cattown

This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive.

I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should be seriously asking in our next all hands meetings if 10x’ing our productivity can get us some days off. Or when our paycheck is going to be multiplied accordingly.

So far we’re all kind of being chumps about this, bragging on Linkedin about all of our new found AI productivity while accepting less job security and no increase in comp.

No way, this is terrible! There are so many great work tracking tools to use or more efficient ways to communicate that accomplish the same thing. Without making a bunch of people take time out of their day so you can ask them if they remembered to do part of their job. Good management creates systems so this kind of thing isn’t needed.

Two-way props! Yikes! That was a mess in the first version of Angular. I thought the consensus was that two-way props binding just opened the door to difficult to understand side-effect laden code.

Hero. So tired of seeing drivers swerve around at deadly speeds on the highway while they play around on their phones. I would contribute to a Gofundme to help this guy pay off the $48k.

Doesn’t this only really affect actual Arduino brand products. There’s tons of just-as-good cheap knockoffs available. See Elegoo kits easily found on Amazon for example. The IDE is open source with the AGPL license.

Can’t we just cut Qualcomm out of the supply chain and keep going as normal without too much disruption? Doesn’t even feel like a hard fork is needed. Just don’t buy Qualcomm’s crap.

Use cash. Get cash out at the ATM, keep it in your wallet. Spend it at local businesses. Even if you can’t do it all the time do it as much as you can. Start today and stick with it.

Otherwise this is what we’ll be stuck with everywhere all the time. There won’t be a choice anymore if you don’t exercise that right. We’re already far down this slippery slope.

Doesn’t sound that profitable to me. $7m is a lot of money. But not that much after building all of that custom tech, setting up a dedicated space, training and paying a whole bunch of people to run these games. Then whatever’s left over gets split between multiple crime families? Seems like a lot of work.

I think lot of this brand analysis misses an important point… This change makes the real estate these locations occupy much more fungible. Instead of customized old-timey looking storefronts and dining spaces packed with knickknacks, by making the branding more bland these locations can be much more easily converted or sold to other businesses that also fit inside a grey/beige box and hang a roughly rectangular sign on the front of the building.

The days are numbered for boomer nostalgia based brands. One of these days those restaurants are going to be something else. PE deals years ago started the work of decoupling a stale old brand from the valuable real estate.

Who cares about selling millions of dollars less in bad food when you can access billions of dollars more in real estate value.

See also: https://www.nashvillepost.com/business/retail/cracker-barrel...

Wow! “built in torch” immediately puts this one ahead of all other competition I’ve seen so far. Not even kidding.

Thank you! That was the most memorable part of the article for me. Can’t get the phrase “Nose Beard” out of my head.

Sausage and pancakes are ones and zeroes, I guess?

People seem confused about the UI. You don't need to click, just move. Most keys on the keyboard correspond to a color. Shift + those keys sets the background.

I like it that there's no hint, it just rewards exploration and experimentation.

I found it very satisfying when the opponent got a question wrong. Math is hard, even when you’re an awesome monster like a flying snake or black hole.

I didn’t understand the “charging” mechanic. A little more explanation or some visual that shows charging would help.

Pretty sweet game! Keep it up!

The hint about using .pluck to only grab what you need from an ActiveRecord query is a pretty good one. I hand't realized you could do that.

I assume this is telling us it doesn't actually make an ActiveRecord instance out of each row when you do that. And instantiating big bunches of ActiveRecord model instances just to grab a few fields from a result set with a lot of rows can be sooo slow.

I miss Drupal a lot. I sure wish it had won out in the CMS battle with Wordpress. I remember making little custom CRUD apps with almost no code all the way back when Drupal 5 was the thing.

Like a lot of other ppl it seems I left off when they switched to composer. That didn't fit too well into the workflow I had at the time using cheap web hosting services where I didn't get a shell as dev environments.

Also the upgrade treadmill was brutal. A few nice little web apps I made got totally left behind by security updates and such and were also too hard to upgrade to newer versions of Drupal. I remember that also being a major motivator to make the big jump to Python and other things. More code but also easier to manage over long periods of time.

Lots of good lessons in Drupal for other frameworks. I haven't tried it in a while, but it's still in my mind one of the best low-code custom fields, forms, and views systems out there.

Good point. Meta's brand identity is pretty much the blue you picked. I see your marker color is exactly the hex value for blue that's on most of their website.

I think you could go a little lighter, pretty sure the actual trains have a lighter more saturated blue on them. Something closer to the blue you're using for the Mass Bay Trans Authority would be fine, and there's no overlap in service areas to make that confusing.

