NAHWheatCracker

That first sentence is hard to grok.

My ISP in a small rural town supported IPv6. I have a few personal projects that only have a public v6 address because I don't want to pay AWS for an v4 address.

It worked fine for a year and a half after I moved in, then they did some work and suddenly no IPv6. At least I could enable 6to4 on my router, but that has intermittent issues.

As someone who wishes IPv4 would just die, I wish I had options to push back on such nuisances.

It doesn't make sense that you would lose more weight by sleeping only considering metabolism.

I can see an argument around sleeping always being a net loss, since you're never consuming food while sleeping. Sleeping more thus means you may eat less.

Doesn't the CO2 get exhaled during activity rather than sleep?

I worked for about 8 months on an internal product for doing transmission studies at a large utility company. Basically, it would feed a PSS/E [1] file specifying most of the transmission grid into a power flow simulation software called TARA [2]. We would add a few extra elements to the grid to simulate a wind or solar plant. TARA would spit out all the components that would be overloaded, with or without contingencies. We would read the results and estimate the transmission costs.

Essentially, we were replicating the process that the ISOs used internally. The users of this product were all former ISO employees. The goal was to speed up the process of determining whether transmission costs were going to ruin a project before any money was spent. ISOs take months to do their analysis. The users told me that they were usually looking for $0 transmission upgrades on $50m+ projects.

The grid and contingency files from the ISOs were under confidentiality agreements. This rubbed me the wrong way from a competition point of view. We also had data about projects slated to be built which could take away capacity from our projects.

I could see a SaaS in doing this sort of analysis. It's probably bureaucratic between reselling TARA, NDAs, and maybe legal issues if the analysis was wrong. I have doubts about the market, most of the money is in big projects at big companies that are already doing this sort of thing.

[1] https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/grid-softw...

[2] https://power-gem.co/software/tara-software/

The first job I had as a software engineer was at a trucking company that had a desktop Swing application. If an exception happened, the user would get a pop-up with buttons to email support the stack trace or cancel. The email went to all the IT staff and someone would usually reply within an hour, often with a fix.

The engineering work was atrocious looking back. I probably fixed 50 random NullPointerExceptions in my 3 years there this way. But, it was one of the most productive places I've worked at because everything was done simple and there were no barriers between users and developers.

The first job I had as a software engineer was at a trucking company that had a desktop Swing application. If an exception happened, the user would get a pop-up with buttons to email support the stack trace or cancel. The email went to all the IT staff and someone would usually reply within an hour, often with a fix.

The engineering work was atrocious looking back. I probably fixed 50 random NullPointerExceptions in my 3 years there this way. But, it was one of the most productive places I've worked at because everything was done simple and there were no barriers between users and developers.

I was wondering what kind of bird was chirping outside my window this morning. I should have had this app.

Nice site, slick. Not sure what use the data has to me, but I don't make posts, so that's my fault.

It would be nice if the chart would move down or something when you select a post that's lower in the rankings. I had to scroll back to the top after clicking one of the bottom posts.

I wasn't criticizing the choice of word, apologies.

I'm interested if anyone has an idea of what it would mean for an AI to generate or do something "novel" in the sense of creatively new.

I think of the word as a mixture of complaining and sympathizing.

I would consider it commiseration if one were to complain to their coworkers about an HR policy in the hopes of receiving sympathy or agreement about the problems with the policy.

Are there any well-thought treatises on what "novel" means?

These days I occasionally run into an app with no words and abstract symbols. I have to guess which one does what I want.

I mess up 50% of the time when I want to open the Google Maps app. I tap the M icon, but that's for Gmail.

Regarding the customer, who knows? Unless they reply to you, you're guessing. It could be a legitimate case of a stolen card or they could deliberately trying use your service without paying. In this case, it sounds like you should indefinitely disable that user unless they explain.

Regarding the bank, I assume they will almost always side with the customer, lest they lose their business. There's no nuance, they aren't going to spend much time understanding your logs because there's no upside for them.

Regarding Stripe, I assume they are mostly passing along costs.

Given your chargeback rate, I don't see why you should lose any sleep over this, it's a cost of doing business.

I wish I had followed this advice when I was first a tech lead a few years ago. I wasn't a manager per say, but I had two junior engineers. We had way too much to do in too little time. I explained how the PM had messed up the project plan. I figured I was just letting them know what was going on, but it just brought the mood down.

I think it's ideal that some level of commiseration happens, so people can try to find ways to fix problems that can be fixed or accept that they can't. It really depends on the people, relationship, and culture. Some people aren't willing to do anything for anyone else. Some cultures discourage trying to fix anything.

Not a fan of asking for an email after uploading.

I didn't get the report emailed to me (yet? maybe because I censored my personal details?). Just a popup asking to subscribe. I doubt there's anyway to save more than the cost of the service.

