less rude than wasting 30-90 minutes of time for a job that I have no chance of accepting.

I also try and be a little upfront if I don't like food someone has prepared. I try not to be too much of a dick, but if someone prepared something that I don't like and they ask my opinion, I will say that I wasn't a huge fan. Again, maybe a bit rude, but I also don't want to mislead people.

It kind of goes against my gut; I, like most people, don't really want to make people feel bad and I certainly am not immune to people-pleasing, but I've tried to fight that for the greater cause of being more-honest and upfront with how I speak.

I'm wondering if it's the same guy. Without doxxing yourself too much, you didn't happen to be in the central Florida area did you?

Yeah no argument on any of that really.

As a kid I had always heard that Hitler was some kind of evil genius. It wasn't until my 20s that I started actually reading about this stuff and NOPE, he was actually a fucking idiot.

Something that I feel like I should have realized earlier but didn't until last year was how unbelievably lazy everyone involved is.

I knew they were stupid, I knew they had positions that I would consider racist, I knew that they were corrupt, but I guess I had assumed that they had worked for their corruption.

But no, you have RFK Jr.'s HHS lazily having ChatGPT generating anti-vax literature with broken links, you have Trump doing a blanket pardon of literally everyone involved with January 6 [1] apparently because he was too lazy to do any diligence. It's borderline farcical.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/01/22/trump-pardons-jan6-clemency

I didn't do Erlang at the Tae Kwan Do studio, that was the FoxPro and ColdFusion (and ActionScript/Flex).

I have just had a lot of very odd jobs which has taken me in a bunch of directions.

I might literally be the only person on earth that can honestly say I have been paid to write FoxPro, Erlang, F#, and ColdFusion.

My first software job was at a Tae Kwan Do studio who ran their own billing department, and the entire billing half was some weird custom thing written with FoxPro. Not Visual FoxPro, I've never actually used that, but the old school DOS stuff.

I absolutely hated every time I had to touch it and I had hoped that it would die in a fire. I hope Visual FoxPro sucks less.

I wrote something similar a few months ago [1], though admittedly I haven't been following my own advice terribly well.

The interesting part of any program source is what it took to make that program. I view AI-generated code in the same category that I see a binary.

[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/04-April/Stop-...

I'm still kind of convinced that these "calls for pacing" are just a way to try and flex to their shareholders.

"Our technology is so unbelievably powerful that the entire world might shatter if we don't have government imposed handcuffs!!!!". It just reads like the corporate equivalent of the drunk frat guy saying "HOLD ME BACK BRO!"

I don't know about your library, but my library would let me check out multiple books at once; I think 5 was the limit for children and 10 for adults. It was pretty easy to have a constant feed of text being sent into your bain.

I am sure that the legality of this is what prohibits it, but I wish someone would just do one of those decompilation projects of Flash MX or CS6 or something.

AI has, at the very least, confirmed something that I (and many others) have been saying for more than a decade: a lot of the writing you need to do while working in the corporate world is strictly performative.

I used to work at a very large BigCo [1]. On the first day, one of the first things they had us do was set up email filters. A lot of email filters. Many, many, many email filters. This is because it was not uncommon to get multiple-thousands of emails every day. Of course it would be impossible for anyone to read that much, so you set up filters to have emails moved to folders that you never open because you never read them, and you needed to make sure that important emails weren't missed because if you took more than an hour to respond back to an email you risked a phone call from an angry middle manager yelling at you asking why you didn't respond to their email [2].

Email, and most written documentation in tech companies, isn't there for humans to read, it's for plausible deniability. You send out emails that you know no one will actually read because then you can say "I told you so!" when things go wrong. You write pages of documentation that you know no one will read because you can tell people that you wrote the documentation. You can generate infinite comments for your code that no one will read so you can show people that you did your work to write comments.

When I complained about the quantity of emails I got, I would universally be given the response of "just set up filters", presumably because they know that most of the emails I receive were a useless waste of time.

It never mattered if the writing was "good", and it never mattered if it was up to date, and it never mattered if it corresponded to anything useful, because "human comprehension" was never the point. It was there to some bureaucratic rule-of-thumb that a middle manager would religiously adhere to in order to justify their existence in the company.

I'm sure there are exceptions but it always felt like all this performative writing was disliked by everyone. No one liked spending time reading low-effort "cover-my-ass" emails and no one liked writing pages upon pages of documentation that no one will read. Having Claude write and read all this shit and cutting humans out is the natural conclusion, because, at least in my experience, no one will ever seriously suggest we stop with all the performative writing.

[1] It's not hard to find my history, and it's fine if you do, but I politely ask that you don't post it in relation to this thread.

[2] That's not a joke, and it's not hyperbole. I had gotten phone calls from higher-ups complaining I hadn't responded to their email within two hours. I usually bit my tongue because I was a bit more of a coward in those days, but now I probably would have tried to explain to them the very basic concepts of synchronous and asynchronous communication.

