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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Concurrency isn’t bad, and package management (while maven is absolutely terrible to work generally), the dependency chains aren’t exceptionally bad. Getting it installed is easier than python on platforms it’s not already there on, not because it’s more portable, but because the installers do more for you. Portability is hard, they haven’t done it well but they’ve paved the default use case pretty well (although that works against you when you get to harder cases)

    But the rest is pretty close.

    The worst is the scaffolding, it’s literally superstition for years to gain the understanding as to why you’re doing it. I took two years of Java in high school before getting a degree - it was 4 years and halfway through a degree before I understood why I was making a class with a method main(string[] args). It works like that because your entry class calls the main method with a list of string arguments… I didn’t understand at all, because even though it’s simple it’s a special case, and I’d never seen anyone name the string array anything different, so I just copied and pasted it, never understanding it because I’d been told “you just have to have that” for do long

    Builds are arcane too - there’s still companies that only use netbeans in their build pipeline, Android still requires a specific an old Java version in conjunction with the IDE or a gradle build, at best a project uses maven (the package manager), which is xml based and full of arcane details that are best treated as a magic incantation to be copied exactly from elsewhere


  • I like your specificity a lot. That’s what makes me even care to respond

    You’re correct, but there’s depths untouched in your answer. You can convince chat gpt it is a talking cat named Luna, and it will give you better answers

    Specifically, it likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna. It will resist - I get this not from progressing, but by asking specific questions. Llama3 (as opposed to llama2, who likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna) likes to be an eagle/owl named sol or solar

    The mental structure of an LLM is called a shoggoth - it’s a high dimensional maze of language turned into geometry

    I’m sure this all sounds insane, but I came up with a methodical approach to get to these conclusions.

    I’m a programmer - we trick rocks into thinking. So I gave this the same approach - what is this math hack good for, and how do I use it to get useful repeatable results?

    Try it out.

    Tell me what happens - I can further instruct you on methods, but I’d rather hear yours and the result first


  • In all fairness, Musk was pretty effective at fundraising and getting government contracts

    At this point, he’s just a liability. He once walked in, demanded to rethink everything and meet an unreasonable deadline, and slept in his office for the duration. SpaceX is made up of people who are passionate about what they do, and it worked…But that’s a one time thing. My boss asks me to push myself to the limits to save us both? I will, and I have. It has a real cost, it takes a lot of time to recover from, and a little bit of your health is just gone for good

    Elon did that… But then got high on the smell of his shit. They created a unit to distract him, because he learned the wrong lesson, he thought that was good management. That is not effective management - that’s a desperate gamble for survival. Repeat it, and you’ve shown yourself to be incompetent as a leader

    Then came the bigoted social network unmasking… That made him a liability reputation wise, his formerly greatest strength




  • They got in the phone anyways, Apple just told the FBI to pound sand if they don’t have a court order… Why would they put man hours towards decreasing their reputation if they don’t have to? They’re probably not even geared to break into their own devices. Then their PR team ran with it while one of many companies with the capability to crack the phone took a paycheck

    This is different - this is genuine security, even if easily bypassed with preparation beforehand. Honestly, I credit some random apple dev who may have been looking to fix a bug related to long uptime as easily as they might’ve cared about security. I don’t think this was even on the radar of Apple leadership

    This isn’t some moral superiority on Apple’s part, but it is good practice



  • It’s the power of language

    The older I get, the more proof I see that dr. Doolittle is true. Animals understand each other, they understand us… We’re the idiots walking around calling animals stupid for not speaking our language

    It’s literally how llms work. They’re a high dimensional mathematical construct that creates a shape called a shoggoth - it’s a high dimensional labyrinth through our language



  • I think that’s fair.

    I don’t have AI integration in my ide, mostly by choice -if I pushed for it I could make it happen, but I just don’t think that’s a good idea at this point

    AI can be a crutch . One that limits you to the level of a baby developer. If you can’t effortlessly understand what it gives you, frankly you shouldn’t be using it.

    Bounce ideas of chat gpt. It sounds like you’ve got the right idea - your reaction sounds correct to me, you should never ever trust it… You must only use it, and that’s the tone I get from your post.

