JauntyHatAngle

That seems a reach to say the popularity of kalshi and polymarket is down to gambling simulators.

Id wager (heh) that it's much more down to a lack of regulation combined with the normalisation of influencer driven get rich quick but pretend it's clever investing that exploded in popularity with crypto and wallstreetbets style influencer investing. Combine that with house prices being where they are and people get risky with investing as their hope outstrips their caution.

I don't think a few rounds of balatro or slotomania leads to that.

He may or may not be right here, but captain steeeve has a bad track record of baseless claims and/or bad speculation and is not a good reference due to his past failings.

I would not be referencing him as a good source.

Yes, skills as a "portable power" isn't really the use case for me unless it's entirely generic and even then sparingly.

I've mostly followed what anthropic suggests, which is putting less into context and more into skills, to keep the "how" out of context until it is needed to reduce context bloat.

Skills have some instructions but are primarily informed repo specific instructions and keep their context away from the rest of the repo to keep things sanitised for me.

I've found it to be useful in that context.

In my experience, when they are in a cutting mood, they often decide first how many people to cut, then go through teams based on their workload.

So your team not having metrics, they are more likely to go "wow that team is pretty empty of work, cut half of them (exaggeration of course) rather than "well they don't have any metrics so Ill take them at their word or wait and see".

Cynical maybe, but my best managers who've kept a team together and protected tended to be really effective at selling the work they're doing and how long it'll take and how much workload each team member has, and showing how busy the team is in a way thats impactful.

While you're right, and I'm constantly thinking/worrying about my own processes giving me AI apathy, you can use AI in a way that develops your understanding of a bug. It really depends on your workflow.

When I use AI to debug a problem, I'm constantly questioning the specifics because I want to learn it, and often I'm better than the AI at quickly recognising patterns that point to a specific issue, where the AI will spin for some time trying to work out where to start - even if it has full context.

So I guess I'm half with you, but an LLM used right can still teach you effectively.

Research Plan Implement.

At the risk of you already knowing this or similar - in essence for a slice of a piece of work, you get the LLM to research the information required into (usually) a research file, which you go back and forth with in-line or via conversation until you're happy.

You then build the plan for the piece of work, again going back and forth with the LLM until you agree with the plan, with the key here being you have a specific set of concrete steps with very limited vagueness. Again this is quite often a plan document.

You then implement the plan with your LLM, following the concrete steps and monitor/evaluate the result.

For me its the 101 mandatory first way to use LLM that turns it from guesswork to genuinely useful. (that or some other similar method, SDD or whatever)

Because without it or something similar you're fully dependent on AI's weaknesses not coming to the fore (context/scoping failures that are silent unless you demand visibility up front and ruthlessly chop/clarify), and you often ascribe bad AI slop as model limitations instead of context/scoping failures.

When I hear this I do wonder to myself how they're using AI.

For me, as long as I'm properly RPI looping it and not blindly pressing "yes" then it will nearly always reach the solution, usually a fair bit quicker, because it effectively becomes an ideation machine that can keep more thoughts and knowledge in it than my brain can.

However, I'm using it through giving it the context, it has access to the repos, access to the sytems, I'm telling it where the logs are, I have docs to show it what each part of the system is for.

Along with that, it does depend on my own instincts/knowledge for me to read its response and for me to say "no, you've over-thought/engineered this and this is actually the better solution", but its very are nowadays for me that it can't find the 1 liner, as long as I've fed in the right context, mostly pre-done because I've spent a bit of time building out the context tree for the repos/systems in a way that allows it to know what it needs to know.

I'm not doubting that people spin their wheels and couldn't find the one liner, but if its as simple as you say, that does seem like people who aren't great at LLMs along with a lack of instinct/experience.

I guess in essence, I think you can use LLMs in an old school troubleshooting way, and I find it still speeds that up the majority of the time. Its basically how I use it most of the time. And like old-school troubleshooting, if you build out the LLMs context over time, it also grows in capability, as long as its being used as a tool and not blindly trusted.

Should I not assume that most senior developers who are serious about LLMs do this?

I would argue the bias is for ceos (of public companies) to act a certain way due to inherent incentives the way the world is set up, which biases their personality. But I won't go into that old argument again.

