rickspencer3

In my Python programming, I have found that ChatGPT makes me something like 10x more productive. From learning to use a new API to tracking debugging, and especially things finding errors in my code from stack traces. Getting results goes SO MUCH FASTER.

However, it has not alleviated any responsibility from me to be a good coder because I have question literally everything little dang thing suggests. If I am learning a new API, it can write code that works, but I need to go read the reference documentation to make sure that it is using the API with current best practices, for example. A lot of code I have to flat out ask it why it did things in a certain way because they look buggy inefficient, and half the time it apologizes and fixes the code.

So, I use the code in my (personal) projects copiously, but I don't use a single line of code that it generates that I don't understand, or it always leads to problems because it did something completely wrong.

Note that, at work, for good reasons, we don't use AI generated code in our products, but I don't write production code in my day job anyway.

Son of a gun! I've been working at SUSE for a bit of a year, and a lot of the positive things people say here still ring true, at least to me.

$4.99 impulse buy. I bought a pdf to put on my remarkable 2 for my next plane trip. I hope that doing it this way doesn't violate the spirit of using paper :)

In my experience, issues like this occur when people project ethical standards onto projects when those ethical standards are not embedded in the license.

In my view, if you believe it is unethical for someone to re-license your Apache code with their own proprietary license, then it shouldn't have an Apache license.

Taking a proprietary fork of an Apache licensed code base and creating an Enterprise product around it seems like a valid business move to me. My guess is that the "uproar" is not coming from the original project creators, but from outside community members who consider such things "anti-social" or whatnot, but I could be wrong.

I would argue that there are good business to be built on top of AWS and Azure catering to the users of those services, and very little chance that Amazon or Microsoft would pull the rug out from under you based on their track records.

I pay for ad-free YouTube. I also pay for a ton of extra storage in Google drive.

I find the constantly closing down and shifting of services to be a slight annoyance but not really too impactful in my personal usage. For example, moving Google podcasts and YouTube music into YouTube has been a pretty sad degradation. But not really a deal breaker for me.

What I would never ever do is build a business on top of Google. They seem so cavalier about pulling the rug out from under you. I can only imagine if you have for example services running in Google cloud, how they would treat you if you were counting on a service that they thought wasn't worth it to maintain anymore. Shutting down apis that people were using like this just seems very on-brand for them to me.

I am so biased this borders on shilling, but may I suggest taking a look at openSUSE Leap Micro? https://get.opensuse.org/leapmicro/5.5/

We (SUSE) have extensive testing and quality control, if you are looking for something very stable. Leap is the version built out of the same bits as the enterprise version. The "Micro" part means it is smaller, transactional, and immutable. It's built for containerized and virtualized applications. You can install the nvidia OS bits in the OS, and then build a container with libraries.

I wish we were in the Star Trek universe, so this was "AI will free humanity to pursue science and art without economic concerns" instead of "AI will make everyone poor and subjugate."

I think that there is an active company behind Superset called Preset.

https://preset.io/

I don't think it's semi-abandoned. I had a brief interaction with the project in my previous job, and I found the community and the company to be reasonably engaged and responsive.

Or developers compile a static linux binary for the specific architectures (usual amd64) and just compile all of the dependencies into the app. You download the binary and run it. That used to be how Steam worked, for example, and I assume still does.

I think that what snaps and flatpaks want to do that is "better" than this, is to isolate your system from such applications if they are malicious.

For "reasons" (i.e. I got a job at SUSE), I have been running openSUSE for the last 6 weeks. I like that I don't have to deal with snaps and flatpaks at all. I was able to install Slack, VSCode, Chrome, etc... from professionally maintained repositories. Open source apps like GNote just install cleanly from repos.

That said, it's nice that people who prefer snaps or flatpak (assuming such people exist) have that option without those packaging formats being shoved at me constantly.

I used to ask it a lot more nuanced questions. Like if I was watching TV and they referred to some historical event, I might have asked it about that historical event and gotten a useful response. Now it says something like, "I don't know how to answer that."

I went all in on Google home, with the little pucks and also screens littered around my house. My wife and I have both noticed over the last couple of years that their usefulness seems to have diminished a lot. They used to seem much "smarter." Now, basically, they can tell me the time, set a timer, play music with like 65% accuracy in playing what I want, and tell me the weather outside. It's possible that they were always this bad and the novelty wore off, but it seems like the service just degraded.

I assumed that both Amazon and Google were underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services.

Now it looks like both companies are hoping that Generative AI is going to make them more valuable [0]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/01/google-reshuffles-assistant-...

This very much matches my experience with co-working. When the time spent on calls went over 2 or 3 hours a day for me, my days became a constant hunt for comfortable and private places to make calls. I ended up making a room in my condo into an office.

I did find co-working to be quite enriching though. I made a few friends, and it was nice to see some of the same faces each day. It was very key that none of the people that I socialized with at the co-working space were people that I was working with.

Just for posterity, this is totally my favorite movie. I don't even know how many times I've watched it staring in high school, and, somehow, I still think it's funny.

Way back in like 2008 or so I went through the interview process of a new job. The last step was a panel interview with the people who would report to me. Their last question was, "what is your favorite movie." When I told them "The Holy Grail" it absolutely sealed the deal for them. It turned out to be a great team and a great fit, too.

In my experience, LLVMs are not about being provided facts. They are about synthesizing new content and insights based on the model and inputs.

Rather than asking it about facts, I find it useful to derive new insights.

For example: "Tell me 5 topics about databases that might make it to the front page of hacker news." It can generate an interesting list. That is much more like the example they provided in the article, synthesizing a bed time story is not factual.

