The cheap ones, not the good ones. If there's a box of two bits for the same price right next to this one, I know which one I'd rather buy.
Good hardening is expensive.
1,358 karma · joined October 1, 2013
Good hardening is expensive.
I'm wondering if this is just what rich people are being sold instead of coffee and a good night's sleep now, or is the experience separate from that? Anyone have first hand experience?
I also wouldn't say that Germans feel betrayed. Quite the opposite, they instead think it's beneficial to betray their allies. Playing both sides, much like Hungary and Turkey.
Worth noting that the quote must have predated the EU and all its predecessors, as well as the Euro.
At the same time, one of the main concerns of at least US foreign policy has been to keep a truce between Germany and Russia from happening, because that would be one of the few constellations that could upset the European power balance.
And yes, that seems absurd, and no, I don't want this nor can I see it succeed in any way, but I also think it would definitely be an upset.
> (Good) meetings are deep work
Sadly not enough managers think that either. I've seen a hierarchy where managers only pay attention when their superiors are around. Day-to-day engineering meetings were not their moment to shine, so they took those meetings from the car driving in. The other option, railroading meetings with a strict slide deck, is also not the way to get engineers' minds to engage.
Good meetings are deep work, but there are two sides to it, and it must be lived in the culture.
Fortunately you are wrong.
Now some of these guys weren't amazing presenters in German either, but my point is that they should not have to be. Some people simply are dry explainers and they don't naturally entertain. Nothing wrong with that at all, especially with such nerdy topics. But in those cases, I'd much prefer a lengthy blog article, or maybe a podcast interview with a capable host. Please, CCC, don't send these people on a stage that they don't enjoy when you could also work with them to get their stuff across.
And with how much is consumed as VOD, I don't think the live talk brings a lot to the table anymore. There could be live Q&A sessions for those who read article or heard the podcast interview.
(I'd argue the same for an academic context by the way - anything above seminar size is either a celebration or a sermon, but not a discussion.)
My best experience at CCC was to literally stumble over bunnie on the side of a hallway where he was sitting against the wall, introducing his own ARM laptop to a dozen of people or two.
And don't tell me this doesn't scale - he has also gotten his message across in ways that scale. But there was finally a natural way of asking questions in a back and forth manner that wasn't in front of a 500 people audience.
(And in neural network terms, that error bar could be represented by the number of connections, by congruency of separate paths of arguing, by vividness of memories, etc ... it's not above human reasoning either, no need for new data structures ...)
The rest of the genius persona is growing up with enough ego that he could become a good salesman, and also badly managed autism and also a badly managed drug habit.
Seeing him dabble in politics and social media shows instantly how little he understands the limits of his knowledge. A scholar he is not.
And as a consequence, they know where that area of expertise ends. And they know what half-knowing something feels like compared to really knowing something. And thus, they will preface and qualify their statements.
LLMs don't do any of that. I don't know if they could, I do know it would be inconvenient for the sales pitch around them. But the people that I call experts distinguish themselves not by being right with their predictions a lot, but rather by qualifying their statements with the degree of uncertainty that they have.
And no "expert system" does that.
The age-old concept of "affordance" in a user interface, where a device announces its capabilities to the user, has completely gone down the drain. Now we're back to mystical buttons that claim to perform magic, and we happily ignore the tedious process of figuring out what just happened, implying that is not part of the User's Experience.
And once you are way up there and you have definitely left earth, there is no right or wrong anymore, just strong and weak.
And as with most learning advice, both sides of each argument are great advice. As somebody who is learning a craft, throw a coin and re-evaluate every once in a while.
Using primes or zooms? Using vanilla VSCode vs a highly customized environment? Putting every picture through a raw converter with split toning vs taking candid snapshots? Using copilot vs typing everything yourself? Flash vs natural light? Microservices vs monolith?
All answers are right answers. The whole point is that not knowing an answer to each means that the photographer should explore the topic until they have formed an opinion. No matter how, and no matter where their opinion ends up on.
And naturally, online places tend to attract people of equal experience who discuss each of those topics, without realizing that they're all just taking part in the same learning experience.
First owner is usually a lease customer (company car), second owner will keep it for much longer, third or fourth owner will run the car into the ground, and it'll almost always be crushed in Eastern Europe. Guessing grandparent is seeing a lot of second and third owner cars.
They do a good job of instilling fear, but we've learned from Ukraine that there are a lot of paper Tigers in that army that aren't as capable in a real fight as they are in a demonstration.
As it turns out, "shoe with four feet under it" is impossible to explain to search engines.
Sure, garbage tier searches will be done LLM style. But few smart people might be bored with that, and pay for something better.
Buying isn't that hard.
It's similar to how Content Management Systems used to manage the layout and navigation of a website, but never managed the content. They accessed the content that came out of the database, but surely there had to be an author to manage the content. The CMS did everything but.
Anything that would get sidenoted, he would do in second stage proofreading only. Not even worth fixing a typo if the whole page could still be axed.
The guy does a lot of scaffolding and prototyping, and some heavy refactoring.
He writes crime novels. Doesn't even like them, but if you want to sell, you either write smut (big gamble) or crime novels (less crowded). Anything you actually want to write about, you have to shoehorn into the crime novel. You also have to keep your protagonists whether you like them or not, or else every book will be your first one.
He also found that he had to write local novels that take place around the local tourist sights. He couldn't write about his actual hometown of course, but there is a touristy spot an hour's drive from him, so that's where the detective had to be based for every single adventure. The touristy area must also be a city. That way you have half a million inhabitants, and the same amount of tourists whose relatives are looking for gifts.
He was basically playing bookstore SEO.
Unsurprisingly, being an ME, he had a product lifecycle. He was working on several books at once in a pipelined fashion. One was being drafted, the next one was being written, the third one was in early proof reading, the fourth one was being finalized. That way he had a good balance between creative and menial work at all times. He also explained how he was careful to use few proofreaders in the early stages, because apparently, his work is a dire read before any corrections. He has a process where he rotates through his early stage proofreaders, and mostly gives them later stage work that is more readable.
Being a successful author is no more romantic than being a successful programmer. Or painter. Or mathematician. Any romanticism is at odds with professionalism, e.g. what works. And that's the same across all these professions.