You're hearing the echo and ascribing it to the noise.

A constant push and pull between leaders and the led is the fundamental. Criticism in both directions is necessary and healthy, and at different times both correct and misplaced.

There have been great leaders and awful ones. Acting as if all leaders are proven and deserving is as asinine as naming all CEOs as useless.

Right now we are at a point where CEOs are biased towards being quite anti worker and too easily rewarded. It's not surprising the cliches against them come out.

It's not objectively terrible. It's subjective - entirely.

It is a 3 hour long game with 4k or so reviews.

Life is strange original has 70K reviews and is 14 hours long.

The remaster has 4000+ reviews and again, is 14 hours long. These games are also all time favourites that fans do replay from time to time. If has more replayability than mixtape, despite it being fairly linear.

A 3 hour one time only game does not retain players on the charts like a game that takes multiple play sessions to finish. Or a game like "tennis elbow" which has far lower max concurrent (like, nowhere near the concurrent max mixtape has) but is a sim game that if it's your jam you will repeatedly come back to.

Its very simple - it's not a game for you, and you have to understand that these types of games absolutely have their niche fandoms who love this kind of stuff.

There is no conspiracy here, artsy titles like this have always, across all mediums, got a disproportional critical appreciation vs more traditional titles.

It's just the same old story. Yes people do like these games. No they are not the majority. Yes you can just ignore it, no it's not a conspiracy.

But it has the right creative vibe which is the point really. Apple has a general creative aesthetic which plays well with artsy games like mixtape.

It's a very deliberate choice when if it doesn't make sense to gamers.

Whether or not you don't like the game, it's a weird misrepresentation to say it's made by Megan ellison.

She's been the co-founder and major backer of Annapurna for a decade.

She's not a developer, she's a publisher, and this game is one of the tons of games Annapurna has put out over a decade.

I get that Annapurna is a lightning rod of politics due to ellison and is increasingly under scrutiny for many debates but they are a mainstay of the industry, hardly a blow in, and like it or not, a lot of the games industry and media really like these kinda of artistic pieces, with this being yet another instance of the age old walking simulator debate.

It should be judged on its own merits. Not it's Annapurna link and it's not a shock to see it come up in an artsy Apple Mac hipster circle.

Not quite sure what you mean by that, I'm not the one making decisions of who to cut. That's one to many levels above me.

Your stated argument would make sense if you're dealing with reasonable people. Which is sometimes.

But I'm talking specifically when shit hits the fan and people levels above me put down a mandate across many divisions.

As it is if they're making cuts they'll grasp whatever metrics they can and cut. If they don't have metrics that gives less protection, not more.

Take "as you can see I have X number of staff fully allocated and up to their eyeballs in work" vs "I don't have that metrics but trust me". That's part of my job or responsibility depending on my seniority to justify my team and keep them employed and not stressed by cuts and workload.

I always include sprint points or at least some metrics to track, because even in areas that don't care about it, there is some chance a new CTO/manager/buyout or whatever jumps in. Day 1 asks for metrics and then retroactively judges people's output on it.

I've annoyed my team previously in demanding jiras and sprint points (and helping build it out as much as I could to not take too much of their time) because I could feel the turn happening to metrics.

Sure enough the only person in my team let go was because he outright refused to fill in his JIRAs and I could not get through to him the difference in what is logical and what plays well to management when they lose their minds.

Bit of a tangent, but even in the work you're describing, I treat sprint points and JIRAs as future CYA, not necessarily a work sheet.

I've seen it in action a few times specifically in government.

It's extremely difficult in my country to fire people in government. Managers want them out of their team but have no way to shift them. They are taking up one FTE in a key area but the person is just swinging the hammock doing just enough to keep from any proceedings.

Finance won't give them more headcount.

So they promote them to another useless department instead. Done.

I know it's been done because I have been to drinks with the senior managers who did this a decade ago when I asked what the deal was with XYZ manager that had been there for years and was truly one of the worst managers I've ever heard of. They intimated a few others were the same across the org.

Off topic - the manager mentioned was comically hilarious in laziness and lack of care. He once invited a new hire to a meeting, and attached the minutes of the meeting including the conversation that had not happened yet (they'd never even met yet) with statements like "Joe Foo agrees to let manager know if work is too much" etc etc.