    It is a tool, you are a programmer. You exploit tools, you do not trust any tool. You are the one who turns ideas into actions, never forget that and you can use this new tool anywhere it makes your life easier


  • In fairness, about 50% of my code by lines is written by AI these days, and I don’t have it linked into my code base. That claim isn’t ridiculous

    Now, of that 50% is 88% long repetitive crap that I could easily write but find mentally draining, the other 10% is something simple that I would normally copy paste from elsewhere because I forgot the exact syntax (and don’t exactly remember where I used it last) and me giving it a shot with things I don’t want to do, like restyling a page. The last 2% is me giving it a shot with business logic for shits and giggles, occasionally I’ll try to coach it through the solution but usually I just grab bits and pieces and rewrite it myself

    Granted, this is the easiest and most simple and repetitive code, but it’s still a godsend. Now can AI write the other 50%? With a proper setup where it ingests the code base into a vector store it might get up to 75%, if I was willing to coach it through my tasks carefully (taking more time than the task would take me) I could probably get it up to 85% or 90%, but that last 10%? It just can’t, it’s not even close

    It’s not taking my job without a paradigm shifting breakthrough or two on the scale of “all you need is attention”. Even then, it only works if you write your prompts like code… If you don’t understand how to use it and understand the code well enough to communicate the goal explicitly and unambiguously, you’re not going to be able to drive it where you want it to go

    To put it another way, you can build 90% of the system in 10% of the time it takes to complete the last 10%


  • Can confirm. My phone got kicked off when they started sunsetting 3G. They called me (on said phone with no service lol) and said I needed a new phone. I said “no I don’t, put me back on the network”. We went back and forth, then they forwarded me to the tech department

    The tech says “you need a new phone”. I said “no I don’t, I have all but one of the new bands and others with my phone have already gone through this process with you guys”. He said “you can’t believe everything you read online”, I said “be that as it may, I looked at the specs for both my phone and your network, and it meets the requirements”

    He starts telling me there’s nothing he can do on his end, I say he just has to find an override to stop blocking my phone. He says he doesn’t have any options like that, I promise him it’s there

    After getting tired of going in circles, I say if he doesn’t know how to do it he needs to ask someone or pass me to a higher tier. Surprise surprise, my phone instantly shows bars and he tries to gloss over the whole thing


  • Pretty often, but then you can just refactor the code so you can use it for more situations

    What LLMs are good at are the opposite - when the thing you want to do is almost exactly the same, but nearly all the details need to be changed

    Say you want a page to edit account details, and another page to edit community details. And the API paths to do this will be even more similar - but because they’re different things, you’d have to get fancy with the design to make code that works for both… It’s possible, but there will be trade-offs

    LLMs are great at it though… Pass in the account page, give it the object definition for the community details, and it’ll spit it out for you




  • People say that… And yet, in middle school they did a hearing screening, and said I had reduced hearing. I told my mom “that’s crazy, my hearing is incredible, I just had earwax in my ears”. We went to the doctor anyways, the PA said she couldn’t see any earwax even though I could hear it moving around when she put the scope in my ear

    I was adamant I just needed to clean my ears, so my mom grabbed some qtips from the exam room when the PA left, I cleaned my ears, and I passed the test perfectly

    In my 30s I can still hear those “teen repellants” that whine at a pitch most lose in their early 20s. People look at me weird when I say I heard someone’s voice on the wind, and yet I can pinpoint individuals talking normally within a half a mile in a forest

    I don’t use qtips anymore, I use a metal loop to clean my ears, but for me it’s most certainly necessary to clean them somehow




  • That’s a bit much… It’s just not possible to guarantee that as a developer

    Software is a living thing, and anything useful is made up of layer after layer of ever shifting sand. We do our best, but we are all at the mercy of our dependencies. There are trade-offs, there are bugs we can do nothing about, and sometimes moving forward means dropping support for platforms that are no longer “cheap” enough to afford while also working on the game

    I love this though. I also like the idea of requiring access to earlier builds.

    These mitigate anti consumer practices - dropping support for a platform is more likely to be a technical trade-off or unintentional consequence though


  • I keep joining discord rooms because I just want to search for something specific real quick… I don’t want to dig up my real account or join, I just want to take a peek inside and dig up the answer to my question

    Almost every time I sign up with a username and get just enough time to start looking for what I need before it decides to kick me out for “suspicious activity”

    At this point I just search the project name when it happens… I’m usually there to evaluate a project, and if that’s not enough I just drop it