okwhateverdude

I've been that engineer and with good reason. That obscure edge case which rarely comes up in production is very disruptive when it does come up. The product person waving it off is also not the one that will get paged at 2am to address the issue when it occurs. Accepting that 90th percentile use case is infuriating because it is tacit consent for an unfinished solution with the rest being made up later with additional toil, now constrained by load bearing things you cannot change. Thanks for rushing the thinking and making my life harder later for no reason.

Robots struggle with syntax-in-syntax. Really easy to confuse them when asking it to write a SQL query that targets a JSON column but it must respond with a JSON envelope so the harness can parse the result. Lots of escaping that needs to happen. Deeply nested structures in JSON also end up with foibles like missing a ] or } in a string of }}]}]}. Aside from the prompt injection possibility, just the result being straight up broken and requiring another LLM call is tokens flushed.

How can we opt-out of these tests? The behavior foibles I've been experiencing over the past month might be directly attributable to these experiments! It can be extreme frustrating. I don't want to be in the beta channel. Please change this to be opt-in.

However, for some reason, both Gemini and ChatGPT tend to argue with me

The trick here is: "Be succinct. No commentary."

And sometimes a healthy dose of expressing frustration or anger (cursing, berating, threatening) also gets them to STFU and do the thing. As in literally: "I don't give a fuck about your stupid fucking opinions on the matter. Do it exactly as I specified"

Also generally the very first time it expresses any of that weird shit, your context is toast. So even correcting it is reinforcing. Just regenerate the response.

I work for a fintech. We're currently building agents to manage basic human labor tasks that are time consuming (think: initial credit analysis, initial web research for AML, etc.). Chatbots are a waste of the actual power behind engineering with LLMs. With tool usage, and detailed instructions, we're easily able to direct the agents to do very useful work. While it has been possible to build these kinds of automations previously, the costs (time and opportunity) would have been astronomical to capture and encode the reasoning in a programming language. Now we can simply ask the robot in plain language to do the task. It won't reduce our headcount, but it will enable scaling the business with way less hands. And the cost to develop is very minimal. The first MVP for the credit analysis robot was vibe coded in an afternoon using an off-the-shelf lib. Doing the actual engineering is trivial context management and tool integration. The challenge is having the kinds of problems we do where these kinds of solutions make sense. In finance and insurance, there are tons of these manual human tasks that could benefit from the robots. I expect this space to explode in the next couple of years.

Do you have an iGPU+dGPU combo like in a gaming laptop? For my 2019 gaming laptop with a i915+RTX2060, if I leave the switchable option on in the hardware settings (meaning the OS can choose which GPU to use ie. iGPU for low power), I end up with similar behavior in Linux/Win10. The external port actually uses the dGPU so rendering must go through it but it will struggle with the switchable option and I end up with freezing or stutters. In Linux, I explicitly configure Xorg to only use the iGPU and reserve the dGPU for model inference which fixes the stuttering issue. When booting into Win10, I explicitly disable the iGPU and turn off the external monitor so my VR playing doesn't stutter or youtube doesn't freeze or stutter.

10786 :-D https://www.johnayliff.com/games/seedship/index.html?bHcorjm...

I'll take an eclectic bunch of weirdos who all do and like cool shit over the corpo conformist normies any day. Super easy to suss out who is who when you first meet them. Just ask what they like to do when they aren't laboring under the thumb of capitalism. The cool people will talk your ear off about some esoteric whatever.

This is common in the southwestern part of the US too. My partner and her friends she grew up with will have conversations that fluidly pick phrases and vocab from either Spanish or English depending on what words happen to be the easiest to pull from their brain. It's wild to listen to.

I'm generally in favor. My taxes provide an amazing experience here. I have never seen the abject poverty that I've seen in other places (such as the US) here in NL. Great infrastructure, labor laws, culture and arts, etc. I worry less about break-ins and theft. All-in-all, the least worst place to live, by far.

More like yolo deploys without proper scaffolding in place to handle SHTF. Also, if your red-button takes 40 minutes and deploys to mitigate anything, it isn't a red-button.

It's difficult to do but demonstrably possible. That's why it is hard to consider any non-willpower solution. And why it is very easy to be consumed by ego if you've done it. I used to be in the militant-willpower camp because I pulled myself up by the bootstraps, so to speak. I had to study... me, in order to make it work. I had to be smarter than default mode network me and anticipate my behavior.

