scruple

The comment I replied to stated that only WoW and Overwatch had unionized. Every game team has unionized at Blizzard, along with some of the support teams.

Diablo also unionized and there's some representation in non-game teams like Battle.net. But I also know (I'm in games and in OC myself, loads of friends at local studios from SD, to OC, and LA counties) that they had a demonstration last Thursday, at 2PM Pacific Time they walked out. They claim that leadership is not negotiating in good faith.

I started doing this in the mid-2010s, too. Used to grab throwaway hardware from a former employer and piece whatever still worked together. I've since moved on to a different employer. How do you procure throwaway hardware?

I also primarily use Kobo e-readers right now but I've been wanting something smaller for an EDC. I think this thread is selling me on it.

You'd think Artificial Intelligence could be used to find a better path forward, alas.

I have the same sorts of thoughts rolling around in my head, and also agree that the college path is looking grim right now.

Have you tried Lisp Flavored Erlang [0]? I never got around to trying it out. I used Elixir for a couple of years, building web backends, and I truly loved the experience. I remember wanting to try out LFE but never got around to it before moving on to a different employer/stack.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFE_(programming_language)

I just got back from a 12 mile trail run. I'd love to be on the trails more often. And I'd love to explore more trails that are further away. But I have to work all week and that leaves me with my weekends. I also like to read, write, garden, hike, bike, strength train, I have other hobbies like woodworking that I'd love to get back into, homebrewing, I bake bread, and on and on. I love spending time with my wife and my kids and my/our friends. And I have to ration my time heavily because I've got ~50+ hours every single week that's wrapped up in making my staggeringly massive corporation employer more money than it knows what to reasonably do with.

This is fabulous and I'm going to buy a copy to play on my SteamDeck. Will be sure to leave a review after I've put some hours into it!

I live nearby, I'm hosting some family at my home who have been evacuated. A fireman friend who has been to the site said the same. That it'll either explode or spill and they're banking on it spilling.

How much time do I want to spend on this vs. just writing the old-fashioned way?

The friction at these commencements is a reaction to the macroeconomic consequences not the technology itself.

I remember being so confused in 2015, watching us go from on-prem to cloud. Truly, the shackles of AWS set us free.

I use coding agents and LLMs at work where I'm more or less to some degree required to. At home, I write code the old fashioned way. Not katas, etc., necessarily, but I've decided that if we live in a world where code is cheap (or cheaply generated) that I'll hone my Lisp skills. I haven't used a Lisp in a few years and it's brought a lot of the joy of programming back for me, at least at home.

What percentage of people "seem accepting of violence as a tool" when they're starving to death?

I guess? Yes. But I played for like 20 seconds and lost interest.

I still have a lot of usage for AI: Exploration, Double-checking me, teaching me.

I'm ready to give up on having it even review my code at this point. It's been so frustrating. It hallucinates bugs, especially in places where "best practices" are at odds with reality.

Recently it informed me of a bug where it suggested the line of code in question couldn't possibly do anything because on Linux the specific stdlib behaved in X ways, but it was obvious from the line of code that it was running on Windows which doesn't have this problem at all. Of course, it doesn't actually mention that this is an issue on Linux, just that there is a bug here. It vomits up a paragraph of $WORDS explaining why this was a high-priority bug that absolutely needed to be fixed because it was failing in subtle ways. Yet the line of code in question has been running in production, producing exactly the results it is expected to, for ~3 years.

And this is just one simple example, of the many dozens+ of times it has failed this task this year. In that same review run, the agent suggested 3 additional "bugs" or other issues that should be addressed that were all flatly wrong or subjective. I'm at a point of absolute exhaustion with this sort of shit. It's worse than a junior half of the time because of how strongly opinionated it is. And the solution to this sort of problem is an endless amount of configuration and customization that will be forgotten about by all of us over time, leading to who knows what sort of knock-on effects (especially as we migrate from one model to the next). We have a guy on our team who has ~17,000 words in his agent and instructions files, yet he sees nothing wrong with this. I guess he just really loves YAML and Markdown.

Yeah I write prompts asking it to misspell a few words, break a few grammar rules, forget to capitalize once in a while, miss some punctuation once in a while. No one will ever catch on.

LLMs are Brandolini's Law taken to an entirely different plane of existence.

I started my career in embedded at an RF company. Back then, I was 20 years junior to the next oldest guy and he was 20 years junior to the rest of the engineers. It was an incredible place to start, learning from some crusty old veterans who were pushing into retirement age. I ultimately left because the pay wasn't there. I've often thought I'd love to go back, even if it meant a decrease in pay, because the environment was so rich with learning and experimenting.

Their point is that the jobs problem or flourishing is a mechanical necessity for maintaining the Mandate and surviving whatever things come next.

Is this something that people are seriously thinking they'll be able to do and successfully stay gainfully employed and contributing to the world?

No. I resisted for a bit but have started using it at work. Mostly because I believe usage is now being monitored. I'm in a very high-scale engineering environment involving both greenfield and massive brownfield codebases and the experience is largely a net loss in productivity. For me and some others who I've spoken to in my org, opting in is a theater that we're required to engage in to keep employment and not a genuine evolution of our craft.

These tools struggle with context once you get deep into a codebase with many, many millions of lines of code and sprawling dependencies. Even for isolated Python scripts or smaller, supporting .NET apps, the time spent correcting subtle bugs or bullshit, or just verifying the bullshit, often exceeds the time it would take to have written it from scratch.

Regardless, what I've observed is that these tools do nothing for the actual bottlenecks of software engineering: requirements gathering (am I writing the right thing?) and verification (does it work without side effects?). Because LLMs are great at generating text, they're actively exacerbating these issues by flooding our process with plausible looking noise.

I know I should be used to people openly lying with no consequence, but it still amazes me a bit.

Well that makes two of us. Character seems to mean nothing today.

Can someone help me to understand why OpenAI and Anthropic talks as if the future of humanity controlled by them?

He wants to build the AI that makes people's lives better. Okay. Did the people ask? Do they have a say? It's all very easy for a billionaire to say when it's just him and a couple of people in his cohort in the driver's seat.

Beyond that I'd like to simply know why he thinks any of this is his responsibility. It seems much more obvious to me that he simply found himself in the right place at the right time and is trying to seize it all for himself as if it's his to take.

Incendiary. Is he trying to suggest the journalists are at fault here?

Yes. This administration is on a blitz ahead of the midterms. Rubio has his eyes on Cuba and he's positioned himself next to Trump. It is happening.

It would be absolutely astounding to read TFA and then continue to take this weasel and his word at face value.

Aren't these things just legal fictions that only exist because/as long as the US government allows it?

So it's a controlled demolition? In this view, is the goal to devalue our own debt? Extract value while it still has value?

Service for citizenship, stationed along the border walls and manning really big fucking guns seems to be the place my brain always goes to in these sorts of conversations.