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michaelcampbell

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I can juggle and solve Rubiks cubes, but not at the same time.

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Love systemd timers 2 months ago

With cronie the system needs to be running at the scheduled time, but systemd timer tolerates this and runs the service as soons as the system is available.

Cronie doesn't have a `@reboot` meta-trigger?

character creation in the rpg classic traveller.

This is half the game. I fondly remember a few "game days" in the early 80's with some friends spending hours "rolling" Traveller characters. Partly because it was quite possible for your character to due DURING GENERATION, before the "rpg" part of the game actually started.

Turns out the humans weren't so bad after all...

The people pushing AI _over_ humans never thought they were. They just don't care about 'good' or 'bad', only 'time-to-market'. A bad app making money is better than a good one that isn't deployed yet. And who cares about anything past the end of the quarter? That's the next guy's problem.

I've worked with companies whose infosec dept. is little more than "see tool alert, ask user what's going on", and then keep searching for the right _tool_ than injecting any human agency in that loop.

If any role is ready for an LLM to take over (or even a shell script), it's that one.

O(x)Caml in Space 2 months ago

the “Ox” in the name is to evoke “oxidizing”

Hah, I was reading it as `0x`, a common prefix indicating hexadecimal, though I can't say my brain made any leap as to why "0xCAML" would be any more hex than standard.

Many of my professors were from other countries. I literally wouldn’t have an education without immigrants.

Curious take; do you think if there were a no-immigrant law on the books those professorial positions would have gone completely unfilled? You _GOT_ an education with the help of immigrants, but that does not imply you wouldn't have had they not been there.

I'm reminded of a comedian's bit I heard recently (he does a lot of "crowd work")

So, what do you guys want to do? Feel like pooling all the cash we have and going to Trader Joe's to buy an apple?

(TBH, I think he said "whole foods" there, but the sentiment is the same.)

You're absolutely right. The problem was so small that SO only had to make a site-wide survey, make a couple of public statements, big administrative changes and a big campaign to earn hearts and minds back.

The SO population decline started before LLMs, too.

I think there's a continuum here, too. I've heard it said, in jest, mind, that LLM's square the dev. It turns a 1.5x dev into a 2.25x dev, but it also turns a 0.75x dev into a ~0.56x dev.

I think the exponent of 2 is probably too high, but it's not a bad approximation of a very messy reality.

There is also the division of people who value the thing being produced vs. valuing the actual production of that thing, whether or not its used. I don't see one side here being "right", necessarily, but when a company is behind it one is certainly more valued, and I think not incorrectly.

I’ve personally can’t remember the last time there was an outage that prevented me from doing work.

You and I are in different domains. It's not daily, but I can't remember the last time I (in my company) went a week WITHOUT having to workaround some outage. Perhaps semantics, but I can "do work" through most of them, but that work isn't getting built or deployed in the same time frame it would have been had the outages not occurred. So "affected" is at least weekly for me.