To change my lifestyle meant somehow incorporating all the good behaviors I wanted to do but within the limitations of being me. It took a lot of work. I carefully measured my caloric intake (gram scale all the things) and expenditure (fitness watch with optical HR, fancy schmancy scale that does body fat estimation) plus doing things like: always taking the stairs, combine my morning run/cycle with my commute (shower at the office), taking the longer way, etc. Dropped 40kg. Went from couch to running half-marathons and cycling centuries. I had to completely change my relationship with food and study all of the nutrition stuff that was never taught to me. I had to unlearn habits instilled by my parents (emotional eating, boredom eating) which meant finding different ways to deal with stress and relieve boredom. ADHD is a bitch. And weed is awesome. Learning how to accommodate munchies without putting on weight also requires forethought.

No. It really isn't all that realistic for everyone to do what I did much less have the same privileges and opportunities. I had to treat my body like a biologist studying a critter. I was incredibly lucky to be at the right spot in my life where I hit a glass ceiling at work and had so much fuck you energy pent up from feeling out of control of my life. I chose to exert maximum control over my body in order to cope and prove something.

It was a monumental amount of effort over a two year period. It is extremely unrealistic to ask people to use a gram scale for their food consistently. Or to log/track their food intake for every bite. Or to always monitor their heart rate to estimate/track your caloric output. Hyper monitoring your body is a weird hobby.

I really do think instead we should be legislating and regulating food more strictly. Labeling isn't really enough. Food science is being weaponized, much like psychology has been with advertising. We shouldn't allow that kind of manipulation for profit.

Adipocytes live like 10 years[0]. You need to maintain for a long time for those cells to die off. Otherwise, it is easy to regain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipocyte#Cell_turnover

Really good times on k5 all those many moons ago. It is weird to consider how ephemeral these internet communities are in the end.

This was some out there singularity fiction back in the day with some really vivid imagery including being raped by a zombie, skinning the protagonist alive and dumping a mound of fire ants on them, and some incest. I re-read this occasionally and still enjoy reading it if only because it feels truthy for how various shades of humanity would deal with an immortality giving, reality altering, techno-god. The shock value of various scenes mimics the darker corners of the internet and does a good job exploring the dichotomy of behavior on and off the internet in the guise of dealing with the reality foisted upon the characters.

If you've not read it, and aren't bothered by some extreme imagery, I definitely recommend.

As an immigrant from the US to NL, and having lived here over a decade and a half, the author's observation is pretty spot on. There are broad differences between the Dutch and Germans (stereotypically, they both like rules, but only the Germans are really strict about them, for example), but overall, they are similar in their mindset toward work. Of others I have met from all over the EU, they too seem to have similar cultural values.

One of the things I have seen, first hand, is when American's buy EU companies and start running them. Or when they open offices over here. The culture shock and friction is immediate. Meta, for example, basically did no labor law research before announcing a layoff, and got slapped hard by the locals. Took years for that process to finally resolve which induced a ton of stress for everyone working there. You also have founders over here that salivate at the Silicon Valley culture and want to emulate it, but for whatever reason don't actually want to move there. They also induce friction in their companies. For what it is worth, I don't want to work at a company with those kinds of cultural influences. And I want to make sure if those companies operate here, we tax them appropriately and force them to behave in an acceptable way that benefits society.

That split second before a throw resolves is a slice of time where you can observe what your opponent is throwing, and change yours at the very last moment.

Urban Terror low gravity CTF was an amazing game. So incredibly satisfying to get the jump just right to swoop up the enemy flag, and make the jump back to capture. I loaded it up some time ago and it was mostly a ghost town. Same thing with Tremulous. Could be my timezone. I really enjoyed the ioq3 total conversions.

It isn't like we're born with a guide book on how to live life. Drinking the kool-aid is very tempting when you don't have a good reason not to drink it. If you never have the self-awareness to ponder your place within the org and how it functions, and just accept the good vibes corpoganda, what other outcome could there be? "They showed up to be exploited and are getting exactly that," thinks their sociopath exec.

I suspect that a lot of the virtue signaling on LinkedIn is only sales puffery for their personal brand. If they can show just how exploitable they are, then maybe riches, recognition, and power will magically materialize for them. And they think this because they were fed tall tales all their working lives.

I think it depends on the shake contents. Fiber addition is absolutely crucial for the satiety. Most of your soylent and equivalents include it. Doing an only-shake diet is indeed difficult for most people that want novelty in their food, especially if they are addicted to the dopamine hit from food.

