gaoshan

Not weighing in on the privacy issue but using Ollama you can run a smaller agent like Qwen 3.6 35b a3b on a sufficiently potent laptop. Pair it with something like Hermes for a nice interface and you have more than you might need for diary like usage.

My fear is that this is an enhanced virus that was being subjected to gain of function research, making it potentially much more dangerous than bog standard plague.

Rationality is the key point. A lot of devs approach their work in ways that are not rational or practical. Like the dev who wants to build a gold filigree decorated elevator that can handle ten thousand pounds of cargo and moves with the smoothness of a magnetic levitation rail in order to reach the second floor when all you really need is a ladder for the 2 people that will need access.

One line that got me wondering: "...and one group ate their dead relatives’ brains at funerals so consistently that they gave themselves a mad cow type disease called kuru, which killed a large percentage of their population and then, within a few generations, evolved a genetic mutation that protects against it"

I had heard this before but my question now is, did they develop this tradition recently? If it were a historical thing wouldn't that genetic mutation have evolved a long time ago? One would expect that if they had this tradition for a long time the genetic mutation that happened so rapidly would have happened long ago, yet it did not. I'm curious as that thought struck me just now.

You joke but...

Deprive who of capital? The folks behind Deepseek, Kimi, Qwen, etc. or only the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI? You can wipe out the mosquitos around your house but if you don't get the entire neighborhood you may as well not bother.

If you can't name it you can still describe it.

But then by describing it you are committing it to a set of conditions this unnameable thing satisfies.

But then if you go beyond a narrow interpretation of that paradox and accept that naming and describing are both accomplishing the same fundamental thing, that being committing a thing to a condition (like a name) or set of conditions (like a description), you do run into the same problem.

Hmm, interesting. Now back to this E2E testing stuff I've been avoiding.

I can tell you that in my case, at least, the real areas of opportunity for something like this come from the masses of people that flood the manager up to senior VP level in a mega-corp. When I'm sitting in a meeting with 8 people and myself and 1 other person are doing most of the work while the rest are vaguely accountable for some metric being reported (we two talk about what's going on, plans, maybe present something completed while the others say "I don't have anything" and the meeting ends, repeat ad nauseum) I start dreaming of what a setup like the one posted here could do. Feels like we could cut at least 50% of our people at those higher levels and stay perfectly efficient and make progress.

Mega corp has too many people who define success by how many reports they have, how many charts they present (prepared by others who are perfectly capable of presenting themselves), how many meetings they sit in and how many reviews they conduct. Automate them away.

My company has a team of accessibility impacted testers who will assess any web/device work we do. It is invaluable and they can always find things that were missed regardless of how many tools we use to help in development.

You should see how little many of the people providing that expert human interaction are paid. My wife is a professor (in the humanities) with 2 decades of experience and degrees from excellent schools, gets top reviews from students as well and she barely earns enough to live on. If I weren't in tech we would be financially destitute. She already works 60 hours a week with just the courses, prep, grading and meetings she has... any more and she would probably just keel over and faint.

There are existing successful education models that we could and should borrow from. Instead we keep trying to reinvent things as if we and we alone must be the ones to develop it. I don't even think it's that much of a mystery, it's just that the potential costs cause our system to refuse to head down that path and as a result we get what we deserve, so to speak.

I'm 57. I was a photojournalist until I was 36. I quit shortly after 9/11 (which I covered) to move with my wife to her new job and start a freelance career. That was 90% trying to gin up work and 10% photography and I was not a natural fit. I struggled financially (even though at one point a NYT photo editor reached out to me to say that they loved an essay I had done on China and they used it for inspiration for one of their younger photographers... still no work that paid enough to support my family). I pivoted to building websites.

It took me a long time to teach myself how to do this and I was making sites for family and friends (weddings, birth announcements) before finally starting to gain traction building sites for local businesses. Eventually a small marketing firm started using me for content updates and then bigger and bigger things. I build sites, created user management systems, handled databases and struggled to learn it all because my fine arts mind was chaotically bouncing all over the place with ideas and designs and finding there were a dozen different ways to do anything. After a few years of this I moved to a large consulting firm, quickly became a technical manager (mostly coding and problem solving but some people management). Then I moved to another and another. By the end I was leading small teams and working with some San Francisco based companies (as a contractor... no bonuses and I was hiring and managing people earning twice what I did). I eventually decided to move to work on a product at a single company.

