2,492 karma · joined January 12, 2012
Email me at trevor@texasexpat.net
Why -- why -- do contemporary American writers feel the need to inject their political affiliation into every piece they make public? This is a pop-academic essay on the use of exclamations in literature, not a NYT op-ed.
Which leads to some pretty boring days onsite, when “onsite” means “in the SCIF”
(At least for the business. My sleep schedule would improve amazingly!)
If we were in the devtools business I would certainly consider that. Sadly, though, owners of small retail businesses tend not to be as comfortable with version control as one might hope…
* Manually create pre-configured accounts for potential customers, sometimes with up to an hour of entering in their existing data so things look familiar right from first login.
* Investigate problems and repair live data, usually just by logging in as a user and using the tools in the product. Can they do this themselves? Sure. Do they appreciate our doing it instead? Oh, hell yes.
* Have screen-sharing calls where we walk customers through the process of linking our product with third parties (e.g. OAuth pairing with Square so they can process payments).
* Call customers who are want help or advice with _other parts of their business_ that aren't related to our product, but about which we know something. Don't know what you should put in your vendor contracts or what % you should charge for sales commissions? Give us a call; we'll help you out.
It'll work until it doesn't, I guess, but so far doing things that don't scale is how we scale.
...definitely an authoritative source that I'd go to first for city-local statistics.
It's going to be a long, long day.
But they literally can’t.
I agree that there’s a sort of implied, under-the-breath muttering of “…you morons”, but if there were a way for the messaging companies to comply they’d just…comply. Angrily and noisily, perhaps, but even in its current pathetic state the UK is too big a market to ignore.
Isn’t the only way to avoid this to assume that the UK can block such updates…globally? Which is on the surface absurd; we settled the “can an island rule a continent?” question centuries ago…
Isn’t the only way to avoid this to assume that the UK can block such updates…globally? Which is on the surface absurd; we settled the “can an island rule a continent?” question centuries ago…
There's no CSAM in the /comment/, just a lament that masotodon.social and pawoo don't federate with each other. Want to take action against a service you find (extremely) distasteful? Great, take action -- dig through their DNS, figure out where their servers are hosted, talk to the FBI. But invoking /dang/ to do something about it (to...protect the emotionally fragile HN community from being exposed to the existing of something vile?) just isn't that action.
I for damn sure won't defend the folks running pawoo, but we ought to defend to the death omoikane's right to talk about it. Free speech runs both ways, and sometimes that sucks.
But that same light-skinned frenchman would turn up his gallic nose an authentic arabic shwarma, even stumbling from from le bar at 2am. That the only difference between a good shwarma and a good French taco is /maybe/ the choice of cheese makes no difference...
(Source: live in Toulouse, have snarky Lebanese friends)
And that's not even _starting_ on the nonsense and bizarre home-rolled systems that small businesses concoct around layaways.
Tech in 2023 is just mind-numbingly depressing. Thinking about throwing it all in and becoming a beet farmer, instead.
Amazingly, they persisted even after learning that I was 14 at the time. My poor parents had zero idea what it was their kid did on his computer all the time; I imagine the conversation where I passed the phone to my mom to talk to their CTO was probably one of the more surreal things ever to happen — to either of them!
After last week’s AWS US-East-1 outage, this has not been a good couple of days to be dependent on someone else’s infrastructure, even something as fundamental as a customer’s ISP…
Give your juniors real, interesting work and keep the GPT-level tasks away from them, and they'll actually improve.
> Does that mean there's zero value in a human attempting to answer these questions?
Your hiring process may vary, but mine sure says "yep, zero value in leetcode."
I'm delighted to hear that! But that doesn't really counter my argument, which is that if a task can be done by an LLM it wasn't a good fit for a junior anyway. Being able to just fling basic tasks over the wall to GPT is great, and should free up time for non-junior devs -- but since those tasks wouldn't have helped grow the junior devs in the first place it doesn't really affect them or their trajectory. Unless you were just using them to churn through drudgework in the first place, in which case I guess great, you can just purge them from your org at no net loss since they'd have burned out soon enough anyway.
If anything I'd turn the thesis of your title on its head: should engineering leads be worried that AI will take away the last bits of code they should have still been writing?
(Betteridge's law, of course, still applies).
> I've set small projects for my newer engineers to get their teeth stuck into, something they will find rewarding, challenging, and fun.
> But now I have to reconcile that with the thought that I could "just" ask ChatGPT to do it instead
The only way I can find to read that is that the author tends to assign tasks that are mostly writing boilerplate code to junior devs, which, sure, is a perfectly good use of otherwise less-productive junior engineers. It sure as hell isn't something I would agree is "rewarding, challenging, and fun" -- and I can't imagine that the author actually agrees with his own sentiment, either. If GPT can generate it then it wasn't the kind of task that a junior dev would have profited from taking (not much to learn from just tweaking boilerplate!).
Punting work like that to juniors rather than shielding them from it is...pretty much the definition of a bad engineering manager in my book. If nothing else, it's a great way to burn out your junior devs early and/or keep them from learning how to grow into more capable engineers who can handle work that couldn't be done by an LLM.
There's a long, long line of flash-in-the-pan frameworks that never really gained traction -- and then there's React (which _isn't_ a framework, but fine, let's roll with it). AngularJS, Angular, Vue, Svelte, Preact, Ember, etc all contributed to the ecosystem and then more-or-less faded into relative obscurity. But for all that time -- since 2014! -- React has done nothing but grow _even more popular_. It's not like React is an equal choice among others; if you're building a non-trivial web application in 2023, it's the default choice and the only one you _don't_ have to justify.
We let a million flowers bloom, it was chaotic and confusing, and now that time is...mostly past. I'd have more sympathy with TFA if it had been written in, say, 2017 -- but to assert that "React could just fade away like AngularJS!" in 2023 is just willfully blind to reality.
Changing the logo and branding is purely cosmetic, sure, but it turns out that having to look at Akamai's logo and colours up there is enough to push me over the edge. Those new VMs are booting over at Hetzner as we speak, and I'll be migrating everything else over the next few weeks once I put a migration plan together. It's a pain in the ass, and I'm sure Akamai won't actually miss my ~750€ / month -- but I guess sooner is better than later.
Maybe I'm just a child of the late 80s, but I didn't see either Ferris Bueller or Bill and Ted until late in my twenties, long after I'd ceased to be in the stated target audience. But both are hiding amazingly thoughtful reflections on adolescence, existence, and friendship underneath the guise of frothy 80s teen movies, and I love them for that.
(And I kind of love the OP for sending me down a moment's rabbithole of reflection by reminding me of both. Time to call some an high school friend and have a catch up!)
Rimworld is actually built in Unity, but without using most of Unity's conveniences; I think it just uses it as a sort of platform-independent shim: launch an empty scene and then do everything with userspace render calls rather than Unity's GameObjects. It's certainly not a /typical/ Unity game, but nor is it in any way Mac-native.
Not that that detracts from your point, really.