finnthehuman

we don’t even expect humanity from big tech since that’s what we’ve become accustomed to seeing.

There is a difference between humanity in communication and saying the problem was a human choice.

You can have humane communication about a system failure and actors in that system. Or you can have cold matter of fact press release voice about an individual persons failure.

I don’t think anthropic statement was any less distant than other times big tech brushes off a whiopsie. They just used personal language to ingratiate the reader.

I can not agree harder.

A rando that knows a little therapy language and has good intentions is dangerous. Turn and run.

The hearsay is essentially repeating what was announced publicly. Their job listing might as well have said, “now seeking applicants for total shit show”. It’s bad form for us to say this out loud.

It's a good thing to point out these unspoken truths explicitly. As people internalize the norms that make it bad form, it becomes easy to skip the mental step of acknowledging the problem. Even internally. But that quiet acknowledgement is necessary to keep oneself sane. Without it, the best case is someone steers away without good reason, at worst it leads to experienced and expressed frustration that doesn't add up and can snowball into the wrong places.

The bit about stream viewers is interesting. What is the typical viewer experience?

I assumed watching streams is similar to watching vs participating in sports. I played a few as a teen, got quite good at one. As much as I like watching highly talented people apply their skill it does nothing to scratch the participatory itch.

I also find it frustrating that articles expressing personality spicier than “safe for work milquetoast” are treated like out of pocket ranting.

Wasn’t that a story with ffmpeg a few months ago? And people were getting roasted for even the suggestion that google should contribute patches?

It was true in 2005, but still? As I described in another post here, a modern strategy is to get a beefy server than can run the same ABI

I’m already sitting at an expensive computer, if everything else were equal I’d rather cross compile than buy more hardware.

I’m open to reasons that’s presently too hard of a workflow to enable so I’m (literally) paying for a penalty, but I don’t see how it’s a better idea.

Software projects are too large to be left to licensed practitioners if you want to ensure quality. It would require the producing company to follow a formal quality management system. Discussing individual licensing is a distraction until that is in place.

I think articles like this are roundabout arguing something different from their text.

It’s not about how much to half ass our hobby projects that were often halfassed without AI.

Over years professional development has reached many context-dependent equilibriums for the amount of quality to build into various types of software. Professionals are facing downward pressure on that equilibrium point - not just the faster iteration promised by AI.

Agreed. I wear headphones because open offices suck and I like music. I’m not trying to avoid anyone.

I can assure HN that they want to be on the grid as quickly as possible.

In a conversation about negative externalities, I don't see the purpose of such a statement. If everything else were equal, nobody would choose negative externalizes just for the fun of it.

Furthermore, a company 'wanting' something is only loosely correlated with the internal political will and resource allocation to achieving it. And says nothing about whether that internal effort is appropriately scaled to the external complexity of the task.

It doesn't prevent people from outsourcing their thinking to AI. People don't bother preparing to discuss topics beyond what AI told them. If they have access to their computer during the conversation they'll ask AI rather than google for reference material. If they don't have access, they'll suggest "investigating" (asking AI) and reconvening.

We had a problem that involved some open source library. The call consisted of various people saying what claude said about the code, then me explaining how it was incomplete or misleading (read: wrong) based on what I learned from actually reading the code.

What’s the logic here

Tenuous connection between unrelated topics to fit them into larger ingroup/outgroup dynamics is the junkfood of persuasion tactics. Bad for you but addictive anyway. If you look for it you'll see it all the time.

I appreciate that it allows people to engage with and discuss the work without immediately feeling boxed out by pretentious poppycock.

I also think obviousness is overindexed as the indicator of bad art because it's often the easiest property to articulate about something thoroughly bad. A lot of the tv and movies that make me quote the robot devil ("You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!") would not be improved by making the characters subtler. They could be the same level, or even more forthcoming, if the writing sounded like natural conversations real people have.

Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he's often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that'll do.

- Creator of Black Mirror, 5 years before series premiere

You know the meme that goes: "Be yourself. No, not like that."

It is possible for someone to have a goal of changing themselves into a person who can fit in socially, and be effortlessly comfortable while doing so. After building the underlying skills, they know how to navigate social situations well enough to intuit how much honesty and revealing is appropriate for a given situation, and can roll back "fake it until you make it". They can accept surmountable social penalties for the comfort of less self-filtering and chance to have more meaningful connections.

"Be yourself" means to change yourself, and then stick the landing.

Yeah, why be such a tryhard? Keeping PR friction down is what matters. Just let the codebase slowly deteriorate. It'll be fine.

Graybeards love to yap. Just talk to them or consume the wide amount of material already out there.

It takes curiosity on your part though. Handwaving about practical concerns taking priority is a path to never getting around to it. "Pragmatism" towards skills is how managers wind up with an overspecialized team and then tell themselves it was inevitable. The same can happen to you.

The lesson is taught early and often. It often sort of baffles me when other people are baffled at how often this happens in science,

Math and some sciences have the aura of definitive right and wrong, so even though by college everyone knows the expression "give the answer the teacher wants to hear", they just think in those subjects the teacher has access to absolute answers.

