TheGRS

So my floating data center in international waters idea has potential investors?

Yes X was merged into xAI last year I believe.

I'm not big on this subject, but I understand that heat transfer is difficult in space, because there's little to transfer to. If the solution is just making large radiators, then that means you're sending some big payloads full of radiators. Not to mention all the solar panels needed. I wanna live in sci-fi land too, but I don't see how it makes any sense compared to a terrestrial data center.

I decided I'm going to take the plunge soon. I've used Windows for my personal computers for a long time (25 years? more if you count our family computers back in the day). I have only used linux desktops for little hobby projects, in Pis and VMs, and most of my experience has been headless servers. I loaded up Mint on a thumb drive pretty recently and it seemed like it would be good enough for running my steam games and VS Code. I'm actually liking the idea a lot because while I've been very happy with WSL, there is still a wee bit of friction developing locally with it, especially for game development stuff. And when developing its usually in the linux CLI anyway. Docker usually has some bumps too.

Thankfully I have my old PC still lying around and it'll play most of the games I like, so I'm gonna give it a spin soon and see if its the right fit for me. Maybe I can use a bot to help me document setup better than I have in the past too.

This is a little more of what I was expecting with AI work if I'm gonna be honest. Stuff spins out faster than people can even process it in their brains.

I was doing that initially, but I think the subscriptions are generally worth it for personal projects. $20/mo is good if you're like me and you can do this stuff maybe a couple nights a week, I haven't run into the limitations on that yet. The $100+ subscriptions are needed if you're doing it every day. YMMV

mmhmm. Yea if someone really had the desire they could figure out my online presence and possibly even get a rough idea of what I'm actually doing with my time. Always something you could figure out from an IT network, its just about putting the history together.

But I'll agree that Teams is packaging this information into something more digest-able for middle managers, and that's the rub. There are always manager types who have the epiphany that not everyone is working 100% of the time and it bothers them enough to call it out to subordinates, or if they don't like someone enough they might do a deep dive with IT. Teams already has this indicator to show if you're online, on mobile, in a meeting, AFK, or offline entirely. Its not that the information wasn't there, its just much more front-and-center for managers to be annoying about it.

I only heard about it this week. Then saw a former colleague post about it yesterday. Feels like its only just now breaking into mainstream tech awareness, I'm sure most of my colleagues haven't heard of it.

I think I'm pretty much there and just haven't made the switch yet. I'm going to give Mint a shot on my old PC soon and if its a good experience I'll switch on my desktop as well. Every time I have a bad experience in Windows lately I wonder why I'm sticking with it. Everything has been solved, its only momentum keeping me going.

I'm trying it out with Godot for my little side projects. It can handle writing the GUI files for nodes and settings. The workflow is asking cursor to change something, I review the code changes, then load up the game in Godot to check out the changes. Works pretty well. I'm curious if any Unity or Unreal devs are using it since I'm sure its a similar experience.

I do feel a big mood shift after late November. I switched to using Cursor and Gemini primarily and it was big change in my ability to get my ideas into code effectively. The Cursor interface for one got to a place that I really like and enjoy using, but its probably more that the results from the agents themselves are less frustrating. I can deal with the output more now.

I'm still a little iffy on the agent swarm idea. I think I will need to see it in action in an interface that works for me. To me it feels like we are anthropomorphizing agents too much, and that results in this idea that we can put agents into roles and them combine them into useful teams. I can't help seeing all agents as the same automatons and I have trouble understanding why giving an agent with different guideliens to follow, and then having them follow along another agent would give me better results than just fixing the context in the first place. Either that or just working more on the code pipeline to spot issues early on - all the stuff we already test for.

Very nice, only feedback I have rn is you should keep the board state displayed after you hit a mine. I like to look around the board to see what I missed after making a mistake.

Was reminiscing about the early iOS App Store days when many apps were free and often hobby projects. Some hooked up google ads to make a nice easy profit if they stumbled on a particularly good early app idea. I don't really find apps like that anymore, or at least they don't really get shared the same way. Maybe this is a return to that in a sense.

I also don't think any particular idea is off limits for making a profit, if you do something and you do it well, you can charge a fee. But if the free hobby version is better then you best find a way to justify the price.

