We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync

If there’s any chance they’ve heard about a concept, I’ll ask if they’ve heard of it and take them at their word (without comment either way).

And if they’re kinda nodding impatiently, I’ll wrap up the explanation and move on to the deeper level

At first, people will sometimes be defensive or lie about knowing a topic, but after you establish there’s no judgement either way with you I’ve found people become less hesitant about admitting ignorance and will even want to hear your explanation of something to check their knowledge

I also do the flip side - I pride myself on admitting when I don’t know something, so that might play in too

I feel like I’ve been going crazy, web searching as a developer has become a daily nightmare and all the devs I ask are like “yeah, maybe it’s gotten a bit worse? Haven’t really noticed”

I think long messages are a good habit. Start with something readable in the history, past that who cares? Most people rarely read past the preview, and if they do they want details

I think it’s great because it makes you reflect on what the goal was and what you did. I sometimes stop to make a quick change as I’m writing, or just collect my thoughts before mentally dismissing the task

Do you have any plans to open source your coffee list? I want to add this feature where I get an iced coffee in the morning

Added zip code to the reseller portal when batch-creating transactions in <main-project>

I try to start off descriptive, in case I want to diff a few changes back. After that, sometimes I write notes or general reflections on life in there… Until yesterday I thought no one was reading them

Oh no, do you mean we might accidentally be feeding children who might not need it?

Oh no, do you mean we might accidentally be feeding children who might not need it?

People just don’t get it… LLMs are unreliable, casual, and easily distracted/incepted.

They’re also fucking magic.

That’s the starting point - those are the traits of the technology. So what is it useful for?

You said drafting basically - and yeah, absolutely. Solid use case.

Here’s the biggest one right now, IMO - education. An occasionally unreliable tutor is actually better than a perfect one - it makes you pay attention. Hook it into docs or a search through unstructured comments? It can rephrase for you, dumb it down or just present it casually. It can generate examples, and even tie concepts together thematically

Text generation - this is niche for “proper” usage, but very useful. I’m making a game, I want an arbitrarily large number of quest chains with dialogue. We’re talking every city in the US (for now), I don’t need high quality or perfect accuracy - I need to take a procedurally generated quest and fluff it up with some dialogue.

Assistants - if you take your news feed or morning brief (or most anything else), they can present the information in a more human way. It can curate, summarize, or even make a feed interactive with conversation. They can even do fantastic transcriptions and pretty good image recognition to handle all sorts of media

There’s plenty more, but here’s the thing - none of those are particularly economically valuable. Valuable at an individual/human level, but not something people are willing to pay for.

The tech is far from useless… Even in it’s current state, running on minimal hardware, it can do all sorts of formerly impossible things.

It’s just being sold as what they want it to be, not what it is

Jeez, that’s crazy… That’s an insanely high effectiveness, but it does seem like there’s something behind it. Guess I’m going to buy more carrots

Ok, I read the abstract, and honestly it’s beyond my understanding of biology. I can usually understand how things interact at least on a basic level, I don’t understand this one

Can you just dump your steam of consciousness understanding of this for me? Ideally I’d like to know how it might interact with cancer/the immune system, but your understanding of the statistics would also be appreciated. I’d like all your thoughts on this, don’t worry about formatting or flow - if you just dump your thoughts on the topic it’ll help me learn from it

Is the carrot thing true? That sounds way too big of an effect

… What? Code quality is “does it work” followed by readability, only then do you get into performance and other things

Good code is better than shitty code by definition.

Well on the flip side, I somehow ended up doing legacy projects with a dude that has been coding for decades and is still actively developing in VB and asp.net. Weirdly, the guys not dumb - he asked me for an API and I blew his mind with generics and cut the code down by a third. I then introduced him to the concept of (primitive) components, he isn’t quite sold on the importance of code reuse, but every time I delete 1k lines of old code and replace it with a 20 line function my soul grows

When we do code reviews, it’s basically pair programming sharing screen… Usually we just push everything and wait for bug reports, because this crazy ass company has been using a reference book, a calculator, and hundreds of people were manually re-entering things by memory into QuickBooks until January 1st this year. They were thousands of dollars off in the second week… We thought it was a bug. It was all user errors

He’s been working on this system for 15 years, I ran into a table with 126 columns the other day. Somehow, this dude manages to swim through a database with hundreds of tables and just as many triggers with rawdog sql.

It’s fucking wild…I split my time between that and working on my virtual assistant that brainstorms it’s own development with me, and an app that I’m trying to make into a unified fediverse client.

I know what a tight ship looks like and I push for best practices when I think there’s something to gain worth the fight, but the sheer spectrum of software dev is incredible. My legacy guy told me about what’s been taking all his time lately today - he has to build a system to screen scrape from an emulated IBM mainframe… And I spent my morning working on a unified activity pub interface and my evening testing my weird observation that LLMs speaking UwU seem to perform significantly better

My point being, there’s a sweet spot between methodology/process, and it’s very rare to hit it. And also, software dev is playing in realms beyond human comprehension, and no matter how orderly if seems it should be, every senior dev who still writes code is superstitious, and often correct to be so

Notify the people you have to notify for your blockers, then embrace the absurdity

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk

Magnet atoms magnet at magnet direction. Altermagnet magnet at 90° magnet direction. Antiferrous magnet magnet at 180° direction

(That’s my takeaway at least)

Sure, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a Corp that frames fair use as a subset of fair use, making allowances only when it’s beneficial to them for marketing

For the most cut and dry example, they allow blog posts praising them… What about a blog post offering a nuanced criticism? What about a satiric post about them?

Those are both undeniably fair use, but by framing it as outside fair use, they’re being shit heels

The time we learned about global warming to now is longer than the time we started using fossil fuels to the time we predicted global warming. And we’re pretty close to what they predicted way back then

There’s an xkcd on it, I saw it the other day but I can’t find it now

It wouldn’t be a black hole, it’d be like pushing concrete into a slab of concrete. It just would take an insane amount of force to compress, and you’d have no leverage

Conversely, what’s the range for taking things in and out?

What if you brought in extremely pressurized liquid air? Could you just take 1cc and release it next to someone’s head? If you took open cones of tungsten in, you could probably abuse it to shoot them like a bullet

What about thermal properties? If the space wraps in on itself, there’s nowhere for the heat to dissipate. You could fill it with extremely high temperature plasma, then take out a little at a time to melt/explode almost anything.

That all depends on the distance - you could fill it with thermite and burning magnesium for a trigger to fill it with extremely hot pressurized gas, but if you have to touch to take it out you’d destroy the body part that took it out… You could sacrifice a finger to blow up someone’s head, but ultimately your power would stop at being a suicide bomber

Personally I wouldn’t do any of that. It’d ruin the outlet

The wires run ana and kata from the plug, and so all you see is a junction box with no holes, but even though you can’t see any supports it barely wiggles when you tug on it

Sometimes I clean my windshield, sometimes just spend a minute on my phone or rearrange stuff in my car