eloisius

The effect of reduplicating is to make it diminutive. It like adding -ito to the end of a Spanish noun.

So if it’s just a shit-test to see if the applicant has enough grit to grind through an arbitrary filter, and not to measure their aptitude, why not use Minecraft or something? Come into our office and show us how long it takes you to kill the End Dragon.

I don't recall them ever taking away lethal weapons after gaining new, less-lethal ones. This is just another tool in the arsenal that demands absolute compliance. Submit now, and let the courts figure out who's right later (hint: it's not you).

The inundation of AI applications is shitty, but I think this side of the coin—AI interviewer—is even worse. This is degrading for a human applicant, and after the very immediate term it’s probably not going to be very useful. Instead of grinding leetcode, people are going to be grinding the AI interview, which is depressing to even consider. Not only that, but there’s also going to be an arms race of AI tools that can ace the AI interview for you.

This is already a thing. Leica cryptographically signs images. Useful for establishing trust for photojournalists I guess. I’m not sure how deep the chain goes. Do they have hardware attention down to the sensor? You could take a picture of a screen, but that would likely have some other tell-tales. Especially if Leica took another step like putting a depth sensor in the package and added its data to the signature.

That (theoretically) solves training, but it doesn’t change the fact that even smart models can’t extract useful information from a dead internet, so you’ll always be stuck with a stale training cutoff. This is already a problem I run into a lot. I search something first. Top results are slop sites, so I switch to a chatbot. Its answers look suspiciously similar to the slop sites I just noped out of. Check the sources. It’s them.

> What do you think happens when a human reads it?

If we’re going to use human analogies let’s start with human rights for LLMs.

I don’t think that’s fair. Some bloggers may hope for financial reward, but many just want recognition for their creativity, to attract a readership, or build a community around their work. Those are meaningful ends, apart from financial reward. What’s not meaningful is to perform free labor to produce the raw materials that a mega corp then goes on to monetize without any recognition.

Unsettling. I mean, is there any reasonable way to develop software in 2026? I've already sworn off ever installing npm directly on my host. Containerizing everything is laborious enough, but running a separate VM for everything?

I have the same question as GP. Your answer helps a little but not really. I might be naive, but I was under the impression that malicious code escaping a docker image and running amok on my host system was not something I should be too worried about. Especially if I run docker in rootless mode. Is that wrong?

For clarity I’m actually using podman, not Docker.

A better analogy is a quality woodworking tool. A sharp planer is mesmerizing as you work the material. A Salesforce-acquistioned enterprise tool that redirects through 15 endpoints over 3000 ms on every link click is the antithesis to that.

Not sure I agree. I have also always thought steak was pretty easy. Whether a t-bone on the grill, a flatiron skirt steak, or some garbage-tier sirloin with eggs. It’s simple. Salt, sit, cook a few minutes, rest it a few more and eat. Always good.

Until I moved to Taiwan. I truly can’t understand how no one can make a steak. From the garbage pale meat glue “night market steaks” to expensive restaurants. Every steak I’ve had here is a complete disappointment. Even when they supposedly use top-quality US prime or Japanese Wagyu, even when the inside looks pink and not burned to a crisp, it’s always total dogfood quality. They often emulate the right look: pink interior, char on the outside, shiny tallow. But something is off. I never feel like I’m chewing a piece of steak. More like grinding tasteless muscle protein into paste with my teeth.

I don’t even know how it’s wrong sometimes. I look at it and just know that something is wrong that I wouldn’t even know how to replicate, becayse cooking a decent steak is easy to me.

Location: Taipei, Taiwan

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Maybe, but definitely willing to travel

Technologies: Python, Torch/PyTorch, COLMAP, OpenCV, C++, Qt

Résumé/CV: https://zacstewart.com/resume.pdf

Email: work at zacstewart dot com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zac-stewart-79b2a5a6/

Looking for computer vision work. Multi-view stereo, camera calibration, SfM, scene reconstruction, 3D object triangulation, 3D multi-object tracking. Object detection, tracking, video processing. I'm also very advanced with Qt and would be happy to be a frontend engineer on Qt projects. I mostly work in Python and C++.

Ansel Adams’ greatness wasn’t shooting. It was printmaking. He invented a system for getting the maximum tonal range in a print. In fact he spent so much time printmaking that he would sometimes reshoot a print (take a picture of a picture) to save that negative as the canonical one to make additional prints from, because it would be impossible to replicate all the dodging and burning that he did to make that perfect print. Having done a little darkroom work myself, I can’t even begin to guess how much time he spent in the darkroom.

