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gloryless

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I read and write software, mostly web applications

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AC is a fairly nuanced problem, and I like to see evaporative cooling getting an update. Obviously there is a chemical component here but for a ton of climates evaporative cooling is the best choice.

This kind of intuition is why a high school level statistics or probability class seems so so valuable. I know not everyone will use the math per se, but the concepts apply to everyday life and are really hard to just grasp without having been taught it at some point.

I have been this person and I'm trying to move away from it. It really is a great skill to enjoy lifting others and to be the glue of a team. But there are multiple slippery slopes inherent to that role that make it difficult. You can begin to confound the knowledge of others as your own, and almost certainly your own IC skills will atrophy if not purposefully maintained. I think it also requires the explicit buy in of the team, or at least other seniors who understand the benefits and can help keep balance.

It just takes one jealous colleague or one "efficiency minded" manager type to completely rug pull you. I know it's valuable because I have benefitted from that person many many times, but it takes empathy and a lot of balance.

OpenAI has shown that these models at full power work great, so now they're trying to optimize for cost. I've gotten similar low accuracy responses from stuff it could handle a month ago.

It was kind of cringey when the model generated low accuracy nonsense the user detected that as "sentient." Come on

Water 3 years ago

Pretty cool, but it acts more like a dense gas than water. Very bouncy and not sticky enough

This is not good. Some of the time stuff is relevant if you're digging deep into it, but it's more like "uncomfortable truths we ignore for sanity." They're mostly edge cases that are unreasonable or silly to address until it's a problem.

Just listing off "falsehoods" is not a good exercise. It's literally an endless list. Some sections have no explanation and you lose context on what it is you should be learning.

More than half of what I read should just be deleted. It's not a reminder, or a lesson to be learned, or actionable

Sounds like a simple layer that can be retrofitted easily, but "there's nothing to hack" is absurd. The truth is that car security is bad, and any killswitch at all is something they don't come with standard.

Super Drug 3 years ago

Anyone else notice the animated header image? That's a flex

This is an unhelpful oversimplification. There are lots of tasks that are maintenance, and the more code your team has written the more these tasks build up. I don't know what motivates someone to pretend it is the same as writing new features, but it deals with distinctly different risks.

I work in web, and one guy did this for two modules in a non-critical server, just TWO before I flat out told him to stop. "What does X mean" was a common question across people who had actually seen the code before and forgotten, and it was absolutely the first question someone trying to learn the codebase asked. It was a frustrating and silly practice that added to cognitive load and corroded faith in the authors decision-making.

In a team ecosystem where you probably need to optimize for readability and ease of use, try to be simple and accurate and get used to refactoring. Making up random shit is the worst advice I can think of.

JsonLogic 5 years ago

There are a ton of scenarios where this would be useful. Not everything has to be the new paradigm shift. It's just a tool

This is nonsense. Suicides are down in 2020. It was a virus that killed people, the deaths were reported. Conspiracy theories are so exhausting

The biggest risk is probably a drifting focus towards improving that tool. Unless there is some overall strategy towards segmenting out pieces and moving those into OSS, finding maintainers/audience, having an actual plan around those repos... I think your intuition of avoiding it is correct.

If it's already releasable (carved out into it's own repo, parsed for any possible security breaches, independently runnable, etc.) You can just make that public with no fan fare and agree not to do anything with it for a month or two. Let your excitement die down, see if anyone notices it or cares, then evaluate at some future date what could happen with it. If you decide no, just make it private again