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andybp85

76 karma · joined June 5, 2015

Software Engineer @ a major media company
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andybp85··on Google Search lets creators know more about their reach
having coded with several RTEs, this just triggered some PTSD
andybp85··on It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12
in my day job doing enterprise web apps at a mac shop 16G became unusable for the engineers 3-5 yeas ago. i managed to weasel into them getting me a 64G M1 Pro in 2022 (now they won't buy us any higher than 32G). i'll probably still be using this thing in six years!

to be fair, given the choice between a decade-old macbook and basically any current windows box with same specs, i'd take the macbook every time. but, if i could put linux on it...

andybp85··on Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
i probably don't understand. the main thought i have re: llm coding is, why i would want to talk to a insipid, pandering chatbot instead of having fun writing code?

but, as an engineer, i have to say if it works for you and you're getting quality output, then go for it. it's just not for me.

andybp85··on Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
if you have to understand exactly what you're doing, why not just... do it?
andybp85··on What you need to know about EMP weapons
yup. "the survivors are the lucky ones" is fantasy.
andybp85··on What you need to know about EMP weapons
The book says that that's exactly what it's supposed to be, to inspire people to talk about it. But (also from the book) the war games the USA runs around these situations always end in a massive nuclear exchange. Sure, some specific situations, like the Devil's Scenario, I would imagine might not reflect a real war, but the case the book is making is that reality is far more likely to be closer to the worst case than to a "best case" (whatever that means here).
andybp85··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
that's a whole different piece of software that it doesn't come with out of the box lol.

Copilot was what i was looking for, thank you. I have it installed in Webstorm already but I haven't messed with this side of it.

andybp85··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
vscode comes with that out of the box?
andybp85··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
what are you using for this? one thing I can't wrap my head around is how anyone's idea of fun is poking at an LLM until it generates something possibly passable and then figuring what the hell it did and why, but this sounds like something i'd actually use.
andybp85··on What makes code hard to read: Visual patterns of complexity (2023)
for the codebase i work on, i made a rule that "functions do what the name says and nothing else". this way if the function does too much, hopefully you feel dumb typing it and realize you should break it up.
andybp85··on The Ribbon Microphone
I built a ribbon mic from a kit a while ago, and only broke the ribbon once putting it together! https://www.bumblebeepro.com/

Of course, as soon as i tried to record my guitarist with it, he cranked his amp and broke it again. Guitarists, man...

andybp85··on Stimulation Clicker
whelp this is making this meeting go way faster
andybp85··on Phase behavior of Cacio and Pepe sauce
did this recently and it totally works
andybp85··on We have reached OpenBSD of Theseus
wholeheartedly agree, git rebase -i is a game-changer once you get comfortable with it
andybp85··on Alexander Abian
I definitely did not see that coming lol
andybp85··on Does a cave beneath Pembroke Castle hold key to fate of early Britons?
Huh, I (from New Jersey) somehow made it through the British Museum without realizing "artefact" is spelled differently in British English.
andybp85··on I was denied tenure – how do I cope?
Isn't showing students where you can find a boatload of real-life examples of the kinds of things their studying kind of obviously a good idea?
andybp85··on Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013)
that's one thing I love about living in Jersey City, NJ. there's a thriving street art program: https://www.jcmap.org/
andybp85··on FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals
it's that money talks, especially to people who don't understand technology enough to spot obvious bullshit. which of course isn't a justification for anything other than why the price of bitcoin is relatively impervious to logical analysis.
andybp85··on Firebase's Firestore Is Down
and we're back
andybp85··on Firebase's Firestore Is Down
been down since 9:30AM EST and the status page isn't showing anything...
andybp85··on Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy
If a law gets made saying what MSTR is doing is illegal and they keep doing it, I'm pretty sure what to do involves the police, SEC, etc. Why would one think it's anyone else's problem?
andybp85··on I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)
My thoughts exactly. I just told people I had a major win this week by getting a buddy of mine who started as an intern at my last job a full-time software engineer position at my current company (big pay jump & next step in his career + he's extremely talented and will be a huge asset for us). If our friend here takes the same approach with their kids, one I think can infer they're including cases like this.
andybp85··on Show HN: Berkeley Mono Typeface
i actually really like the font, but I'm super turned off by the copy. i feel like this kind of writing belongs on a wine bottle or in a calvin klein catalog. to each their own, i suppose.
andybp85··on Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen
web3 is explicitly, 100% blockchain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
andybp85··on $130B wiped off crypto markets in 24 hours
USD is an actual currency, and if everybody HODLs it we wind up in a recession (or worse). This comparison is wildly invalid.
andybp85··on Programming in 1987 versus Today
I wonder if another major change was the rise of the web browser. Making websites do cool things was what really got me into it, after a couple minor forays into things like C++ when I was in grade/high school. Obviously programming for a virtual machine and the concepts in Javascript are nothing new, but having the execution environment and useful programming tools like Firebug a click away for anyone by default seems like it would've been a paradigm shift in piquing the curiosity of people who otherwise would've never thought twice about say what the jvm installed on their machine actually did.

This was before my time though, and I could be confusing correlation (explosion in pc/web usage) with causation.

(Also I'm kinda jealous of people who were programmers in the 80s, it sounds so cool lol.)

andybp85··on Programming in 1987 versus Today
This reminds me of my first foray into useful programming, which was on a TI-83 in high school circa 2000 - I wrote all the code on the calculator! Didn't do anything crazy, learned from modifying games and wrote some programs to do some of my math homework for me. I do have a funny story:

I wrote a program to calculate between orders of magnitude and gave it to a few classmates. Before the test, the teacher noticed people I think transferring programs and asked what was going on, and one dude said something like "We've got a program Andy made to do the test for us!" The teacher responded, "Well then you better know how to do the work so you can make sure Andy knew what he was doing!"

That program worked, but since becoming a dev a decade ago there's definitely been instances where that would've been good advice lol.

andybp85··on Pelosi defends stock trading by lawmakers. ‘We are a free-market economy’
similar situation here, I'm a dev for a major business news company. her comments are brazen at best.
andybp85··on Web3 is going just great
there's some cool stuff going on in the NFT space, e.g. my favorite band has been selling NFTs that come with access to stuff like concert videos and private events. the idea of NFTs as access to a community i think has merit - hey, if you buy a Porsche, you can go to Porsche owners clubs and stuff. nothing wrong with that.

that being said, the main reason I haven't bought one (i'd love to see the concert) is you have to use ether. that means taking on something like forex risk, plus costs money and time for what feels like the sake of costing money and time. if i could buy one of the things in dollars with a card or paypal, i probably would.

i get (at least some of) the ideas behind using a value token that's endogenous to and therefore in the control of the software ensuring trust, etc., but it seems to me that the cool parts of NFTs are somewhat negated by the cryptocurrency part of the implementation.

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