Aside from that, I don’t know why so many people on this site seem to hold Adams up as the world’s greatest photographer. His work was great for its time, but if someone was shooting the same things today it would most likely be lost in the deluge of boring postcard landscapes. Contemporary photographers that are great shoot a ton. Watch an in-the-field video with Martin Parr. Someone like that comes home with hundreds or maybe over a thousand frames from an afternoon at the fair.

It's too easy just to drink the glass of pysllium husk and not obsess over data entry and trend analysis. You may even learn that your poops are the alerts.

> They're still building the systems that you already have in place.

Bull. They're doing highly sophisticated procrastination. I'll never become a great photographer by vibe coding the perfect tool for my workflow that selects, ranks and edits the 100 photos I took this week, or one that tells me where to stand and when to click the shutter. I have to be out shooting thousands of photos every week and laboring over the editing myself. You get good at what you do, and if you're spending your time making these one-off disposable apps instead of doing the thing they ostensibly support, a few years from now that's what you're going to be better at.

> There's an engineer mindset that tools can solve any and every problem, but do they?

No. These people just spend more time fiddling with their computers instead of doing the parts of life that it supposedly frees them up to enjoy. It's IoT lightswitch automations all over again. There's no reason anyone would ever need to calculate their smoothie according to their Strava data and the positions of the planets on that day. It makes far more sense to spend more time knowing your body and learning to treat it well than trying to create an app that will do it for you.

Guaranteed it would be unable to avoid searching for and selecting songs that specifically mention wood, woodworking, the shop, etc. It's like when you tell it to write something and give it a "vibe" or "mood" word wishing it could just give tone to the generated text, but instead it incorporates it literally.

That went over my head, but maybe it was meant to.

Would it be ethical to give these bots a non-stop code review runaround to burn those tokens up?

I keep coming to this thought too. If we really get to the point that AI can produce all the software we need, do any knowledge work we need, why wouldn't Big AI just use it to do that and take you out of the loop? Are "AI developers" making the flashlight app in the App Store right now?

I’m most curious about what you’ve built with the code factory. Is it just building itself or do you have any outputs that validate it for building something other than AI coding tools?

These are absolutely consuming Taipei over the last few months. This spring I saw an AI-generated menu for the first time, and then it was like overnight that now on basically every street there's at least one restaurant that has an AI menu, sign, or window dressing. It looks awful and I can't understand how anyone thinks it's a good idea. Noodles give me skin-crawling ants feeling. Chopsticks pick up tofu without pinching it, as if it's drawn magnetically. Spoons dip sauce from bowls that are smaller than the spoon.

I use these a lot. If I find I keep front-loading a lot of context I just create an assistant. Like I just created one specific for Qt that includes all the context I kept prefacing questions with. The only thing I wish was a little easier was to change the model of the assistant.

If you’re a Kagi user you can view the most-blocked list and adopt it

For the same reason that you can make a similar-looking chair, but you can’t distribute a fuzzy copy of Star Wars. The char isn’t a copyrighted work.

Apartment hunting is an unpleasant chore I haven’t had to do since 2022. It hadn’t even occurred to me that AI slop would be the norm. I really have lived to see man-made horrors beyond my comprehension.

I’m just collecting training data for my AI.

There’s no way this would work, or work more reliably, than the translator apps we have on phones. In order for this Babelfish sci-fi interface to work, the other party has to be aware and pause their speech for the translation. If they can’t hear their translated message they’ll speak over it. Either that or you have some kind of deafening that passes-thru the translated voice in realtime, and then you lose their emotion, emphasis, and tons of other information that doesn’t fit neatly into the standard monolingual worldview of tech.

Even the “conversation mode” built into Google translate or the iPhone app is useless. I can only imagine it working in the sterile environment it was probably designed in: a conference room with two people trying there hardest to make it work.

I live abroad and travel a lot for photography. Whenever I’m using a translator app, it’s typically a chaotic situation like haggling with a taxi driver, a meal with a group of strangers who invited me to eat with them, lots of background noise. The mode that everyone defaults to, without fail, is to use their own phone to speak or type a message and then hold it up in front of their interlocutor’s face. Sometimes they mix in some fragments of English or I know some fragments of their language. It’s lossy but it works.

I can’t imagine a wearable that would perform better. A notepad that can magically translate little messages is about as far as I would want it to go. Tech is pretty awful at intermediating human relations.

That only worked in first-gen dating sites where you browsed profiles. I think this strategy was called "spearfishing" where you make your profile as polarizing and authentic as possible, because it would cut out all the people you don't want to meet and appeal strongly to the person you do want to meet.

In today's Elo-score face swiping apps, your profile just tanks because all those people you didn't appeal to left-swiped you, and the one person who would have liked your tattoos never sees you. The only strategy for these apps is to 1) be attractive 2) don't be unattractive.