Pay increased, bonuses appeared but I was now in my 50s and realizing that the corporate ladder favored me about as well as the marketing and sales part of photojournalism had. I am pretty much stalled out now. Salary is solid, bonus is great, upward trajectory has stalled and I am in my late 50's.

All of this is to say, I have given no thought to switching industries at this age. I think it would be too daunting and I am not willing to give up the higher salary that tech is providing this late in the game. I am holding tight (hopefully, lol... sigh) until 62 because my slow start in the industry and lean early years means that I will need to add social security into my income streams in order to lead the life I want to in retirement. I cannot afford the overall cost of living without that extra chunk added to my retirement drawdowns.

The delta here is your understanding of what a sauna is (or your understanding of the definitions involved), not the reality of what a sauna is.

Having ridden the trains of China fairly extensively and over a long period of time I am essentially ruined for what we have in the US. The older style Chinese trains were fine and I always enjoyed the journey (and remember excitedly riding the maglev when it first opened in Shanghai) but the newer generation of high speed trains is what pushed me from "It would be so pleasant to have this system in the US" to "We are losing out and falling behind the modern world".

Trips that take me 3 hours in normal traffic here would take less than 45 minutes in China... possibly as little as 30 minutes. Trains would be leaving for the main destinations in 15 minute intervals, travel times cut by an order of magnitude, arrivals would be in stations that connect to clean, modern, efficient, inexpensive and safe subway systems.

A typical journey. Hangzhou to Shanghai used to be a 3 hour bus ride for me. On top of that it was 45 minutes from home to the bus station. Now I can walk a few hundred meters to a gleaming, state of the art metro station (seriously, you've never experienced anything like this if you've never left the US), arrive in the ground floor of the train station, catch a glass smooth, spacious high speed train to Shanghai that leaves every 15 minutes and takes only 45 minutes and go downstairs to the subway to travel wherever I need to go in the city (usually within a couple of blocks of whatever destination I have).

We are so far away from this that I find it a bit distressing. We cannot afford it, we cannot overcome the legal and political hurdles to make it happen... we are just going to fall further and further behind.

Charisma and connections are pretty much all it takes. Really only connections are needed but since these people are coming back from being exposed they need charisma to assuage the concerns of their connections.

Asia rolled it out? Wow, imagine the coordination that took to get all of those disparate countries (like, 48 or 49 countries make up Asia) on board with a 4 day work week... and so quickly, too!

My homeowners association can't pull off a neighborhood playground cleanup without conflict, disorder and confusion even with 6 months of planning so again, kudos to the 48+ countries of Asia for coming together in this herculean example of speed, unity and coordination.

Iran did not admit to this. Further, the current suspicion that the killing of these children was done by the US is coming from a US investigation, not from some external source.

Can't blame you. Coming from the US I have been making a point to vacation in Canada, fwiw.

Short of voting, protesting and getting into arguments with MAGA people I don't know what else I can effectively do.

They were operating in a traditional "China town" neighborhood for the detentions and the neighborhood they were going door to door in is one populated mostly by white collar professionals (tech, college professors, etc.).

No, all of the specific cases I heard about were Chinese people that were naturalized citizens (some for decades) who were cuffed and detained for a few hours before being released. As others have said it doesn't really matter, though. It's the sentiment that counts.

ICE has been detaining Chinese people in my area (and going door to door in at least one neighborhood where a lot of Chinese and Indians live). I was hearing about this just last week as word spread amongst the Chinese community here (Ohio) to make sure you have some legal documentation beyond just your driver's license on you at all times for protection. People will hear about this through the grapevine and it has a massive (and rightly so) chilling effect. US labs can try but with US government behaving like it is I don't think they will have much luck.

*edit: not that it matters, but since MAGA can't help but assume, these are all US citizens and green card holders that I am referring to.

