arthurjj

I try to buy as many shirts as possible from bands I like and this post reminded me to go look again. I listen to a lot of metal and punk and the problem is most the shirts are either black, which overheat you in SoCal, or have designs that are aggressively ugly [1].

I wish more bands hired better designers or at least had shirts I wouldn't overheat in

[1] I own and wear this one so it's not always a deal breaker https://merchbar.imgix.net/product/174/7292/6127313518766/Zs...

I missed that thread when it came out, it's really a wild read. The difference between how people describe her vs how she's normally portrayed in the media is really startling

I like this summary https://www.andymasley.com/writing/the-ai-water-issue-is-fak...

And this is a reply to her comment about water usage where it becomes clear she's not arguing in good faith. https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1990498830131888173

I think part of it is she had excellent PR skills and a dedicated fan base. I was at Google when she quit, working in ML, and hadn't heard of her until the story broke. I remember there were a large number of Memegen posts about it, but no one I spoke with knew about her, so I assumed it was brigading.

I think she's since since lost a lot of her allure, especially when she didn't change her mind when the facts about the AI water usage changed 1000x

It might take a while for people to see how the model is useful to them, or to figure out how to make it useful or the capabilities weren't there ye. My mother tried ChatGPT in '23 and thought it was useless, she now uses it regularly, because it's improved and she knows how to use it better.

More than 30 percent of the US working-age population is using AI [meaning about 70% isn’t], an increase of 3 percentage points from the end of 2025

This makes me less bearish on the AI investments that are being made, if 70% of the working age population isn't using AI then there still is a lot of growth. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed (yet)

employees will receive a minimum of 16 weeks base pay (plus 2 weeks per year worked), their next equity vest, and 6 months of COBRA

As someone who lived through multiple rounds of layoffs at big tech companies this seemed quite generous.

Thank you for demonstrating my first point while trying to contest my second.

As I said in another comment, I think it’s important to debate what these companies are doing, how they’re doing it, and whether the United States’ actions are morally and legally justified.

I think it's sometimes hard to debate these issues in tech circles. In my experience something like 5-10% of techies are vocally critical of these companies or anything National Security related. This article headline is a great example, a serious debate is difficult when you compare people who disagree with you to Nazis

I was discussing resume screening with a jr engineer and unprompted he mentioned he would filter out anyone who worked at a defense contractor, not knowing I had worked at one. I tried to make sure he was removed from interviewing as he obviously wasn't mature enough for it.

I was pretty curious as I have a kid who's not very aware about cars. That appears to be an extrapolation from a pretty biased source [1]. It's probably more honest to say "the aforementioned systems are expected to save 58 to 69 lives each year" after they are fully rolled out to the entire fleet.

That's not counting injuries or property damage, but it is still an already low number

[1] https://www.kidsandcars.org/news/backup-camera-mandate-linke...

[2] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2014/04/07/2014-07...

When a good programmer writes a new feature, they are looking for both existing and new abstractions that can be applied. They are considering their mental model of the whole system and examining whether it can be leveraged or needs to be updated. That's how they avoid compounding complications.

This is actually a pretty good argument that it's a permanent issue. I haven't tried with writing, or having an LLM write, a summary of the coding style of any of my code bases but my hunch is it wouldn't do a good job either writing it or taking it into account when coding a new feature

Agreed. If I'm looking at what it proposes then about 1/2 the time I don't make the changes. If this were fully automated you would need an addendum like "Only make the change if it saves over 100 lines of code or removes 3 duplicate pieces of logic".

There are other scenarios you would want to check for but you get the idea.

LLMs not being lazy enough definitely feels true. But it's unclear to me if it a permanent issue, one that will be fixed in the next model upgrade or just one your agent framework/CICD framework takes care of.

e.g. Right now when using agents after I'm "done" with the feature and I commit I usually prompt "Check for any bugs or refactorings we should do" I could see a CICD step that says "Look at the last N commits and check if the code in them could be simplified or refactored to have a better abstraction"

I just want to thank the submitter. This is the type of internet that I really miss. A very smart person who's a good writer, proud of their interests and obsessions.

These were interesting but I don't know if they'd work on most or any of the places I've worked. Most places and teams I've worked at have 2-3 small repos per project. Are most places working with monorepos these days?

The only access anyone has to those questions is through something like introspection: either their own, or someone else’s honest reports of their experience, or the accumulated testimony of literature and philosophy...

I'm broadly sympathetic to the point in this article but it's trying to slip in literature and philosophy with honest first hand reports of introspection is underhanded. There's no reason to expect them to be any less guilty of motivated reasoning than Marc Andreesen

My favorite part of that site, besides it loading incredibly fast, is even though it has an ad, for a wholly subsidiary, on it it is hard coded in the html.

Netflix pays like a Big Tech company, is valued like a Big Tech company and was part of FAANG. 10 years ago the streaming tech they had was fairly high tech, even if it's now pretty standard. So they're considered Big Tech for historical reason

I was thrown by

I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.

Individual actions probably will not save the world, but big tech is bad

It's weird to see this without any context or justification or comparison to other industries. As if it's so self evidently true that the author never considered the reader might dismiss his wider point when coming across it with no explanation

Had a similar experience in around ~2017 and switched over to Linux. At the time I didn't have the time to build my own and bought a mid-range System76 laptop.

Best computer decision I've ever made. I'm not a heavy gamer so the machine is still running fine. I've only had one time in the last 9 years where I had to drop everything and fix my computer vs Windows where it felt like once a year

Is this so you can automate the spell casting via robotics?

My 10 year old loves this game. He started playing it Wednesday or Thursday of last week and basically all of his screen time. Both trying to optimize and the level design scratch an itch that few games do

It makes me so happy to see this genre taking off. We did "ABCs of Programming" [1] when our son was 2 at least partially because there weren't any real kid's books talking about what "dad does all day". Funnily enough it wasn't selling that well until I posted an article [2] on HN about my experience writing it. Then it did steady business for a few years

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1548489778 [2] https://arthur-johnston.com/hacker_writes_a_childrens_book/

You still get in person for 1-1s, small team whiteboarding and pair programming.

My RTO'd team of 13 is distributed across 3 office and not evenly distributed (8, 4, 1) so the probability of the person you need being in the same physical office is ~43% instead of the 0%. So overall it's better if you value in person and I say this as the 1

I've definitely watched repair videos on tiktok. And one of my favorite (indie) tv shows was only on YT for some reason instead of Hulu or Netflix. My kid watches videogame playthroughs on YT, not twitch. And that's completely disregarding you can listen to music on YT.

When defining a monopoly you can't just say "only this subset of the market is the market we're considering" you have to look at everything it does. As the FTC just learned

But Youtube isn't a monopoly. It's competing with Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu Instagram, Tiktok and Twitch off the top of my head. So they do have to make Youtube competitive

Your theory of

just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion.

is the most likely culprit

It's likely I projected the complexity onto the Art & Fear. Reading it every few pages I thought about how what it was discussing applied to creating software. But that's not really what the author intended, it's more the mindset I brought to the book

He's upfront that it's novels only but I really enjoy short difficult non-fiction more.

* Exit, Voice and Loyalty - about how organizations and people work. Easily the best social science book I've ever read

* Art & Fear - gives a much better model for creating software than most books

I don't have a passion for racket sports but I have family who do (pickleball/tennis) and I could see them really loving this app. I can't count the number of times they've told me about a point or a game that they wish they could have shown me.

Also as an runner "strava for racket sports" is a great description