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Buldak

792 karma · joined March 21, 2017

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Buldak··on Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
I've had this experience too. In the case of vibe code, there is at least some incentive from self-preservation that prevents things from getting too out of hand, because engineers know they will be on the hook if they allow Claude to break things. But the penalties for sloppy prose are much lower, so people put out slop tickets/designs/documentation, etc. more freely.
Buldak··on Should managers still code?
I've had managers who not only don't code, but never coded. I'd settle for one that had substantial engineering experience in the past.
Buldak··on Schools reviving shop class
We called that "Home Ec" (as in "Home Economics") when I was a kid. (I'm an elder millennial.) To be honest, I didn't find it particularly useful, and I think many of the calls for "practical" classes in primary or secondary education miss the mark.
Buldak··on "The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab" – a "study"
"study" is already in scare quotes
Buldak··on Ask HN: How do you work with people who are "not quite smart"?
I don't really have an answer, but I've thought about this problem too. It can be uncomfortable to fire people for things that aren't transgressions (such as laziness, irresponsibility, rudeness). Some people don't do anything flagrantly wrong, they just don't have the level of ability required for their job despite otherwise exhibiting qualities of a good employee. I'm sure many HackerNews readers work at companies that are serious enough about performance that it seems obvious to simply fire under-performers as such. But in my experience, the average company is much more forgiving than this.
Buldak··on Wasted Education: How We Fail Our Graduates in STEM [video]
Yeah, I think it's a form of self-flattery or gatekeeping for programmers to say that you need passion or drive to have a career in tech--outside of the upper echelons, you clearly don't. In this respect it's a mundane occupation like most others, and I wouldn't expect coders to be any more passionate about their work than nurses or plumbers or accountants.
Buldak··on A drop in salaries and in the number of jobs available in the Bay Area
A lot of things are like that (e.g. nuclear energy).
Buldak··on Housing should be affordable except for when I sell my house for $1M
What you describe reminds me of arguments about whether "TERF" is a slur (and therefore objectionable) or just a straightforward description a specific political stance.
Buldak··on Wittgenstein's Ladder
Wittgenstein tries to explain how language works, how it represents the world. One consequence of his theory is that language cannot represent that relationship itself. (At one point, he compares this limitation to the way that an eye necessarily can't see itself.) Well, if you believe that, what's the point of writing the Tractatus? So the ladder metaphor is supposed to suggest that contemplating the Tractatus might lead the reader to grasp the nature of language, even as they ultimately realize that a book can't really depict that straightforwardly.

One source which I've found very accessible on this topic is Bryan Magee's interviews of John Searle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrmPq8pzG9Q&list=PLB72977AF4...

Buldak··on “I would like to apologize to Halli”
Insofar as one can "apologize" on behalf of someone else, anyway. Elon is deprecating about Twitter's performance because he attributes it to the prior regime.
Buldak··on The time when Joshua Bell went busking in the subway, and no-one noticed (2022)
I'm a little surprised at people here who claim to be classical music aficionados and yet haven't heard of him. I would have guessed it's hard to know enough to be able to name more than two or three classical violinists and not know who Bell is.

But I think that's beside the point, because I don't think the premise is that people "should" have recognized Bell as a celebrity. The naive hope is rather that people can recognize great art when they encounter it.

