suzzer99

I had to look up Madagascar's castle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rova_of_Antananarivo

The Rova of Antananarivo /ˈruːvə/ (Malagasy: Rovan'i Manjakamiadana [ˈruvᵊn manˌdzakəmiˈadə̥nᵊ]) is a royal palace complex (rova) in Madagascar that was the home of the sovereigns of the Kingdom of Imerina in the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as of the rulers of the Kingdom of Madagascar in the 19th century. Located in the central highland city of Antananarivo, the Rova occupies the highest point on Analamanga, formerly the highest of Antananarivo's many hills.

At least 50% of the time on SO, the best answer is 3rd or worse, and I'm always thinking, "Why is this not the top answer?"

Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment"

Yep, this exactly happened to me. I felt like a taker for always reading SO but not contributing. I saw an answer that was out of date, so I tried to point it out. I couldn't make a comment, so I put it in another answer.

Got banned from answering until I got my points up, and the only way to do that was to ask questions, of which I had none. Never mind that the information I tried to post could have saved someone from going down the wrong path. Totally irrelevant. Rules must be followed.

And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.

Ironically though, de Landa's curiosity about the Maya language ultimately led to its translation in modern times. Without the written 'alphabet' that he had a Maya scribe write down for him at the time, it's likely that Maya script would still be a mystery cipher.

What is Western Europe's #?

No system is foolproof. They'd have to be willing to throw out some % of good customers along with the bots. Amazon can do that because they have a monopoly already. Anthropic can't risk it when they're trying to grab market share.

I worked for a company that did opt-in spam email. Their main offices were in Silicon Valley, but they had a startup thing in LA that I worked at. Ostensibly we were building a self-service email campaign app to be bundled with Weblogic Commerce Server (which itself was basically DOA).

It became pretty obvious to me from the get-go that nothing was being built, and the startup was just siphoning money off the parent company. I'm not sure if there was any fraud going on beyond a bunch of people collecting a paycheck.

I think the boss was skimming off of the captive H1Bs, and there was a guy in NYC who never did anything as far as I could tell. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of kickback going on there.

My first day, I went out for sushi with the top devs, who proceeded to tell one horror story after another about the boss. Awesome way to start a job. I lasted 3 months.

How jejune of you.

I'm shocked it's that low.

There's a sweet spot between AI slop and 144 characters. I can tell within a few sentences whether there's a human on the other end getting to the point, or an AI dancing around the point and finding 3 different ways to say the same thing.

I can't imagine working for a place that has a big bucket of PRs that either get reviewed or languish for some amount of time based on who feels like reviewing them. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, just that everywhere I've ever worked, there are expected features with priorities and timelines and some project manager or product person breathing down your neck to get them out the door.

Ice yachts get well over 100 mph. I'm not sure how much they were used in pre-industrial times.

You just drug its food and wait till it passes out.

Human zoo keepers are actually smarter than that. For months, they train the tiger to go into the carrier to get food. Then on transport day, they shut the door behind it. Unclear if this works for future transport situations.

Peter Attia is a crap human being for being buddies with Epstein after most of his crimes were already known.

But I still trust his analysis more than anyone else at dissecting this kind of stuff and separating the wheat from the chaff. I'll be curious to see if he covers this.

The CCC and WPA produced a lot of valuable stuff that still stands today.

I think most humans have some intrinsic desire to feel useful to their tribe, to feel like they earn their keep. I know people on the equivalent of UBI, and they're all miserable. I don't think we're wired to do nothing all day, and I don't think everyone has it in them to be self-motivated artists or craftspeople.

This is all just my personal experience, obviously. I don't have any data to back it up. But I know that even though my job bugs me sometimes, I'm a lot happier when I'm busy than not, and I work remotely. I like the feeling of accomplishment. But do I like it enough to build things for free? Probably not. I'd probably just sit around and spiral, like I've seen friends do on extended unemployment.

Anyway, this all is a moot point imo because as long as one person still has to work, the billionaire class will turn the "lazy freeloaders" on UBI into scapegoats. See: current politics.

The false disability claims are completely out of control.

But nothing like showing off a Monet to visitors.

This has been largely true for the history of tech. The most-hyped technology usually wins out over the best technology.

The billionaires building doomsday bunkers get it.

I still get spam emails on the one-off email address I used to sign up for Bearshare.

I come here for the comments first, then decide if it's worth reading the article.

I feel like this is very possible eventually, but under 5 years seems unrealistic to me. The compute power is already running into limits. And a few more major problems need to be solved before agents can have that kind of autonomy to create software from scratch and run entire businesses.

I'm 57 and have no desire to retire. I know plenty of other programmers in their 50s who aren't itching to retire.

Programming, at least for me, isn't like some factory job where you can't wait to get out at your 30 years or whatever. I've always enjoyed what I do and found it rewarding.

Seriously. I've been programming almost 30 years and I feel like I could easily have another 10 in me. I'm sure many reading this will assume my skills are deteriorating at an atrocious rate. But I'm still the lead developer on a team that leans on me heavily to figure out the hard stuff. So I can't be too far gone.

At every place I've ever worked that hired juniors, the juniors always have to leave by about 2 years, because the company will never (roughly) double their salary to what they can get on the open market.

That first year, the juniors are probably a net drain in productivity - for their work and the time other devs spend teaching them. Then the 2nd year, they're underpaid for as long as you can hold on to them. But the good ones will be out the door pretty quick.

The system always seemed kind of broken to me. But a shop without any junior devs is also kind of sad. If you hire the right person, it's rewarding to the other devs to teach them and watch them grow.

Those critic skills are great. I see a real business opportunity for someone who can bundle everything you describe into a turnkey solution for a programmer like me who doesn't want to take months coming up with their own system and extensive .md files.

I'm currently, very painfully, removing a tiny bit of tech debt at a time from a massively complex project that we inherited from a 3rd-party vendor. Some of the tech debt is AI-related, some because it's a vendor who rarely has to maintain anything they create, some because when we first inherited it we had no grasp on the entire codebase and were just trying to change the plane wheels while flying (we still are).

What I'm doing now is the hardest kind of programming imo. I spend hours/week just meditating on how to chip away at this out-of-control codebase, figuring out how I can surgically remove some leaky abstraction that's spawned 5 cousins w/o disrupting the whole project. I'd be fascinated to see if the latest frontier model with a system like yours can actually help me. But I don't have the time or desire to invest the months of trial and error that I'm sure it took you to get to that point.

Some shame is good and other shame is bad.

Yeah, like most human emotions. The right amount of fear keeps you alive. Too much fear debilitates you.

According to ChatGPT, researchers are working on models that remember personal directives across sessions. IE - an actual personal assistant that gets to know you and your proclivities. So it's definitely on their radar. No idea how far along they are.

If a junior developer makes a dumb mistake that causes a mini-disaster, their brain makes it a priority to never make that same mistake again. They physically feel anxiety the next time they get into a similar situation, which serves as a very effective reminder not to do the same dumb thing.

LLMs make the same mistakes over and over. And even if/when they have the capacity to learn on the fly, they have no capacity to prioritize. It's all just a big haze of tokens.

That's my overall point. Humans have mistakes and then they have MISTAKES. And a whole continuum in between. LLMs just have a mish-mash of training data. I think before LLMs are more than just fancy parrots, we need a find an analogue to pain, shame, joy, fear, and the myriad other emotions that factor into human decision-making.