The primary thing taught by our schooling system (and 2nd place isn't even close) is bureaucracy obedience. This has the obvious effects, but one of the subtler ones is deference to "science" as an authority requiring obedience rather than the process of figuring shit out.

I don't think they're not recognized for it, they just don't brand themselves as it.

For as long as broadcasting has been a thing, major broadcasters were involved in pushing the technology forward. For most of it's history the American network NBC was a subsidiary of the Radio Corporation of America. But NBC's brand is not tech, they want to consumer to associate the gliz of the picture.

Bleh, that attitude ruins merch. If all you care about is maximizing the number of walking billboards then you're satisfied because it's impossible to calculate the ROI of making available designs that people actually want to wear in public but reduces walking billboards.

The only tech merch I've ever worn was back when firefox had a good logo, goodwill, and no text on the front of the shirt.

Lots of people just want a simple graphic tee and IFKYK. It's not sports. Bands can sometimes get exceptions, but often approach wrestling tshirt levels of gaudiness.

Capital-A atheism is a dead fad. It was a few years of people loudly dunking on something that that was safe to dunk on. The overall culture found them grating and insufferable, even to other atheists. Over time we swung to the point where you see more discussions like these.

What's the deal here?

Without making a jab at the bay area culture bubble, I dunno what to tell you.

I don't need religion to be bad, that was Capital-A atheism's thing. I just need it to leave me alone. And it does.

Some people are religious, and a lot of those who are would recommend it. When it comes to defending religion, as an atheist I still think bad takes are bad takes even if they're against the religion I left.

The cuneiform texts of an ancient Mesopotamian people should, in theory, hold little interest to an arts and crafts vendor based in the midwestern United States.

Why shouldn't it? People with money buy artifacts and art of note. The rest of us buy replicas and less noteworthy stuff. People from the Midwest can take interest in ancient Mesopotamia.

When writers casts the reader as dumb so they can twist it with an upcoming reveal, it's a signal I use to stop reading. If the twist was good I wouldn't need to be made to think little of the Hobby Lobby owners.

Or is this shower-type thought safe to chuck in the receptacle of non-sensical but good sounding ideas

Regardless of veracity, having an answer is reductive beyond the point of utility.

Like, yeah, it's reasonable to infer that someone who has chosen a career in programming might enjoy a nice game of Factorio. But beyond that, what is actionable or predictive about knowing?

It's worse than that. People will start making the hidden little assumption that the complexity of a deliverable is strongly correlated with the practitioner's propensity for complexity.

It's just blaming developers for bad software with extra steps. Instead of considering the dozen bigger factors that lead to shipping imperfection, we just have another reason to pull out the tired old excuse of blaming the programmers and their broken nerd brains that focused too hard on nerding instead of delivering business value.

Current? Derby Line/Standstead has been fucked since Bush 43. The library access was cold comfort after all the other changes "because terrorism."

Yeah, it's discouraging that it too is now gone. But if someone wants to be mad at Trump, just be mad at Trump. They don't need to suddenly pretend to care about Derby Line to have a legitimate gripe about Trump.

Would ads be better?

It has ads. Did you forget to turn off your adblocker? Or are you talking like even more ads?

Have you considered instituting a formal quality system? I'm not even saying that it's an alternative to or incompatible with licensing, but there are off-the-shelf standards for software process and quality you can download and implement today without government action.

A surgeon doesn't get to time-travel and test 1000 different ways to make a cut. You don't get to build 1000 bridges in the same location for load testing. But with software we can have a final deliverable that remains inert if you put quality gates between the development process and deployment. There is a very strong argument that when it is possible to have process and testing to hold the deliverable itself to the standards, that puts more confidence in the deliverable than just practitioner sign-off that it's right.

Jenkins is cron with bells and whistles. The result is a pile of plugins to capture all the dimensions of complexity you are likely to otherwise bury in the shell script but want them easier to point and click at. I'll hate on jenkins with the rest of them, but entropy is gonna grow and Jenkins isn't gonna say "no, you can't do that here". I deal with multiple tools where if tried to make fun about how low the jenkins plugin install starts are, you'd know exactly where I work. Once I've calmed down from working on CI I can appreciate Jenkins' attempts to manage all of it.

Any CI product play has to differentiate in a way that makes you dependent on them. Sure it can be superficially nicer when staying inside the guard rails, but in the age of docker why has the number of ways I configure running boring shell scripts gone UP? Because they need me unable to use a lunch break to say "fuck you I don't need the integrations you reserve exclusively for your CI" and port all the jobs back to cron.

And that's why jenkins is king.

A few minutes of spitballing what implementations might look like create a number of problems that appear to make the idea a nonstarter. You should have a real proposal that explores the possibility space, say what the key requirements are, and assuage (or confirm) people's objections. That way more people might be willing to engage with the idea seriously.

For that to work, a website has to push a mirror into that alternate system, and the scraper has to know the associated mirror exists.

That's two big "ifs" for something I'm not aware of a standardized way of announcing. And the entire thing crumbles as soon as someone who wants every drop of data possible says "crawl their sites anyway to make sure they didn't forget to publish anything into the 2nd system."