I still miss Naomi Wu’s tech videos.

Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.

How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?

They probably got the sound file from the Visual C++ 4.2 CD’s samples folder. That’s where ICQ got it from.

Could be a MUSIC/SP reference. (No I don’t remember how to use it either. I had a letter-letter-number-number %nemomus@academic.nemostate.edu email in college though.)

Yeah a bit. IBM QRadar is alright. I’m confident there’s something real (and real expensive) underneath the buzzword salad in that article.

And those jobs are critical to the process of making new developers.

An important part of my education - the part that grad school can’t teach you, you have to learn it on the job - was being new and terrible, grinding on a simple problem and feeling like a waste of money. Any of the experienced guys sitting behind me could have done this thing in a few hours but I’ve been working on it for a week. “What’s the point? Any minute now they’re going to tap me on the shoulder and tell me I’m done, it’s time to go find another job.”

But that never happened.

Those early problems weren’t fun. At home I would have never chosen to work on them. I’d leave them for someone else. “But now that I’m collecting a paycheck for it, this isn’t up to me. I have to work on it. I can’t give up. I can ask for help, but I need to show my peers that I belong. I can solve difficult problems. I can persevere.”

As a mediocre professional developer, I had to struggle to learn that. I wasn’t getting far on my own, without mentorship and motivation. Homework, pursuing degrees, wasn’t getting me there. (And even now, I seem to have about two weeks of attention span, for projects at home.)

I think the most important thing we can do is shout about this from the rafters, so every potential IPO investor can hear. Most of the subject matter experts have fled. The best data is available for free elsewhere. (And none of us are too happy about having our collective knowledge shared without attribution or appreciation by an AI, but that’s not the point. Money is the point here.)

As a professional C# developer since 2012, I’d say a programmer needs four kinds of knowledge. As an organizational user of Github Copilot for a couple months, I’d say AI tools can help with one, maybe two of those.

Understanding language and syntax, so you can communicate the ideas in your head to the machine accurately: AI is fairly good at this, will certainly get a lot better.

Understanding algorithms and data structures, well enough to compare and contrast, and choose the most appropriate ones for each circumstance: AI can randomly select something, unless it’s a frequently solved problem. I don’t expect this to get better except for the most repetitive of coding tasks.

Understanding your execution environment and adapting your solutions to use it well: I don’t see the current generation of AI tools ever approaching this. I don’t think they have context for how a piece of code is used, when trying to learn from it. One size fits all is not a great approach.

Understanding your customer’s needs and specific problems, and creating products, not code. Problem domains and solutions are a business’s entire reason for existence. This is all kept confidential (and outside the reach of an AI training data set) for competitive reasons. As a human employee, you get to peek behind the curtain and learn these things yourself.

Or one of those laser “pointers” with crazy high power, 1 watt or higher?

Even old HP printers aren’t safe. I have a two-generations-back HP Color LaserJet I got from a tech recycler for $300. (MFP M477fdw) It can be optionally configured to enforce or not enforce genuine toner. I can get a four-pack of CYMK high-capacity cartridges for $70-80 on Amazon. Prints wonderfully, toner is cheap, so I’m in the clear, right? Safe from this BS?

Turns out that wear items (intermediate transfer belt, for example) within the printer have chips with versioned firmware. And the printer will throw error codes if different firmware versions within the printer aren’t mutually compatible.

I’m sure the moment they believe they can get away with it, replacement ITB assemblies, fixers, document scanners, etc will include a shrink wrap license and firmware that requires you to update everything else to match - and the matching firmware will make official toner no longer optional.

Definitely Fuck HP. The moment any of that comes to pass and disables my own printer I’m re-recycling this printer and buying another brand immediately.

You might be presenting it backwards. We need LLMs to be right-sized for translation between pure logical primitives and human language. Let a theorem prover or logical inference system (probably written in Prolog :-) ) provide the smarts. A LLM can help make the front end usable by regular people.

Clearly my comment annoyed you. What should I have done differently? Apart from switching away from Windows, what plan or idea should I have attempted to rally support for?

Ok that tears it. What firewall rules do I need to set so I get security updates and absolutely nothing else?

Agreed. They are deliberately taking advantage of the fact that people don’t understand how autopilot is actually used in aircraft.

