bsoles

> The second thing is that using LLMs in a useful way is a skill in itself.

Not really. I don't even bother writing complete sentences as my prompts anymore. Once the LLM has enough context on my current issue, even incomplete sentences or phrases result in the same outcome quality in LLM's responses.

I routinely steal my wife's hairbands to tie various cables in my cable stash. You can never have enough USB cables of various types. But as Murphy dictates, the USB cable that I need now is one that I don't have in my stash.

As much as I like to watch Casey, Prime, etc. on YouTube, they are not going to teach anybody anything. They are just entertainment for software people with a certain viewpoint.

Mine does. I am able to login to the browser extension with my password and see all my passwords. I think there was a setting to enable local caching somewhere.

If Göbekli Tepe doesn't count as an indication of a civilization, I don't know what does.

Requirement for a writing system is an arbitrary condition. A lot of civilizations, especially in that region, have strong oral traditions.

At least in small scale, having your own git server is trivially easy. Why are organizations so eager to put a third-party layer on top of that?

I am sure there are afficionados of these things, but $349 for a keyboard is crazy. I am not sure what you get in return for such a price..

This comment cannot be overstated. Armchair "software engineers" like them do a lot of disservice to the community by promoting non-workable solutions in real production environments.

On the other side, I still consider McConnell's Code Complete to be a gem.

It is going to be easy this year. I'll make up some bullshit story about how I used Claude to improve my productivity, and how learned and used AI tools to speed up the feature delivery process. It doesn't have to be true...

With mild (self-diagnosed) OCD, I can't even read a book with a single dog ear on it, let alone markings and writing.

This may not be you aim, but there is research out there indicating that highlighting text does not help with retention.

Being silent about it when they fully know about it is not much different than promoting.

> Nobody attacks children.

Ever heard of the Catholic Church? What does rape count as?

Are we talking about the same church where children were raped, "witches" were burned, non-believers were tortured, gays are demonized, women are treated as lower beings, ..? Yeah, so good for our souls?

> Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect?

I would also argue that they use LLMs to learn "about" new things, but not really the thing itself. I, myself, learned a lot about complex SQL queries just recently using LLMs. But I really don't know how to write complex queries myself.

People often confuse reading about a thing with knowing the thing.

I thought it was a myth until the junior developer on my own team responded with "I don't know" to a question about why he made a certain computation during a design review. Because the (wrong) computation was fully AI generated and he couldn't even tell the difference.

Most people don't use AI to learn new stuff. They use it to do "the job" for them and they don't even understand the result. What is the point of a person if they don't bring any value to the table other than being a "resource" to generate prompts?

My employer literally put "effective use of AI" as a yearly performance review criteria this year. So there is that...

> 35 points for open source contributions

> 30 for personal projects

These are insane weights for scoring a software engineer's resume.

I can clearly identify this kind of developers at work by their mindless enthusiasm for AI. Development is just another job before they can move into "management" and make all-knowing statements all day long.

It is why I feel dirty after AI generates a piece of clever code: I know I am stealing somebody's IP without attribution. And the AI companies benefit from this, not the real people behind the training data.

As much as I like Terrence Tao, I think he is entering the crackpot phase of his career. Much like Roger Penrose and many mathematicians and physicists before him.

Tangentially related, but after the mindless push in my company for more AI use at any cost, every morning I drive to work thinking to myself if today should be my last day at my job.

One reason I am not giving my two-week notice is that I don't like "difficult conversations" with my manager.

My "strong" performance rating got me a raise less than the inflation rate this year in the US. I guess I am not using enough tokens to justify a bigger raise.

MATLAB

The theory of (basic) linear algebra is pretty easy. The practice of proper linear algebra is very difficult. People spend entire careers on things like error propagation in matrix operations. There are entire books on inverting matrices using a litany of approaches using things like QR décomposition, SVD, etc. I think it is fascinating...

I had fun times around 1985 with zx81, ZX spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amiga 500. Creating "games" with sprites and all... Even writing for loops with print statements were fun.

My employer's domain starts with "m". Bunch of people recently fell victim for a fishing email whose domain started with "rn". In Outlook 's font the two look almost identical.

It is called Gell-mann amnesia.

> Although MATLAB probably kind of outdated these days as anything can be accomplished in Julia and Py.

Literally every major brand car runs code built with MATLAB and Simulink. Same goes for every modern aircraft, space vehicle, etc. Far from being outdated.

My company is one. They just made "AI use" a mandatory performance goal for next year's reviews. I am thinking about retiring at this point...

> Not sure if it helps, but if we get our first blind user I will gladly make some admends to make it more usable for them.

I have heard "we don't have blind customers" argument many times before. Apart from ethical issues that this raises, ADA requirements, technically, don't care if you have blind users or not. Accessibility is still required...