Buldak··on The availability of text generators will force positive changes to education
Yeah, there seems to be a general sentiment that if a computer can do it, it wasn't worth a student doing it anyway. But presumably (?) there is a line to cross where that ceases to be the case. So where do you draw it?
Buldak··on Scotland ‘snow-free’ for fourth time in six years
This is like saying that people who think we should welcome asylum seekers should also welcome war and other calamities that make asylum necessary.
Buldak··on Sex is going out of fashion?
Do you think this is also a plausible account for, say, Japan?
Buldak··on Ask HN: Tesla is making us move or quit. Would I get severance?
The point is that being terminated, as opposed to resigning, has implications for unemployment and other benefits. It therefore matters if an employer is free to simply interpret an arbitrary action or non-action as resignation.
Buldak··on NYC allows citizens to report idling vehicles in exchange for a cut of the fines
I don't know, if you're worried about that sort of thing I'd think there's a very long list of exploits that should concern you more than this quirky bounty program.
Buldak··on US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent
Where did you go to school where it was the norm for parents to always see their kids board the bus?
Buldak··on Modern movies teach us awful lessons [video]
You're right that it's not a coincidence, but that's more a reflection of the video's author than its subject matter. I agree that the depictions of female characters in question are shallow and uninteresting, but I wonder what you're watching if you think recent blockbuster movies with male leads are much better.
Buldak··on Mark Zuckerberg on the Lex Fridman Podcast [video]
Yes, I've been somewhat baffled by the suggestion that Lex is some kind of boy genius. I find many of his questions incredibly inane (asking "What is the most beautiful idea in mathematics?" over and over again). I keep watching because the guests are great, but I don't think much of Lex's ability to really engage with their ideas.
Buldak··on Resurrecting the old Wordle for procrastinators
I suppose they're both vulgar, but one difference is that "pussy" has a derogatory use that "boner" doesn't have.
Buldak··on Poll: Why are you staying at your job?
I keep procrastinating on the regimen which (I assume?) is necessary for me to become competitive in interviews.
Buldak··on Ask HN:How many calories can non-athlete burn in one shot without been exhausted
Out of curiosity, how are you measuring your calorie expenditure for these workouts?
Buldak··on Corded headphones are making an unexpected return
I don't mind wireless earbuds for walking around town, but my primary use for earbuds is running and cycling, and I've found wired earbuds more practical here. The wireless earbuds I've tried are heavier, bulkier and more prone to falling out (they're especially bad for running); they don't work with the devices I prefer (like my iPod shuffle); and they don't have enough battery life for longer activities (which can last six hours or more). Meanwhile, a cord is just not much of an inconvenience to me.
Buldak··on Refinement Culture (2020)
This article reminded me of an excerpt from "Diary of a Bad Year," where J.M. Coetzee complains that the insistence on accuracy and objectivity in sports officiating represents an anti-social, inhuman attitude toward sport (think about why many people find the prospect of robot umpires in baseball distasteful). Coetzee suggests that this trend began in horse racing because bettors had money riding on the outcome, and that demanded accuracy.

It's tempting to think that the "refinement culture" that Skallas is talking about, which encompasses everything from hyper-optimized athletic training, to corporate mascots rebranded for sex appeal, is similarly motivated by what is, at base, just capitalism.

Buldak··on Refinement Culture (2020)
The article suggests that the original Olympic athletes aimed at some ineffable ideal of human form, not just winning. By contrast, athletes now optimize for winning with results that the author finds unappealing. Did baseball players in the 70s really have some more holistic ethos of the game, though? Or were they doing their best to win, just as players do now, but with more imperfect knowledge of how to do it?

As for your suggestion that we ought to optimize the rules themselves (i.e. so that players and teams end up playing in the way that we want), I'm skeptical of this. I have a feeling that, whatever rules we adopt, optimization of the sort in question is liable to produce the same sorts of distortions.

Buldak··on Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home
Yeah, I can appreciate certain complaints about the way men are portrayed in media and popular discourse, but it seems like a leap from there to phenomenon in question. We criticize men for telling women to smile, or whatever ... and somehow the end result is that they give up on their career ambitions?

I think you're right that the real issues are economic. In fact I'd say that this is part of a larger, more general tendency to use cultural conflict to distract from class conflict.

Buldak··on Don't let social media think for you
Before I switched to computer science, I studied philosophy, and I encountered lots of people who seemed to think that philosophers had some kind of special relationship to critical thinking. That makes sense in a way, but I also imagine that adherents to just about any discipline, whether it's mathematics or history or journalism, tell themselves a story like this.
Buldak··on A first lesson in meta-rationality
Yeah, the author says that for any of these problems "there should only be one reasonable rule." But I suspect that "reasonable" here really points to contingent facts about human psychology, i.e. some rules just strike us as more intuitive or appealing than others, but they aren't correct in any objective sense. That sort of gives the lie to the notion that what we're exercising here is "meta-rationality."
Buldak··on Biodiversity decline will require millions of years to recover
If you just mean that the earth will continue to exist, or that some manner of organism will live on it, then yeah that seems like a safe bet. But a lot of people think it would be a bad thing if we drove elephants to extinction, or destroyed the Great Barrier Reef (and not for any prudential reasons tied to human interests, either), and that's what they mean when they urge us to "Save the Earth."
Buldak··on The Awful German Language (1880)
I had a similar thought when I studied French in school, i.e. that I could explain a lot more about French grammar technically, explicitly, than I could about my native English. This sort of example occurs to me whenever someone insists that you don't really understand something unless you can clearly explain it.
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