Sure, the most pedantic of us will point out that, with autopilot enabled, the pilot-flying is still in command of the aircraft and still responsible for the safe conduct of the flight. Pilots don’t** engage autopilot and then leave the cockpit unattended. They prepare for the next phase of flight, monitor their surroundings, prepare for top-of-descent, and to stay mentally ahead of the rapid-fire events and requirements for a safe approach and landing. Good pilots let the autopilot free them up for other tasks, while always preparing for the very real possibility that the autopilot will malfunction in the most lethal way possible at the worst possible moment.

Do non-pilots understand that? No. The parent poster is absolutely correct: Tesla is taking advantage of peoples’ misunderstanding, and then hiding behind pedantic truth about what a real autopilot is actually for.

** Occasionally pilots do, and many times something goes horribly wrong unexpectedly and they die. Smart, responsible pilots don’t. Further, sometimes pilots fail to manage their autopilot correctly, or use it without understanding how it can behave when something goes wrong. (RIP to aviation Youtuber TNFlygirl who had a fatal accident six days ago, suspected to be due to mismanagement of an unfamiliar autopilot system.)

Hmm I’ve got an old Compaq 575e with a PCNet32 nic, and an old 3com 3c509 ISA adapter in a closet with 10base2 and AUI ports.

Use a modem router or managed switch to get down to 100baseT, give this box a Linux distro, enable Ethernet bridging in the kernel, and slaps case this baby can drop almost 20k packets a second, no sweat!

Ok now I’m curious what I’m missing out on. Can anyone recommend a good PCIe token ring adapter and concentrator?

Do you keep a shopping list? A personal to-do or reminders list? You should stop because that’s a ritual and rituals are clearly bad.

I mean, no, you should keep the rituals that help you work better and discard the rest. Which is what successful agile teams are already doing.

I’d love to see this become something greater. Consider this challenging problem:

Suppose you have an instance with a community (“C”) that likes to promote subtle but wrong things.

Suppose there’s a community of fact checkers (“F”) who wants to promote actual, verifiable/falsifiable facts by responding to lies with compelling and relevant references. They want to help by directly replying to posts or applying tags in community C, but they are not permitted to contribute by that instance. The community C seems to want their lies to remain unchallenged.

And then suppose there’s some opted-in users (“U”) who want to receive help understanding when posts in community C are not factual. They would like to receive posts or tags from fact checkers, because people they trust have recommended they listen to these fact checkers.

I’d love to see a tagging system that can help “U” and “F” connect, even if the owners of “C” don’t want them to, when browsing content in “C”. Ideally in an extensible way that lets some future implementer come up with novel ways to organize and maintain the fact-checking side of things in response to new threats.

I probably explained this badly, and the letters are probably more pretentious than helpful. But I hope someone smarter can pick this up and run with it, because it’s something the world desperately needs.

That’s right. I know I was thrown off by large projects earlier in my career. The more you learn the stronger you get at understanding and packaging/setting-aside larger and larger pieces of a project. Bigger projects stress this ability in new ways. I think I lost a job in 2016 because I couldn’t stretch my brain around something bigger, at a small business with maybe 14 devs.

This might be a bad way to communicate this, and I think I’m taking this in a weird direction, but: I’ll use the Mozilla project as an example of a large project, though I’ve never looked at its source.

Suppose you were in an interview, and due to the specifics you are expected to be fast and fluent with the same technologies used in the Mozilla project, though you’ve never looked at the source before. Given a machine with the source already checked out and open in an IDE, you have one hour to read through the source and familiarize yourself with it, so you can answer questions about how you would approach adding features or test coverage.

What I want to know is: how high does your heart rate go? Does it go up just a little, as expected for a high stakes situation? Or does it go up a lot, because you honestly have no idea how much another dev in your situation would be expected to accomplish, so you have no clue what “good enough” looks like?

This is a crappy example because no interviewer could ever actually use this metric. But I’d say if it goes up a lot, for the reason I gave, you might not be ready for senior. And by this metric, it might not ever be possible to grow to “senior” without working at a company with large multi-team projects. But I think that’s accurate.

(Edit: yes, sorry, Software Development Engineer. I think that’s a protected term in the US, in Texas and California at least, but anywhere else in the US you don’t need to pass an engineering board exam to use that title.)