I had to rethink my relationship to food in order to lose weight. Eating a soylent clone for the majority of my meals helped me to do that. Getting a gram-accurate scale for measuring food helped. Building a database in my head of calorie estimates of various foods helped when I was not at home. Double checking nutrition facts for fast food helped too. Really, I was raised by an emotional eater. And I didn't have the natural intuition about food that most people acquire from their parents. I had to unlearn all of that shit, and learn about nutrition, calories, macros, etc

Food is not a treat or a reward, it is fuel to live. Taking a more ascetic approach to food has helped tremendously. And if I know I am going to an engagement with rich foods, I'll even lightly fast before hand so that my calorie intake stays reasonable for the day. And of course, if I have a craving for something calorie rich, I try to make an effort to justify that intake with additional activity that balances things out.

The thing about satiety is that we've conquered food scarcity in the developed world. Feeling hungry is practically taboo and is used as an excuse to consume more, the longer the feeling is felt. When in reality, hunger should be used as a signal of how soon to eat, rather than how much. Hunger is not a pleasant feeling, but the world is also not going to end if you skip a meal or two, especially for the overweight people. Having proper emotional regulation around this is important, too.

I think I am in the same boat as you. Knowing how the sausage is made only makes the flaws noticed even more offensive.

But I do think the GP has a point about the intentional friction and bullshit introduced into lots of modern software that wasn't even a twinkling in some CEOs eye way back when. Software has become adversarial to the user. Psychology has been weaponized to induce behaviors in users. Instead of users feeling utility and choice in using the software, they feel burdened, controlled. Or at least, I do. I try to make smart choices about what software I use to maintain my own volition.

These kinds of flaws are fundamentally different from the kinds of flaws in software from the past if only because of the order of magnitude increase of resources that can be mustered to accomplish it. And because they are exploitative.

infrastructure and professional norms around classical engineering disciplines just aren't there (yet) for developers.

I honestly doubt it will ever get there. Our profession pretty much materialized over night in comparison to other disciplines, and in a rapidly evolving environment, with a much broader application. Only so many bridges/dams/buildings are built in a given time frame and have such incredible capital costs, and human life costs if they get it wrong. It makes sense to carefully curate who and how those things get built. The vast majority of software on the other hand, unless it is for medical/construction/factory equipment that can kill people, is usually super low stakes. And with the democratization of programming in general, even your VBA-curious business analyst can do it in their spreadsheet. Sure I can do the pro se thing in court (and lose my life/freedom), read webmd and treat my own cancer (and die), build my own dam (and flood my neighborhood), but we gatekeep those professions because of the dire consequences of fucking it up. Until software more broadly has those kinds of consequences, there will be no licensure.

And now I am infinitely disappointed that there don't seem to be any covers of Tom Lehrer tunes in the style of System of a Down.

No?

Indeed, that is what I meant. This is a neat result, just not practical yet.

the team worked with FePS3 — a material that transitions to an antiferromagnetic phase at a critical temperature of around 118 kelvins (-247 degrees Fahrenheit). [...] They placed the sample in a vacuum chamber and cooled it down to temperatures at and below 118 K.

I feel like this massive caveat was buried half way through the article. This is why I dislike university press. I mean, the wizardry is impressive, but it isn't gonna revolutionize anything anytime soon if it requires a vacuum and liquid Krypton-ish temperatures.

I suspect that many of these projects will have lower quality than regular proof-of-concept projects today.

Exactly. It will be way worse than a hacky PoC because you might able to reason about the structure or logic based on the human author and their intent which is impossible in the case of an LLM author. Further, assuming the human author isn't hit by a bus or whatever, you can query them directly if anything is unclear. Good fuckin luck asking an LLM for a reason why it did something in the PoC.

`layout.testing.overlay-scrollbars.always-visible` in `about:config` is your friend.

If you go full screen the drift stops

I'd argue it is a bit more common than you think, but probably for different reasons than you would assume. It isn't so much the impact of the side project that gets you the job, but more about networking. If you are involved in an am-pro manner in a given FOSS community by actively participating (code, docs, etc) and speaking (blogs, conferences, workshops, etc), your networking opportunities explode. Anecdotally, this is how I landed some really nice gigs, even if that community (and tech) has all but evaporated now. But if you're toiling away on some project and not actively engaging with anyone that would remotely care, your potential employers very likely won't care either unless they are specifically looking for it.