This comment really resonates with me (I’m old now, for context). I was put in the gifted program, but the truth is I wasn’t very good at math while I was wildly strong in language. I was a pretty solitary kid who read a lot of quality literature and was endlessly curious about the world. I ended up getting kicked out of the program early in elementary school for being "immature," but the gifted label stuck and I kept hearing how smart I was.

By high school, I was a 1.4 GPA student who was also on the Academic Decathlon team winning state-level medals. My upbringing was extremely abusive, which definitely contributed to the academic problems, but what I really needed was someone in my corner pushing me to explore and actually try. Being told I was smart wasn’t just useless, it was actively harmful. I became afraid to try and leaned on what came naturally (hence doing well on Decathlon tests) while consistently failing to finish things (no homework, no papers... and the GPA shows it).

What would have made a huge difference for me was being explicitly taught how and why to study, how to take and review notes, and how to manage my time. And just as importantly, someone consistently emphasizing that effort matters a lot more than being "smart."

Even now, I’m honestly surprised by how many people I work with in tech equate being "smart" with being good at math, algorithms, or pattern recognition, while seeming almost oblivious to some pretty big gaps in other areas. That mindset isn’t doing anyone any favors.

This smells of "I like to solve puzzles and fiddle with things" and reminds of hours spent satisfyingly tweaking my very specific and custom setups for various things technical.

I, too, like to fiddle with optimizations and tool configuration puzzles but I need to get things done and get them done now. It doesn't seem fast, it seems cumbersome and inconsistent.

Since this is proof that the original and stated point of supplying ID is not valid can we just dispense with the whole charade? It clearly isn't about security if a measly $45 is all it takes to circumvent it so let's just get rid of it entirely.

The emperor not only has no clothes, he's shouting that fact at us.

ChatGPT helped me understand a problem with my stomach that multiple doctors and numerous tests have not been able to shed any effective light on. Essentially I plugged in all of the data I could from my own observations of my issue over a 35 year period. It settled on these 3 possibilities: "Functional Dyspepsia with slow gastric accommodation, Mild delayed gastric emptying (even subclinical), Visceral hypersensitivity (your nerves fire pain signals when stretched)" and suggested a number of strategies to help with this. I implemented many of them and my stomach pain has been non-existent for months now... longer than I have ever been pain free.

I feel like the difference is that doctors took what I told them and only partially listened. They never took it especially seriously and just went straight to standard tests and treatments (scopes, biopsies and various stomach acid impacting medications). ChatGPT took some of what I said and actually considered it, discounting some things and digging into others (I said that bitter beer helped... doctor laughed at that, ChatGPT said that the alcohol probably did not help but that the bittering agent might and it was correct). ChatGPT got me somewhere better than where I was previously... something no doctor was able to do.

FWIW I have used git bisect with merged commits and it works just as well (unless the commit is enormous... nothing like settling on a sprawling 100 file change commit as the culprit... good argument for discrete commits, but then it wouldn't matter if it were rebased or merged)

If maximizing profits is the primary thing that matters (and in the US, amongst other places, it is) then nothing will change about this. It's also why unions are so opposed by certain groups and it's why we have such an obscene wealth imbalance. Shareholders and profits matter more than people.

Martin Luther King Jr. expressed it well when he said, "when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,"

When Carl Sagan said, "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself" he was poetically accurate. The comets are seeded with the remains of untold countless exploded stars.

"One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually."

It is interesting in how challenging it can be to convince some younger developers of this. Some of the stronger and more technically proficient developers (that are young-ish... mid 30's and down, let's say) have a level of contempt for those skills that is surprising and not trivial to coach them on. They seem to suffer from "smartest person in the room" syndrome and mistakenly believe those smarts apply to everything they deal with rather than the just the technical areas that they excel in.

The aspect of small local stores functioning as a social hub really hits hard. The social hub, such as it is now, can be so much larger and less personal that it really does feel like a loss (a negative even).

Is the social hub now something like Instagram or a specific forum/subreddit/space for a school or neighborhood? These are really insufficient replacements and people that grew up knowing nothing else likely do not realize just how insufficient they are.