aloe_falsa

Oh god, yes. The powers that be in my workplace are obsessed with cyclomatic complexity, so now we’re reviewing a flood of LLM diffs that take perfectly good code and extract each loop into its own function with a dozen arguments. The code is now more maintainable on paper and far, far less maintainable (by a human) in practice.

> The original claim, as I understand it, is basically this: you can’t be an honest actor in a dishonest system.

Right, but, taken to its logical conclusion, you cannot earn any amount of money honestly at all, because you'll always create negative externalities to some extent, or supporting people who do/companies who exploit their workers, even as a rank-and-file employee.

I don't know which FAANGs you have experience with, but the companies and teams I worked for were very numbers- and impact-oriented. No amount of posturing and politics would help you at performance review if you couldn't show that you accomplished some goals and moved some KPIs that ultimately made the company money.

YMMV though - if you know people who managed to stay at a FAANG for a significant time without producing anything of value, more power to them.

> the uniqueness of your starter is defined by the local climate, local flour, and the way you feed it to keep it alive. The weather in Greece is much warmer...

There's actually a word for this: terroir - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroir

As someone who knows English and is learning German, the words "Handy" for smartphone, or "Beamer" for overhead projector, or "Oldtimer" for classic car all sound very out of place. Even hearing "das Baby" for a nursing-age baby (instead of the German "Säugling") sounds a bit weird.

I guess it's different when you grew up with those words and internalized them.

That's exactly what ruined it for me. The few apparent survivors of the human race are huddled in a tin can, running out of resources - fade to black - and suddenly, by divine providence and author fiat, everything is fine. It kills the suspension of disbelief.

GPL defines the “source code” of a work as the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. If Meta released a petabyte of raw training data, would that really be easier to extend and adapt (as opposed to fine-tuning the weights)?

Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel “Ship Breaker” deserves a mention here. It’s set in Paolo’s dystopian solarpunk universe, where old tankers are cut up to extract the last tons of fossil fuels from their hold, and it really emphasises how dangerous and unrewarding of a job it is.

> Property that is used by the public should be owned by the public.

Not sure why that follows, or how it would avoid the tragedy of the commons, or why we should act as if that’s already the case.

That all aside, how would you feel about people reclaiming public space, parks and public transportation, by blasting loud music in there?

> absolute bare minimum

Doing the bare minimum for a "Meets Expectations" rating after performance review and calibrations still means working a lot and delivering on the projects you've committed to, drafting design documents, doing interviews, actively improving existing codebases, and mentoring junior ICs. If you do all that, then the company's happy.

(Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.)

Not an umlaut, a diaeresis - it shows that the letter has its own sound (unlike the word "coop", for example).

You'd generally use it for proper nouns (like Brontë or Boötes) and rare loanwords - it doesn't seem very useful for common dictionary words, since anyone who can understand the word itself probably knows how to pronounce it.

Not sure about police officers, but the other professions you named have to complete graduate or post-graduate studies in their field, pass a formal examination, maybe publish a few peer-reviewed papers while architects build a portfolio - this is usually proof enough of their strengths.

Actually, this works in IT as well: if Donald Knuth, Yann LeCun or Zvi Gallil ever decide (however unlikely) to apply to a web shop, they'll probably get waved through on the strength of their credentials. For the self-taught J. Random Hacker, who can't show any of his old code because it's under NDA, there's the interview pipeline.

Technically true, just as if you replace Meta with Amazon, Google Cloud, Etsy, eBay, the local city council, etc. If you don't have a diversified, multi-market, preferably international presence, you're not viable in the long term.

Of course, in the really long term, we're all dead. Meanwhile, the local mom & pop candy shops keep advertising and selling online and making ends meet.

Funnily enough, "MMAcevedo" doesn't break my suspension of disbelief, while "Clippy" does, hard - even though it tries to stay grounded in reality and drown you in quotes and references.

The Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos had a $40M salary in 2022, which is definitely too much money. However, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the company's $31 billion revenue.

So I'm pretty sure the streaming services are charging whatever they can get away with, aka the market equilibrium price, regardless of their executives' salaries.

So there are two different things here: you're talking about building an individual profile for someone and including their home address as part of it, and I meant tailoring the ads to the IP address location, regardless of the user identity.

E.g., if I go to linustechtips and see an ad for cheap notebooks at Best Buy, that's pretty useless if Best Buy doesn't even ship to my country. I was just curious what the new regulation says about this.

Does anyone have any specific details on the ban, maybe a link to the legal document?

The article seems to use "personalized advertising" and "behavioral advertising" interchangeably, and also mentions that using location for advertising is a breach of privacy - which would prevent any local business from advertising itself to people in the same city, as I see it. Was that the intent here?

A good starting point for that would be http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html#adv - or maybe, if you're interested in the prose more than the scaffolding, https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/books/IFTheoryBook.pdf

There's also the recently published "50 Years of Text Games" (https://if50.textories.com/)

It's refreshingly earnest and twee, and always technical and to the point (as opposed to other vacuous and rambling bloggers).

Also, it's reassuring to see someone say "I don't know this"/"I'm not sure", instead of trying to pass as an authority on the subject. We all learn together.

> Only four nations have successfully landed on the moon, the U.S., Russia, China and India.

Correction: the U.S., the Soviet Union, China, and India.

The telescope could have been invented thousands of years ago - ancient Egyptians could polish lenses. Ditto for the sextant, optical telegraph, the printing press...

> It would be fun to imagine Antiquity with many modern inventions in it.

Or the modern era with inventions that are due to appear in thousands of years, but which we could easily replicate if we only knew where to look.

On a similar note: the P and V semaphore operation names are very intuitive, because passering means "pass" and vrijgave means "release" in Dutch, as clearly noted by Edsger Dijkstra.

BofA is Bank of America.

VDI is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_virtualization

The Bitcoin whitepaper, probably.

> no-one at Meta noticed that the payload also included 'what deductions that person was eligible for'

I wouldn't expect anyone at Meta to actually look at unencrypted user pixel payloads. Seems like an easy way to lose your job.

> One of my colleagues was moved to tears by a GPT-4-generated letter of condolence to a relative who had recently received a devastating medical diagnosis.

Nice to know that Theodore Twombly's job from the movie "Her" has already been automated away.

More to the point, I find it hilarious that in the near future AIs will be more creative, convincing, and compassionate than us, and humans will likely be relegated to menial jobs. This is not what sci-fi promised us.

> What does Microsoft really get? Maybe in the beginning, telemetry was the real answer, from whichever developers didn’t opt out.

This is beside the main point of the article, but: as a developer, it's true telemetry is critical for building a good product. Knowing which parts of your app are underutilized or need improvement is extremely important - without hard data, you're basing your project on a hunch. However, telemetry is worth zero in and of itself.

If the article author thinks Microsoft is magically turning their VSCode latency data and error stacktraces into metric tons of cash money, they're probably mistaken.

* The 49 euro ticket is a digital offer, e.g. I bought it online on the BVG (Berlin transport authority) website via Google Pay.

* How did you manage to buy a Hamburg to Berlin ticket for 400 EUR? The most expensive 1st-class high-speed rail ticket costs about 120.

Considering I straight up was not able to get a therapist appointment in my city or outskirts, sign me the f** up. The first company that tunes the model for this and offers a good UX (maybe with a voice interface) will make millions.

Also, I expect a lot of the value here to come from just putting your thoughts and feelings into words. It would be like journaling on steroids.

Their "pay later" function is an interest-free loan, so not sure you can call them loan sharks. If you meant that the loans with missed payments get sent to collections and the customers' credit score takes a hit — isn't that how all credit works?