I hated performance reviews. My manager would always keep stuff vague. He tried to protect people and he didn't really observe my work. His feedback was based mostly on emails asking people what I'm good and bad at.

Every three months for 5 years, he would send me some blurb that basically said "NAHWheatCracker is a great engineer. Sometimes he's difficult to work with." We would have a one-on-one to review the performance review. I would ask about the "difficult to work with" part.

My manager wouldn't say who said what. He wouldn't discuss circumstances. He wouldn't facilitate having a discussion with whomever for specifics. It could be an issue that came up once, a chronic problem, or a minor complaint on a bad day.

I wanted something specific to improve on. It wasn't hard to make assumptions, but assumptions aren't clear. Non-clarity drives greater wedges between people. I shut down in conversations lest someone say something to my manager.

The idea of it being made more dehumanizing by having an AI slop out a performance review seems even more depressing. That said, I think bad managers will ruin this process regardless of AI. You can't get much worse than being less than useless.

Having an editor isn't wrong, but it's an luxury for something as small as a Hacker News comment or an email.

Paul having an editor isn't a luxury. His essays are edited because it's important for his business. He can easily justify a paying someone.

More to the point, we're contrasting Paul's essays to people who don't have the luxury. Paul's essays could be seen as less genuine, even if they seem wiser.

I don't feel much inspired by the metaphor of garbage collection and AI.

Garbage collection makes thinking about memory irrelevant 99% of the time. Time saved with AI is spent figuring out what the AI did.

The garbage collector rarely makes itself a problem. AI almost always makes itself a problem.

Developers can go years without thinking about memory if they aren't in a complex environment. AI can't go a day without screwing up.

Garbage collection is very predictable. AI isn't.

> I switched to Raindrop, and the free-tier is more than useless to me.

Low bar to hit.

In some ways, yes. If you want to optimize at that level you ought to use another language.

I'm not a low level optimization guy, but I've had occasions where I wanted control over which threads my goroutines are running on or prioritizing important goroutines. It's a trade off for making things less complex, which is standard for Go.

I suppose there's always hope that the Go developers can change things.

Yea. Watch a sci-fi film - nifty gadgets, robots taking care of chores, and widespread spaceflight. Real life is some unreliable chat bots.

Then there's the depressing practical stuff. AI being forced down our throats. AI as an excuse lay people off. AI as an excuse for massive data hoarding. AI flooding the internet, making it harder to find good content.

I got a new phone in January, a Pixel 8a, after my previous phone's touch screen died. I never had issues with my old phone playing music.

When I played music over Bluetooth, the new phone would bug out after a few songs and make odd muffled sounds. I would have to reconnect the speaker and restart the app and it would play another song or two before bugging out. I tried a bunch of suggestions online, nothing helped.

Then there was an Android update and the problem went away. Joy!

Now there's another Android update last week. Suddenly my music app doesn't change the actual music that's playing when I click play on a song. The UI says it's playing the new song, but it keeps playing the previous song.

It's such a mess. I don't know how there could be churn in the simple, standardized system for playing music. I certainly don't notice any new features or improvements.

> all written in Javascript

Pass.

I didn't make the original analogy. I was just explaining part of the point.

I disagree with the number 100. It is not a reasonable number with respect to current AI capabilities.

If the cost of digging ditches goes down, companies will be apt to dig more ditches. I've seen many projects worth $100k-$500k but they weren't pursued because the cost in salaries was higher.

I don't think companies are generally well run to let go of unnecessary people efficiently. At least one place I've worked at had, by my estimates, $100m salary of unnecessary people employed. It didn't matter, the business has revenues of $100b yearly, so it's a drop in the bucket.

It's a metaphor.

If 1 person can use an excavator/AI, then a 100 person crew can use 100 excavators/AIs. Capabilities have increased for everyone, not just for 1 man operations.

At the last place I worked I assiduously filled out those surveys. Twice a year the executives would do an all hands meeting and talk about the result of the recent survey. They would make a big deal out of all the changes they were making.

After a few cycles, I noticed that the top problems from the surveys always stayed the same. Then I noticed that the changes they were claiming to make were either half-hearted or were gross misinterpretations of survey results to push their own agendas. Of course the survey results stayed the same, nothing was done to address the problems.

After I noticed this, I still filled out the survey, if only because they would track me down and tell me the complete the survey (wait, I thought this was anonymous...). One year I answered 5/5 on every question. The next year I answered 0/5 on every question. The next year I quit.

Very interesting to rate movies and see what it predicts. Sometimes it's fairly spot on and other times it's way off. Very mathematical. Thanks for sharing.

Hah, I was just going to go back to these after I had issues with the Shadowmarch series by Tad Williams and The Wizard Knight series by Gene Wolfe. I had figured out that the books are on the authors' page even though the search wasn't serving them up.

Thanks!