It was a template he sent out and he never even came to those introductory meetings. Just you agree and then neither of you actually meet.

Government can be a different world so I understand when people think people are just inventing insane theories to justify their own ego, but these things really do happen in certain industries and types of companies.

What? The joke saying about that is "those who can't teach, teach gym".

Never heard anyone say that about software engineering.

You cant fool me. It's AI all the way down.

I'm a bit suspicious of this as there are open source excel clones already.

It's impressive AI can put together it's own version, but I can't help but feel it's probably just relying on existing excel clones as it's a well trodden space.

Novel applications are what impress me. Not a clone.

I don't think that makes sense.

I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, but autistic in that comment is attempting to capture that "literal rhetoric but socially unaware" style of argument people can have when they argue a point too black and white.

"Retarded" does not imply this

I would say the problem with the comment is more in line with how OCD or adhd is used, improperly. Like despite autism being a spectrum with traits that can't be reduced to that one stereotype.

It's being used to invoke a stereotype of neurodivergence. Not as a stand in for general stupidity.

That is an external service needing to do maintenance.

Not my own device on my own machine.

I don't remember a time my CD player on my car would stop working due to an update.

>I can't say I know anyone IRL who has any interest in leaving PlayStation

As a counterpoint to that. Most of my 30+ year old dad gamer friends (all of us are the type to own a PC, switch and ps5 pretty much) all are considering whether this will be our last sony generation as most of us are either physical copy people or suspect the pricing will be bad without a second hand market to compete.

I don't think there is a mass exodus coming up, but a slow decline in console gaming for certain types of gamers, peaking in ps6 and digital only coming out is possible - whether that is more of a hit than the control of the market Sony will get from digital only is another question though.

For example I doubt it'll stop many playing GTA 6, but general purchases on Sony vs PC may be weighted to the latter a bit more now than previously as that physical collection part is dead now for Sony, and arguably worse than the PC market in terms of there being only one store front for digital.

It's not always obvious but the bit that is clear is it's hard to delineate "dad is working so don't interrupt him" for on-call incidents etc vs "dad is looking at cat videos". They look the same and it's pretty clearly confusing because it's a malleable boundary.

In terms of attention I actually find it pretty easy to identify their cues even when on my phone. It's more of a general feel of how much I've played with them vs solo play and when they want to hang out they will walk over and make it clear. Plus you are always watching them.

I find these studies specifically frustrating because they don't answer the most interesting question - is it damaging if your caregiver uses phone a lot but remains responsive.

This study specifically excludes it, and fair enough when being honest about the statistical inference and not overreaching, but that is the question I find most interesting as someone who uses my phone to get away from my desk but keep work going so I can spend time with my kids while doing my job.

One outcome would be this is damaging and worse than just not spending time until after work, the other result would say this is a beneficial arrangement.

This is barrens chat 2.0.

Just a constant slew of racism and US politics.

Plenty of countries have moved away from DST. Over half who previously used it IIRC.

Sure but a producer has never needed to be able to be a live artist. Making the music is the only requirement and that totally fine.

That doesn't really work for electronic music though.

Electronic or not, whether messing with a buchla or producing via vsts and changing knobs around still ends up with a human feel and human choices in a way AI music doesn't.

And what about the line between triggers or samples? I can play some impossible AI music if I sample the impossible parts and just say it's a sample played on a synth or whatever.

That was fun. Bit confused by the result because it says I was "wow are you stephen fry?" Which I assume meant I did decent. (72K).

But then below it said "you are a man of few words".

I take it the latter is just because I've only done the test once? But it's mixed messaging on first attempt I think.

One thing to consider is non-office whether remote or personal projects.

A lot of devs like gaming. Gaming is more simple on windows. Gaming PCs are usually high spec. High spec is good for most coding.

That's why I use windows quite often. My laptop is Linux, but when I'm running heavy models I'll still remote into my main Windows PC, which I also use for gaming.

Though in terms of workplaces - sure, I reckon you're on the money. Big corps often still force windows onto their Devs.

Ah thanks. That context was missing for me appreciated.