Also, "write me some python code to do x" where x is based on libraries that were well documented before 2022 also has similarly creative results in my experience.

Years ago when I worked at Microsoft, they had a "pseudo localization" tool, at least for Visual Studio, that would inject backwards text, longer text, etc... It was gibberish, but it gave QA instant feedback on whether the UI would accommodate the localization process.

I did a quick web search, and it appears to be a well-understood practice, even covered in a different Shopify blog:

https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/pseudo-localization.

It's complete double speak, is it not? Any commitment to even mediocre journalistic standards would not have led to this whole situation, much less this outcome.

I am a heavy user of Flutter. Even for simple things if I need to throw together a UI for my own use and then throw it away, I default to Flutter simply because I have become proficient at boot strapping a Flutter project. This is especially true now that they support desktop applications.

For this application, it sounds like the underlying services are not very platform specific, so on that level it seems like Flutter is a good choice. My concern would be that the developers seem very focused on the quality of the experience of even micro-interactions. My experience in Flutter would say that this degree of attention to detail would be hard to get right with Flutter, especially without choosing a platform to focus on, in which case the cross-platform benefits of Flutter are minimized.

Whether delaying an MVP for months to achieve that quality in the user interactions is an interesting side debate, though.

I feel really bad for this seller. This, btw, is why I go straight to merchants and suck up the longer delivery and delivery costs. The effort of dealing with rip-offs on Amazon was made the experience of shopping their so terrible.

Also, if this seller got really successful, Amazon would have noticed and created an "Amazon Basics" massage gun anyway.

I do still regularly buy certain things on Amazon still (a certain kind of socks, a certain protein powder, etc...). I haven't been able to find a good source for those. Ironically, the protein power is something I used to get at Whole Foods, but they don't carry it there anymore.

This has been very contrary to my experience. We have had a fully EV Kia for almost a year now, and it is the most low-drama new car that we have owned by far. Literally zero issues with it (unless you count the slow leak in a tire from a nail). 10 years ago we had a Subaru that came with so many factory defects, we swore off Subaru forever. We have had many VWs, none of which ever broke down. They took a ton of maintenance compared to our EV, though.

We were able to install a level 2 charger in our garage, and this had made the car completely worry free. Also, the experience of driving an EV is so much better than driving a gas powered car. I can't stress enough how much of an upgrade going full EV has been for us.

I guess you need to be careful which specific model you buy, and we avoided Tesla because I felt that I had enough buggy software to deal with in my life, but I would guess that the most reliable EVs are much more reliable than the most reliable legacy gas engine cars. After having our EV, Ithink that they are simply just better, and a complete take over in the industry is inevitable.

I think the tech stack would whatever is easiest for the specific team you have. The app doesn't seem complicated.

The platform that I would like would:

  - Block links. The platform is for sharing personal thoughts and quips, not spreading marketing or propaganda.
  - Block "re-sharing." This would include detecting and deleting duplicate posts across accounts.
  - Cost a token amount of money. Enough to filter out scammers and bots.
  - No "engagement algorithm," your feed is exactly what you design it to be.

I assume that some percentage of these employees are developers, engineering managers, etc... I assume that a large percentage of those have high salaries and are based in the Bay Area.

I wonder if they will all be absorbed into the local job market, or if some will have to take lower salaries at remote companies, and perhaps even move to more affordable places?

I just recently listened to 2 great of Darknet Diaries covered Citizenlab, NSO, and Pegasus.

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/99/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/100/

The gist is that the NSO group is a company that sells malware which they claim is only ever used to catch bad guys, but the podcast makes a pretty compelling case that they know that repressive governments and even companies use it to target journalists and activists.

I read the original NYT article as well.

I disagree with the position that the "AI failed." I suspect that the images were pretty much dead on for suspected child abuse image from how they were described in the original article.

What I think is terrible about the story is that Google seemed supremely uninterested in investing any effort whatsoever in helping their customers recover from the false allegations. The customers ended up losing all of the information that they had stored on Google, and the company seemed to treat exoneration of the hideous crime that they accused the customers of to be a triviality not worth their effort.

I am a big fan of Google's technology, and I am deeply wedged into their ecosystem for my personal life (Android, Google Maps, Google Photos, Gmail, etc...). I even pay for premium services. But, it's clear from how they treat Youtube creators and stories like this that, as a customer, they are wholly indifferent to customers as individuals. You have to play defense against their tech.

What really galls me, and I know I have ranted about this here before, is that you can't even really load an app ON YOUR OWN PHONE without paying for a developer account, not to mention that I can't side load something someone else made. I get that iPhones are nifty and all, but I don't see how people can spend that money on a device that locks the owner out of basic functionally.

Android is not perfect, but at least I am able to, you know, use my phone as I see fit.

Environmentalism ends up in such a catch-22. Of course you want to acknowledge that environmental efforts actually work, but, I think there is also a fear that if there is acknowledgement that things are improving, society will immediately revert to the behaviors that caused the problem in the first place, or worse.

This content seems very hopeful to me. So long was we refrain from adding "acute stress" to the reef, there is a chance that it can recover over the years.

I had great luck with Sparkfun Inventor's Kit. It came with an Arduino, a bunch of sensors and effectors and a manual of projects today went step by step to learn electronics and the Arduino system.

This is why I prefer to use permissible license for my own software. I just don't need the drama of worrying about what people are doing with my code after I write it. Living in a world where you think a company is evil for training ML models on code that is published for anyone to read on the internet anyway because it violates the license you used just sounds exhausting.

We wrote and published about it quite a lot, but none of that content seems to be indexed or available anymore. Here's some content referring to it, though:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/mort-elvis-einstein-and-you/