Or maybe different marker size/shape for regional vs national trains.

Also saw the South Shore Line is there now. Nice!

Super cool! I love this. Makes me yearn for a day when this map is way more full of activity.

Just a little feedback: the color for Amtrak and for Chicago's Metra trains are so similar it's hard to see at a glance where the Amtrak runs are amongst the many Metras that are out at a given time. Would be awesome to differentiate those marker colors a bit more.

Very cool! Didn't know this was even technically possible with the available data feeds. Great work!

Depends on what your definition of senior engineer is... For me it means you've spent a lot of time coding and mastered a few programming languages. You're able to make use of all that they have to offer when appropriate. You understand more advanced concepts like code readability and reflexively think about long term maintenance of the code you're writing. Starting to think about larger systems, maybe also branching out into team lead type of management responsibilities, or deepening technical skill sets related to infrastructure or particular areas of expertise adjacent to software development.

This usually takes about 5 to 7 years, in my experience. After about that much time working in a focused way on software you're probably pretty "senior" at dev work, without a whole lot more to learn in terms of just getting better at coding.

The author doesn't quite fit that description. This sounds more like what happens at lots of high turnover "fast paced" startups. As people come and go from the group they find themselves in a situation where their 1 or more years of experience is allowing them to significantly outperform those with 0 to 6 months of experience. Maybe high turnover or rapid growth at the employer makes it easy to get promoted to "senior" because there are so many other truly very junior people around.

Not to belittle the author at all. Sounds like a smart guy and I admire his enthusiasm and spirit. Just sounds like crazy-startup-battlefield-promotion "senior" rather than the more rigorous definition of senior some of us might be thinking about.

I like Terraform and will continue to use it. I'm just an end user that isn't involved in building other product offerings on it or a user of other derivative products.

Even though this really doesn't affect my use case it does feel like kind of a dirty bait and switch. I do hope for a future where there's a version (and Terraform provider module versions) that are actively maintained under a true open source license. I'll favor using those over the official BSL version as much as possible.

I guess it's the CLA that all of the contributors signed that allows this to happen? I wonder if there's a way for open source licenses to address this, and disallow the use of CLAs, or require some CLA clause that doesn't allow sudden switches to non-permissive licenses?

No! Don't do it!

I'm sure there are rare cases where these techniques are useful. Like creating developer tools or making your own object persistence layer or winning a code golf contest. But if you're an app developer for goodness sake just write a few extra lines of code. Do whatever it is you're doing the verbose and clear way, not the slightly shorter and super obtuse way.

Stuffing method definitions into classes at runtime, monkey patching, dynamically generating method calls with .send. These will all be very puzzling for any future developer that works on your code, senior or junior. And come with bunches of technical pitfalls. Writing clear and maintainable code is a higher calling for us than reducing LOC and showcasing neat tricks. Even if you call yourself a Rubyist. Speaking from experience.

How do they decide where to use the little letters in these acronyms? Seems like it should either be HDR-NRF or something like HiDR-NeRF. Come on folks. Naming consistency, please.

I believe that laundering licensed or copyrighted content for reuse that fails to recognize the original authors or usage restrictions is likely to be one of the biggest commercial applications of generative machine learning algorithms.

I also believe this is where a lot of the hype about "rogue AIs" and singularity type bullshit comes from. The makers of these models and products will talk about those non-problems to cover for the fact that they're vacuuming up the work of individuals then monetizing it for the profit of big industry players.

Was this written by a large language model? Meandering narrative and logic tenuously connecting related topics rather than a clear thesis and orderly presentation of evidence seems like the LLM style.

A lot of what we call "human intelligence" and "consciousness" derives directly from the fact that we live in bodies made of meat which we have to constantly eat food to maintain. Our perception of time, the spectrum of colors we see with our eyes, the range of flavors and scents we can detect, our deepest yearnings and compulsions. All of these are optimized toward finding food and eating it. It is both one of our most basic functions and one of the highest joys.

What else does this guy have going on that's so important?

Oh yeah baby! Here's my top 5 reasons...

5. Crypto bros deserve a punch in the face. If you don't feel that way, it's probably because you're a crypto bro. The world is secretly (or not) cheering for this to all burn to the ground because it's easy to perceive people who promote crypto as obnoxious swindlers. Really, they are. Sorry, if this isn't a good reason, but I'll just spill those feelings out right there before making some more reasoned arguments...

