khendron

Claude is helping me learn French right now. I am using it as a supplementary tutor for a class I am taking. I have caught it in a couple of mistakes, but generally it seems to be working pretty well.

When I was in grad school my faculty advisor joked to me that to accurately estimate any medium to large software project, take your best estimate and multiply it by 3. If hardware is involved, multiply by 8.

Yes, he was telling me this tongue in cheek, but in my actual experience this has been eerily accurate.

When I first tried an LLM agent, I was hoping for an interactive, 2-way, pair collaboration. Instead, what I got was a pairing partner who wanted to do everything themselves. I couldn't even tweak the code they had written, because it would mess up their context.

I want a pairing partner where I can write a little, they write a little, I write a little, they write a little. You know, an actual collaboration.

You've spent so much time explaining why enterprise software is terrible, we're starting to think you might be the person who designed Salesforce.

That's a low blow.

You are right, but it doesn't take many extroverts not understanding this concept to make it feel like it's everybody :)

My mother, for example, is a serious extrovert. When I explained to her that socializing seriously drains me and I need to, for example, spend time alone after attending a party, her response was to ask if I'd seen a therapist about it.

No, I just avoid it.

Not for me. Coffee, anything caffeinated actually, makes me sick like I have the flu. The older I get, the more sensitive I become. I can't even eat chocolate anymore because of the caffeine content.

You don't. Explaining what happened is not going to help the user at all. You can only explain what options are available to the user. Something like the following

"Sorry, this message can no longer be saved. Copy this message before discarding it if you will need access to it later."

This reminds me of the time at my work when the CTO gathered all the devs together, and told us "We have to innovate more". With no real further instructions. He even showed us a graph (without any numbers) that had Profit on the Y axis and Innovation on the X axis, with line line going up to the right.

When asked when we were supposed to work on this innovation, he told us it was important to still work on our current projects, but do it more innovatively. When pressed about what this actually meant, he just showed us the graph again.

I resigned shortly after.

but of course plenty of orgs figure out how to collaborate effectively while remote.

Some do, but most don't. Too many companies seem to think becoming remote means just installing Zoom on everybody's computers and sending them home. In reality, there is a lot more to it than that.

No remote technology comes close to having collaborators together in a room with a whiteboard, with a well-defined agenda. But while remote collaboration is less efficient, it doesn't mean it can't work. You just have to recognize that things are going to move slower and consensus of opinion will take more time.

Perhaps everybody in the world needs some sort of signing key, so they can officially "authorize" public media that contains their likeness.

There is almost no atmosphere for friction so basic Newtonian mechanics should be able to make a decent landing

Actually, I think that is the one of the biggest challenges. No atmosphere to slow you down means you have to rely entirely on rockets to slow down from orbital speeds to zero.

I remember reading a sci-fi story in which aliens who are covertly observing the Earth see this happening and secretly rescue Laika just before she dies.

One of the advantages of functions is that a well-named function is self-documenting. If you can take a bunch of lines and wrap them in a function whose name summarizes exactly what it does, then you have improved readability in my opinion. In this example, I don't really need to know the details of how the query parameters are extracted. I just want to know I've got them.

I always did best at the exams I had nightmares about. To the point where having an exam nightmare would make me feel better about an upcoming exam, I would actually start to worry if I had a big exam coming up and I hadn't had a nightmare about it yet.

Still today, 30 years later, I get these dreams. Usually when I have a big work or life challenge coming up. And the nightmares still boost my confidence (though the nightmares themselves suck).

I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid

Isn't that where Salesforce came from? At least in the CRM space. It is not as horrid, though that is not saying much :P

Oooh! I have a copy of that at home! https://imgur.com/a/rWHmft0

Getting flashbacks to the sci-fi short story "Grenville's Planet". First contact may not go very well.

Amazing! Love this!

How do you choose the books to added to your library?

Something similar happened to one of my corporations. Somebody targeted by scam the was suspicious and contacted me via LinkedIn. Discovered somebody had setup a completely separate and very legit looking website using a similar domain name (e.g., instead of company.com, it was companyinc.com).

I have no idea if they successfully scammed anybody.

One thing I did that is not mentioned in this article is that I contacted the police. The police took a statement and collected all the relevant files (e.g., the PDF job offers I had been sent).

There was, unfortunately, not much the police could actually do. But having an official police report helped in my next step, which was to start an internet-wide game of whack-a-mole with the scammer's website. I'd identify the hosting company, send them an abuse report, citing the police report, and request the website be taken down. The hosting company would usually comply within 24 hours, then a week or so later the website would reappear using a different host. Lather, rinse, and repeat several times until the scammer gave up (or moved to a different domain that I have not discovered yet).

Same. It shaved 8 years off of me, and then called me ugly.

Unless getting in and out of VR becomes as easy as putting one and taking off a pair of sunglasses, it's never going to become mainstream. Some serious disruption is going to be required to get there.

Compare it to the PDAs (e.g., Palm Pilot) of the late 90s early 2000s. They were cool, but hard to use. Though they were popular, they were far from mainstream. Then the iPhone came out, and a few years later everybody had a computer in their pocket. VR sorely needs a similar disruption.

[Pathfinder 3] will be the largest airship built in the United States since the Macon was built [by Goodyear] in 1932

They conveniently do not mention the Macon's sister ship, the Akron, which crashed in 1933 killing 73 people.

One trick I know of is to add site:myshopify.com to your google search. For example https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amyshopify.com+mens+sw...

Nah, it's not terrible. It's just not very professional—probably intentionally for humorous purposes. It reads like a story being told over beers at the local pub.

Why does it insist I live in Cork, Ireland when I live in Canada?

This article seems to contradict itself. Near the beginning it says storing at a low temperature can increase toxicity. Then near the end, it suggests storing potatoes in a cool place. Which is it?

I used to have a large collection of sci-fi, mostly paperbacks but some hardcovers. Plus a large number of non-fiction books on a variety of topics (e.g., investing, gardening, sailing, skiing, wine). Not to mention my obligatory collection of O'Reillys. Totalled perhaps 1500 to 2000 books at its max.

I got tired needing bookshelves everywhere, and liquidated most of my collection in a big garage sale. That was a really fun, like a day-long bookclub meeting. All I have left are my favorites and, ironically, the ones nobody wanted to buy. Maybe a few shelves worth.

This brings to mind the time I was at the national art gallery listening to a tour/talk by a well renowned sculptor.

Somebody in the group gestured to one of the pieces and asked “does the transition of the floor from green to grey signify the subject’s disillusionment with current environmental policies and the increasing hopelessness of contemporary civilization?”

The artist’s reply was “I ran out of green.”

If your programming no longer excites you, learn something new in programming, or even learn something that isn't programming and do that.

This is the key right here. If what you used to do is no longer exciting you, it is time to try something else. This often means getting out of your comfort zone, and there is no guarantee that the new thing you try will excite you. But if that happens, at least you tried. Every discovery of something that doesn't interest you is a step closer to something that does.