grumpymuppet

Honestly, mathematics is replete with psychos and the socially ill-tempered. How many times have I attempted to have a "human conversation" with a colleague about a topic of presumed mutual interest, just to be rebuffed or shrugged off? Too many to count.

AI is an improvement.

I had my "wow" moment recently and saw an AI agent do something do over a weekend something that I spent years developing a relatively niche skill might have needed a month to complete.

I think the message the team lead takes away right now is "oh, this can be done a lot faster, let's do more!" This is exciting for a bit, but I think it comes at the cost of learning -- and being able to communicate --architectural lessons that would stage off systemic issues later.

I bet a huge amount of that is on your head, or if it is factual, a function of a toxic work culture where people are primarily incentivized to "outperform one another" rather than arrive at collaborative solutions.

The wealthy/owner class once again consume all of us -- here through AI -- because we cannot agree to work together.

It's a little different because cloud and blogs didn't actively get in the way of your home compute. To wit, the various cost spikes for hardware.

People -- WANT -- this technology on their home devices and (apparently?) the providers of this tech don't seem to be running a profit so they probably don't want the maintenance tail on their side either.

I think it's a bit different. Inevitable that this becomes a household-run thing? Not likely.

As a semi-savvy programmer, but with little experience in web-dev, I'm actually a bit ignorant of what a site can measure -- client side -- versus collect server side.

Presumably it's a simple matter to send something back to a server, but I've really never thought about the mechanisms involved.

Presumably why the person you are responding to called it a modified ad hominem.

Is that the hang-up? Like are people so unimaginative to see that none of this was here five years ago and now this machine is -- if still only in part -- assembling itself?

And the details involved in closing some of the rest of that loop do not seem THAT complicated.

I think think this must be why so many advanced level texts are couches in "introduction to..." language. Maybe it's a concession to not being able to cover every topic!

Because my own introduction was through combinatorial game theory, I always get excited to see some hackenbush diagrams and rarely do when the subject is mentioned.

Perk is... quite a thing. I think if you like programming because you like believing you have secret knowledge... go for it. Perk will scratch that itch. But I do not believe it beings you closer to the pantheon of God's. Ai n't gonna stop anyone from dancing with the Satyrs though, if that's your jam.

I have to agree -- I generally avoided Twitter/X over the past decade. I started poking around in there once in a while the last few months and everything time I'm left exasperated. 'I can't believe people believe any of this!!"

And... Then I remember it's rage bait.

Better to just read a book.

It's not a matter of a "deal" to be made or agreed to, it's a matter of paying a fair share of the cost to organize a society. When Capital gets to reap dual benefits of revenue from business prospects and lobbying government directly to set the tax rules, then it can't ALSO offload outlaying to the public good that it DEPENDS on to make a profit.

Avoiding tax through various loopholes that Capital gets a seat at the table to help craft, while benefitting from externalizing the costs to taxing labor is just corruption.

I have been curious about this. Where can you find definitions for the basic operations to build up from?

IEE754 does a good job explaining the representation, but it doesn't define all the operations and possible error codes as near as I can tell.

Is it just assumed "closest representable number to the real value" always?

What about all the various error codes?

Well... is it really? Just because someone can pump out some kind of product that someone will buy doesn't mean it's actually worth any externalized cost whatsoever.

It's one thing of we're talking food production and housing. Completely different if we're talking McDonald's happy meal toys.

Like, does the same argument apply to noise pollution? Are we alright installing a factory next to the symphony hall so long as the factory "owns" their land?

I think as our technology and understanding of the world grows we ought to change with it.

It would seem likely they were consumed by the proximate concerns of evading notice and making it to the plane and had no idea or thought about the dangers of being at such high altitudes.

There are enormous pressures on a new parent -- stress about getting back to a normal work routine and lack of sleep compound into a unique kind of stress and things start to slip.

For me: I decided I could just slow down a bit. Standing out isn't worth the stress. I don't want to slack, but I don't feel compelled to cram productivity into every moment.

Well, they just got like $170 Billion budget passed, so they've got plenty of money to stay busy for a while.

We were 38 with our first. I strongly agree that is too late to have them, especially given the likelihood of birth defects. Thankfully, we avoided issues there.

A few years in and I feel "back on my feet", but it was harder for being older.