4. Crypto not useful in a real way. Speculative investing, money laundering, hiding wealth, pyramid schemes. I'm a tech guy and I have no idea how I would go about acquiring crypto currency then using it to pay for something tangible of real value without eating an exorbitant amount of fees and taking my chances moving stable fiat currency in to a highly volatile asset. I know here are exceptions, but let's be real, crypto in 2022 is about creating shady financial tooling.

3. Crypto's externalized costs make it expensive to society while providing little benefit. Graphics card shortages, energy usage and global warming, brain drain from other real tech problems, aiding and abetting criminal activities like money laundering. What are the benefits that make up for any of that?

2. People losing savings sucks, but the longer crypto insanity goes on the worse that's going to be. Taking a statistical view, unsophisticated investors almost certainly will be taken advantage of in unregulated markets. The longer this insanity goes on the worse that's going to get. End it now and fewer real people with real savings are going to get hurt.

... and the real reason we should all be excited about...

1. I used to be excited about blockchain technologies. I think there are some really great uses for them. But then speculative investing in crypto became a craze and that kind of swamped out everything else interesting. If speculative investing becomes no longer feasible, hopefully we can start to get some focus on some of the more interesting and beneficial applications.

"they're all full of lonely developers and other socially awkward people - short guys looking for girlfriends, unattractive/aging women looking for husbands, etc."

Welcome to becoming a mature adult in the real world! It's true, as people age they become gringey dorks. And you may be surprised... It happens even to people who don't work in tech. I participate in a few communities that have little or nothing to do with tech, and they're still filled with awkward characters searching for connection too.

Sure, there are people in their 30's still partying and leading the lifestyles of the young and beautiful. But, maybe those people are still doing that because they haven't grown much since their early 20's. And if you haven't found focus in life beyond "being cool" and drinking and socializing by the time you're in your mid 40's, that lifestyle starts to be a pretty cringey look of its own.

Maturing emotionally means becoming more guarded and picky. You and the people around you have lived in the world, become invested in your own ways of living, and taken damage from the ups and downs of life. It's never again going to be as easy as being 20 something in a room full of 20-somethings who all want to meet each other right now.

But, there's also the chance for connection beyond what's possible at a party with "laughing, kicking and screaming" full of people who closely match your demographic. Ask people what their lives are about, people usually like talking about themselves. You'll get them to open up and you'll learn new things. Let things take time and be willing to let friendships form on a timescale more like months or years rather than days or weeks.

Not so much to your original point, but you mentioned "quitting the career"... If you're sick of tech, start on your second career. Even if you're not super confident, pick something that seems doable and pursue it. It will be exciting and rewarding and you will re-experience the feeling of joyous surprise you once felt when learning tech. You have time for this and can afford this easily since you're making tech job money and it sounds like you have time for weekend/evening/intensive classes. And you will meet a new batch of people. I've been in a program where I've taken a number of classes with the same group, and it's been a great way to get to know some new friends.

No reason to be scared because you don't have to "quit the career". Tech will take you back if your other thing doesn't work. You can learn a new thing and switch back and forth. Or you can do both part time.

I've been a software engineer and managed software engineers for 20 years and worked in all kinds of businesses. This is both normal and mostly acceptable, in my professional opinion.

Doing just as much work as your employer requires and no more is way less of a problem than employees who actively steal, commit fraud, bring drama and distract other team members, or are introducing defects because they've faked their way into a job they don't have the skills for. Your managers are likely dealing with those problems too, so they may be more aware of your situation than you think and are ok with it. Or maybe not, whatever. Not your problem either way. They can let you know if they're not happy with your performance, which it sounds like they are not doing.

However! I will say that this way of working and living comes with some significant hazard to your mental health. Doing something you don't like, care about, or believe in for decades long periods of time can really mess with your sense of self worth and happiness in life. You only have one life, do something with it that is satisfying. Get out of the rat race.

Personally, this realization has led me to switch careers. I'm now in a 2 year evenings and weekends program to get certified to do something that has nothing to do with tech. It is a huge pay cut. I also am happier than I have ever been in my adult life because I'm learning something challenging and helping people instead of coasting through 8 or 9 hours of pretending to work every day. Starting over mid-life and finding another thing that I love as much as I loved computers as a teen has been a blessing worth more than any amount of money.

Good luck!

Entertaining, almost convincing. I want to believe.

However we know it is one of...

* A hoax, like hundreds of other videos of UFO sightings.

* One branch of the military testing a piece of equipment another branch is not able to identify.

* A video showing an actual space craft built by aliens from another planet.

Consider which of these is most likely and which is least likely. Consider also that extraordinary claims should be backed by extraordinary evidence.

I'm surprised BBC picked this up.