I think MySpace being an example is bizarre. It had its time and I'm sure it made a lot of advertising revenue. It walked so Facebook could run. I guess there's potential for another social media start-up, but its a crowded space for sure.

I can relate to the author. Really loved the strip when I was younger and before I actually worked anywhere. The TV show on UPN was pretty decent too, it's a shame it didn't catch on more. Adams seemed to have a smart everyman quality to him and was doling out nuggets of wisdom like candy. His later years really troubled me because it difficult to relate the earlier idea I had of Adams to the later. It's a lesson in mortality and how much a person can change (not that I knew Adams or anything, maybe he was always like that). There are many other examples out there.

One thing I think people make the mistake of is taking a look at a person as they are now and then retroactively applying that to their past persona. I think there is something more to learn from the idea that we all can change substantially over time, even without major life incidents. The mind is very complex and sometimes it can go down some dark paths.

I certainly have been around for conversations leading to this or that change in direction. It happens.

But the bigger reason it's useful is to get facetime with the decision makers and the folks adjacent to the decision makers who might think of you when opportunities arise.

I dunno watching office space with my team doesn't seem like the worst way to spend some time together. Maybe just reading too much into it?

I think this whole thing could be summed up by: this is an acceptable change made with wildly bad rationale.

Not everyone develops and commits the same way and mandating squashing is a much simpler management task than training up everyone to commit in a similar manner.

I bounced out of this article pretty quick after seeing it was generated by AI.

I don't agree that this is the central value juniors provide. Its a nice tertiary value, but not why one hires them. I think the value is the later part of farming for new talent and just growing your team.

I still think the central issue is the economy. There are more seniors available to fill roles, so filling out junior roles is less desirable. And perhaps "replacing juniors with AI" is just the industry's way of clumsily saving face.

That has been the case for a long time, and I guess something about the current generation of parents has gotten them to act more on it. My dad came from a very religious family and they all did private religious schools for their early grade school years. Then they went to public for high school years.

If I had to guess, its maybe something about the demise of church life that has gotten religious parents to just pull back entirely. It wasn't that uncommon for public schools to make nods toward Christian ideals/lifestyles before like the 90s, but now that stuff just doesn't happen anymore.

I'd disagree, they're not mutually exclusive.

Anyone in law enforcement for long enough, and I'd probably say something like 5-10 years on the beat, is enough to make many apathetic to rights and dignities. A sad reality unfortunately. Its the same vein of salespeople who get so caught-up in the hustle they that see everyone and every relationship as a potential transaction. And if I'm being introspective, my own flaw of seeing most systems/laws/social contracts as problems that can be solved with tinkering (they can't).

I'd go a little further to say that he believes the government has the authority to do what it needs to do to catch criminals/terrorists/bad guys. He's much more concerned over whether a method is technically legal than whether or not the government should do said method. Whether its a properly signed warrant is kind of immaterial when there are various ways to get around that requirement legally and with precedent.

I have deep disagreements with my father on this subject. He worked as a federal agent for 30 years, mostly in digital forensics. He does not believe in the right to privacy in any of the same ways I do. Whereas I believe a right to privacy in your tools and communication is essential, he believes they infringe on the government's ability to catch criminals. Classic justification of "if you're not a bad guy, what do you have to hide?"

I just thought this was worth sharing, my dad was a tech guy (though not much of a programmer), the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview. But not everyone shares this view, especially those who work in or around law enforcement. Civilians who believe in the right to privacy must stand their ground in the face of this.

After using agentic models and workflows recently, I think these agents belong in both roles. Even more than that, they should be involved in the management tasks too. The developer becomes more of an overseer. You're overseeing the planning of a task - writing prompts, distilling the scope of the task down. You're overseeing writing the tests. And you're overseeing writing out the code. Its a ton of reviewing, but I've always felt more in control as a red team type myself making sure things don't break.

The worst offender of giving my secrets away is still myself sadly.

I haven't seen a lot of progress on it, but I would definitely jump on whatever device lets me not have this chunky block in my pocket all the time. The concept I saw years ago was like a slap bracelet that you could remove from your wrist and unwrap into a tablet form-factor.

Entirety seems a little extreme. Maybe gradually they could get there as society and technology changes. But yes changing large areas to pedestrian-only seems totally doable to me in NYC.