HN user
One of my great regrets in life is not knowing anything about how to rebuild an engine (and various other car parts). It's not exactly a cheap hobby, so it's probably for the best, but I have the feeling I would love working on cars (my wife probably not so much).
That was discussed in the article.
And DraftKings/FanDuel
There was documentary about this in the 80's: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088933/
The Patriot Act is perfect example of the adage, "Never let a crisis go to waste."
"Usury" is still a word in use but now, for legal purposes, it means "interest that a lender charges a borrower at a rate above the lawful ceiling on such charges" rather than just any interest at all.
My wife, who honestly tries to avoid technology at all costs, was working on her business site and said, "It's almost impossible to find any good stock photos with all the AI slop out there."
AI, among non-tech people means two things: slop and shitty customer service bots.
As someone with extreme phone anxiety to begin with, long waits on phones are deal breakers for me. If you are a company that answers your phone quickly by a real person you've earned yourself a lifelong customer.
I used Rokus for years (happily) but they slowly began to degrade the experience with ads on their home screen (that were often not appropriate for children). Due to an unrelated project that required me to purchase an AppleTV I was quickly amazed at how much better their product was. Fast and clean. Never going back.
I know that as technologists we tend to think of this as "treasure" but most other people think of it as "large metal objects that are expensive to store or landfill." Maintaining, storing, and restoring them on top of that is also very expensive. Usually they'll give them to anyone willing to take them off their hands. We only need to look at the closure of the Living Computers Museum closing [1] to see that most people do not see the value in the history of computing. That's why the CHM is doing such is important work.
[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2024/seattles-living-computers-muse...
HN Hug of Death: https://web.archive.org/web/20260522134016/https://robida.ne...
A byte is always 8 bits. The word you're looking for is `word-size` which, in this case would be 4 bits.
In Minnesota they tend to be (or were) owned by companies in the construction / maintenance industry and plastered with full body advertisements for said services (not actually used by construction workers).
Came here to say that a lot of these LLM posts make me feel like I was hit by a hammer and I can't understand the world anymore. Thankfully, the HN comments confirm that this is as insane as I thought it was.
If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying to colonize Mars, I recommend A City on Mars: https://www.acityonmars.com/
It's by the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and his wife (the one with an actual science PhD). https://www.smbc-comics.com/
It's not that they made more money from merchandise, it's that they sold more t-shirts than albums. Implying that more people were interested in the "image" of punk rock than the music.
Because Worse is Better. /s
It's the incentives and everything is a trade off. Time to market, performance, features: none of these choices are made in a vacuum. Oh, and people like to go home and see their families once in a while.
As a developer of over 35 years, I feel like I hear the same arguments over and over again. "Programmers used to care about performance!" No they didn't, they just had no choice because computers sucked and you had to work on performance or your application would barely run. "Progammers used to care about the quality of their code!" Really. You apparently never worked on legacy systems with years of hacks and spaghetti code that took an afternoon to trace through just to figure out what it was doing.
People haven't changed. Kids aren't lazier these days. The incentives are always just to ship as fast as possible. Performance will be dealt with when and if it is so bad that the customer complains and not a moment sooner.
When I was much younger I fancied myself a "craftsman" of software. But any "craft" I was able to bestow on my software was in spite of the surrounding incentives not because of them. Software is closer to assembly line work than craftsmanship and LLMs are just driving that point home faster and harder than ever.
I still love software development after all these years but it's entirely because I love solving problems and computers still fascinate me the same as they did when I got my first TRS-80 Color Computer at age seven. Nobody that's not a programmer cares as long as the software does what they need it to and does fast enough that they don't start wonder why they have to use this piece of crap software in the first place.
Everyone made personal computers in the late 70's and early 80's. It was the latest corporate fad.
"Animal Farm" is a satire of the Russian Revolution.
* ANY consumer-grade home appliances.
I'm so old and out-of-touch that all I could imagine this was about was an ancient version control system:
And also why a large percentage of the "content" on YouTube is YouTubers reactions to other YouTubers.
I'm a strong supporter of the "I did it because I wanted to see if I could do it" ethos. So this isn't a criticism of the project itself, but I'm pretty sure a snap gun will beat this almost every time.
The figurines can wait but often the graduate student or postdoc cannot.
Disco Elysium is truly a wonderful game for adventure/rpg fans. I have a small fraction of the time I had as a younger man to play games so I have to be very selective with my choices and Disco Elysium has taken up a large portion of that time for the past few months.
If it makes you feel any better, that's about the age I started functioning mostly like an adult. It started around 30 but took a good decade to take hold.
You certainly don't need to have someone in your life -- as someone who married late and has two kids now I sometimes look back on my long period of begin single with fondness -- but I would also recommend being very honest with yourself. Very few people are totally undesirable and expecting others to meet some predetermined standard is very common among people that don't interact socially very often (I speak from experience). While I'm lucky that my wife is very bright (and in many ways much smarter than me) the most important thing that she has given me is new perspectives on life and seeing that it's more important to be kind and helpful than smart.
It's very hard to see outside of our early conditioning without outside perspectives. We may have a vague sense that we might not have been given the best tools for social development (we may even be brutally aware of it), but having someone that has the skills that we are missing is often more important than that they have equal skills in areas we are strong in. Having a good partner can make you realize things about yourself and open you up to things that you never even realized were there.
It's not that one.
Anything that contributes to you not needing to actually "think" and instead just "react" is going to be bad for you because it is simply engaging your reward system. The only way LLMs can be a net good is if they free you from drudgery and allow you to work harder on the things that actually matter. (Think dishwashers and laundry machines). If you are using them as an "easy button" so you can finish your work (poorly) to have more time to scroll your timeline then yes, you are turning your brain into mush.
I'm purposefully not engaging with whether LLMs are actually even good at what they do, which is another discussion.