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trefoiled

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I've spent two hours today trying to provide Sol with guidance that reduces its pretentiousness, to no avail. Layers upon layers of rules only for it to use the phrase "async spline resolution" in a sentence.

Unfortunately it's one of the most bug-ridden and unreliable pieces of software I've ever used. I encounter issues with it on a daily basis, but the burden of switching and a lack of superior options keeps me locked in.

Forget about the danger of a dev to customer pipeline with no product people in between, some of us are living with the reality of product to customer pipeline with no developers in between, and that's much more disturbing. Our CEO is now the top contributor to our codebase, and he's completely non-technical.

Features like tab groups, vertical tabs, profiles, new tab wallpapers, PWAs, and taskbar pinning weren’t just ideas – they were direct responses to what you told us you wanted

Yeah, that's ChatGPT. And not a particularly high quality ChatGPT style sentence. They weren't just ideas, they were direct responses? Ok.

It's also slightly deceptive to describe the DOGE cuts to USAID programs as "one time cuts." This is technically true, but it implies that the programs will be replaced with different programs with a similar cost, which likely isn't the case considering the Trump admin is trying to axe USAID permanently. The actual savings are whatever USAID's budget would have been had it continued to exist.

There's an exception to this I've seen since a relative started working in the game industry. There are executives in that industry who have a retinue of loyal followers. The studios the executive works for may change regularly, but his followers come with him each time. These workers will spend their entire career serving one man, and in exchange he always has a job lined up for them and seems to trust them the same way they trust him. It's very different from my experience in the rest of the tech industry, but I'm sure it happens to a limited extent there too.

I hear this argument applied often when people bring up the deficiencies of AI, and I don't find it convincing. Compare an AI coding assistant to reaching out to another engineer on my team as an example. If I know this engineer, I will likely have an idea of their relative skill level, their familiarity with the problem at hand, their propensity to suggest one type of solution over another, etc. People are pretty good at developing this kind of sense because we work with other people constantly. The AI assistant, on the other hand, is very much not like a human. I have a limited capacity to understand its "thought process," and I consider myself far more technical than the average person. This makes a verification step troublesome, because I don't know what to expect.

This difference is even more stark when it comes to driving assistants. Video compilations of Teslas with FSD behaving erratically and most importantly, unpredictably, are all over the place. Experienced Tesla drivers seem to have some limited ability to predict the weaknesses of the FSD package, but the issue is that the driving assistant is so unlike a human. I've seen multiple examples of people saying "well, humans cause car crashes too," but the key difference is that I have to sit behind the wheel and deal with the fact that my driving assistant may or may not suddenly swerve into oncoming traffic. The reasons for it doing so are likely obscure to me, and this is a real problem.

what's your workflow like for situations where you need to poke around in an unfamiliar directory and open files in helix?

totally valid point. I would expect most people to be surprised that the variance is typically smaller than a spoonful of peanut butter, but the nature of gaining or losing weight is such that even a spoonful of peanut butter over years could be the difference between many pounds of body mass.

Excuse me if I take Tesla's self reported statistics with a grain of salt.

"...statisticians have pointed out serious analytical flaws, including the fact that the Tesla stats involve newer cars being driven on highways. The government’s general statistics include cars of all ages on highways, rural roads and neighborhood streets. In other words, the comparison is apples and oranges."

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-27/tesla-stop...

Are you familiar with PRISM or the information Edward Snowden disclosed? The NSA doesn't need "magical" knowledge from the future, they have back doors and exploits in hardware, data collection methods directly arranged with ISPs and FAANGs, and free legal reign. The "best people" at FAANGs readily cooperated with the NSA and FBI, doing everything they could to assist them. If you've never looked into PRISM, I highly recommend going down the rabbit hole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM?wprov=sfti1

If you haven't read 1984, this is really confusing, but a "memory hole" is a hole into which you place something you don't want to have any memory of, destroying it forever. The ironic name is an example of "doublethink."

As fantastical as this passage may sound, most of the details McCarthy provides are historically accurate, and based on a particular event: The Great Raid of 1840 [1]. A thousand Comanche warriors conducted an extremely deep raid into Southeast Texas, where they sacked the port of Linnville. An exceptionally large amount of trade goods were present in the port that day, including clothes bound for various settlements across the Texas frontier. The bits about umbrellas, stovepipe hats, and even the wedding veil come directly from eyewitnesses to the raid. The bit about a Comanche warrior wearing the armor of a conquistador is also real [2]. The Comanche were known for being exceptionally flamboyant, prizing extravagant clothing dyed in vibrant colors. It must have had quite a psychological effect on their enemies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raid_of_1840

[2] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Comanches/Cqh8qSexvU4C?...

This seems like it could work in some way, but it's important to recognize that spam, and LLM usage already require payment in some form or another. There's a cost to sending out millions of emails just like there will be a cost for generating millions of LLM generated posts. So with that framing, it's obvious that spammers, using AI or otherwise, are willing to expend capital to produce spam. There may be a threshold of cost they won't be willing to exceed, but there's no principle here which can be applied universally.