I still have not found a development platform that I enjoyed as much as Flash.

I'll admit that a large chunk of why I have such good memories is because it was one of the first programming platforms I learned, so there was a lot of novelty to it, but I still think it was a very fun platform.

It was so fun that it was "animation-first"; I would be dicking around drawing a shitty cartoon, and then decide I might want to add some code, so I convert to a movie clip and start scripting. I have played with a few game dev toolkits (and I'm even a maintainer for GDevelop on NixOS [1]), and they certainly can be fun, but I'm still chasing the high that I got from coding in Flash.

I actually think that, ironically, writing Flash games might be a valid path forward again. Ruffle has gotten quite good, and importantly the features are locked, so you could treat writing games in the same way that people do homebrew for the SNES or something.

Maybe if I can figure out how to get Flash CS6 working in Wine I'll give it a spin again.

[1] https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=26.05&query=gdevel...

I don't think it's "just for the sake of it". I think they believe that the Rust code will be safer.

> It was nearly impossible for most people to afford to fill every waking moment with a book in front of them

I'm not sure I agree with that. Public libraries have been around for a very long time, certainly well before the internet. People could get all the books they wanted to read for free. During summer vacations when I was in grade school, I would read multiple books per month, sometimes multiple per week, because we lived close to a public library.

I don't know if something changed recently, but I have been getting a lot of stuff "flagged by safeguards" in the last two days.

I am quite confident that what I'm doing is well within the law, and I'm not even doing any kind of pen-testing stuff, just some basic reverse engineering, but I can't even use Fable anymore because every time I enable it, it works for about twenty seconds and makes me drop down to Opus 4.8, and often even down to Sonnet.

If anyone here works at Anthropic, did you make the safeguards super sensitive recently?

I am not sure that that's recent. Most books, even before the internet, were kind of low-effort shit.

You've always had terrible borderline-porn romance novels at grocery stores and terrible pulp novels and the like. We just don't read terrible novels from 100 years ago; whatever we read from that era now has survived the test of time. The same cannot be said about anything released in the last couple years.

I have two grandmothers.

One is racist in a way that is somewhat understandable (e.g. using outdated words like “oriental” to refer to Asian people). For her, I am more or less fine just rolling my eyes and continue talking to her, because I think she is ultimately a decent human who is just a victim of her time.

My other grandmother is not like that. She is actively very racist in a way that I don’t find forgivable. I don’t talk to her after Trump won in 2016.

It’s not that voting for Trump is in itself enough of a reason for me to cut someone off, but in her case the moment he won she just dropped all pretense and started being racist in ways that I have no interest in engaging with.

It’s a little sad, it’s not like all my memories with her are bad or anything, but it’s life doesn’t always work out like we want it to.

Technical papers are the one of the few things I still print out, actually. I have never been able to read them from my Ereader.

That’s primarily because papers are PDF and thus the formatting isn’t as dynamic.

I don’t have any data, it just feels like a lot of my friends who got kindles for birthdays or Christmas would use it for a week and then then it would sit in a drawer for the remainder.

To be fair, I don’t think most of those friends actually read that much though.

I get a lot of books from Libby to read from my library.

Annoyingly they don’t work with KOReader but the Pocketbook reading program is competent enough nowadays.

Not cool.

To each their own, it has never really bothered me honestly.

Ha, no, I actually don't talk to that grandmother anymore and probably never will again since she's extremely racist and doesn't like my (Hispanic) wife. I wouldn't buy her gifts at the best of times.

I sort of discovered this accidentally twice.

First was when I go the Kindle I realized I could make the text as big as I wanted so I would do that, as stated before.

Another time is when I wanted an external monitor and I bought a big TV because it was much cheaper. Because the TV was bigger the text was also bigger, and I realized how much easier it was for me to work.

I think I used to feel like there was a "coolness" factor to keeping the text small. I don't know why I thought that, but I think what's much cooler than having lots of small text is actually being able to read and understand the text on the screen.

Now I have no desire to impress anyone, and I keep my text in the browser at like 200%.

KOReader has bookmark support; if I need to go back a few pages (or use the search), I'll just set a bookmark for my current place so I can easily jump back.

I read a lot, and I own a lot of physical books, but I almost never actually read physical books anymore. I'm one of the happy few that used my Kindle for more than a week after getting it as a gift.

I find that reading on an ereader is many times easier for me, primarily because I can make the text gigantic and I don't lose track of my place on the page nearly as often. I'm not dyslexic (I've been tested), but I do think that there's some issue with my brain where if the text is small I really can't follow it. On all my computers the text is gigantic and even then I will click and highlight text as I'm reading so don't lose place. I would love to be paid to read but I don't think I'd love to be paid to read physical books.

I remember my grandmother was wholly unconvinced that my Kindle was a different thing than an iPad or a Game Boy, and that it was not "real" reading, for whatever reason.

I hadn't heard of zfsify, but I think I'll check it out on yet another old laptop running ext4.