At face value, I think I agree -- especially the format of the website being in a sort of hand-designed style.

"Assembly Theory" is a sort of applying (kolmogorov-esque) complexity theory to physics and other natural sciences. I don't know much else beyond that it's a "real thing".

So with that extra background, I give it a pass. I think it's an interesting idea at least.

I'm nearly certain it's the dopamine response of "solving problems" coupled with the fear of losing a paycheck.

Morality isn't a consideration.

Sort of both. I believe there are massive polarized forces that invest heavily in understanding and gaming the system. Sort of like a big multi-player game of tug of war .

The system must be understandable or people wouldn't incorporate and collaborate on extracting an edge. Slack in the system represents a lower price point, which will be corrected by a corresponding purchase order.

An individual has an effect, but it's miniscule compared to the massive forces in play. Unless you have a TRULY novel analysis of a situation, you are going to have a very low probability, success rate and out competing the market.

Were the database configurations "vibe coded"?

My understanding is the notion is about getting an application to "work" without any underlying theory of operation or evaluation of the imported context.

Right. There are two problems with software generally like this: interface and culture.

Becoming expert at a tool like git involves building familiarity with the concepts involved. While it's not entirely hidden in the --help and manual pages, the descriptions provided there do not consistently use higher levels semantic descriptions of the transformations. You are REQUIRED to look elsewhere to understand or worse -- develop a privately held theory of what's actually happening.

Culturally, a lot of engineers have a basic ethos of "getting things done". Getting the job of the moment done is a "win". There are tons of how do do XYZ articles that are separated from "why" and unmarried from useful additional context.

Like, one should be proud of learning a new tool, but it shouldn't be a personal endeavor to conquer Everest. I think it would do a LOT of good for tools -- especially collaboration tools -- to have completely standard introductions that the community enforced in collaboration. "Oh you don't know XYZ? You probably haven't read the standard introduction."

The problem with this sort of analysis is that it's incremental and balanced across a large institution usually.

I think the reality is less like a switch and more like there are just certain jobs that get easier and you just need fewer people overall.

And you DO see companies laying off people in large numbers fairly regularly.

Ahh, sorry, yeah. This stuff is classic. "Old" even.

If you are interested in programming language theory (think language design) then, yes. In some sense, this kind of stuff is impossible to avoid.

If you're an engineer focused on shipping product, probably not. It's not TERRIBLY useful for most day to day coding tasks.

I would argue some understanding of theory is absolutely necessary if you want to make any significant tide change in CS. It's just that most people won't (myself included).

I wish cache analysis was exposed more broadly everywhere. Everyone I deal with seems to understand and know how to think about it, but best practices seem to be wrapped up in a lot of heuristics.

I am aware of being able use hardware counters for profiling systems, but the more fine-grained exposure of what's happening at a lower level seems to be just hidden... Or I haven't found the right reference resource yet.

This is something I've wished to eliminate too. Maybe we just cast the past 20 years as the "prototyping phase" of modern infrastructure.

It would be interesting to collect a roadmap for optimizing software at scale -- where is there low hanging fruit? What are the prime "offenders"?

Call it a power saving initiative and get environmentally-minded folks involved.

It seems to me the way to do this is have folks scan in a receipt. Tag with any missing information (location, date) that may be missing.

Incentivize the behavior... somehow... and hope for the best.

This really resonated with me (I'm now in my 40s).

I missed out on so much because I never pushed back on management who asked me to do X, Y, or Z. "Oh, that's the priority" I'd tell myself. Nope, that was their ass getting promoted by managing a bigger team.

Repeatedly hearing "we don't do X, Y, or Z" when I saw an opportunity to innovate. Nope, that was just an uncreative bored person who didn't want to play along.

I simultaneously feel so lucky to be where I am and so absolutely frustrated at how poorly run and disorganized EVERYTHING seems to be.

I've decided in the next phase of life to kind of do like you suggest. Focus on "the doing" of something I like.

I may even have that opportunity, but my area is facing a lot of instability lately, so I hope it works out.

I love the promise of ranked choice voting (and other schemes). Properly implemented it seems like it could be a magic bullet to balancing some of the political divide and drawing out candidates and ideas that would satisfy more than just the extremes...

But, oh boy: we have trouble with simple plurality voting. How would you explain the outcome to people if it was implemented broadly?