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maxfurman

1,369 karma · joined March 1, 2016

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maxfurman··on China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes
How can a soccer player be loyal or illoyal to Xi?
maxfurman··on Incident with Pull Requests, Issues, Git Operations and API Requests
That Blender Gitea theme is really nice! I wonder why exactly it's so much easier on the eyes? In a lot of ways all of these are "just Github" with minor changes, so the one that is actually better really stands out.
maxfurman··on Beware of Drunk Deer, French Police Say, Announcing Season of Inebriation
Every time I see this my brain reads it as "Beware of Drunk Beer" - truly, it is the beer I have already drank that has done the most damage to me so far
maxfurman··on Confessions of a Millennial in Tech
> It’s a weird experience to spend ten years becoming excellent at something only to watch a 22-year-old produce a suspiciously solid version of it in 14 minutes

> Which forces a much more uncomfortable question: if your identity was tied to being good at X, what happens when X gets automated?

I've been grappling with the same thing the last few weeks. It's easy to say "don't put your job at the center of your sense of self" but I've been writing software professionally for twelve years now and I like to think I've gotten pretty damn good at it. It's part of who I am. What happens when the value of the thing you're best at decreases sharply?

The answer is, in the Darwinian sense, adapt or die. Same as it ever was.

maxfurman··on Drugwars for the TI-82/83/83 Calculators (2011)
I too am only a software engineer today because I wrote crappy games for the TI83 in middle school. The day I discovered you could download games from the web, the scales fell from my eyes.
maxfurman··on U.S. science agency moves to restrict foreign scientists from its labs
Look up "On Fascism" by Umberto Eco, it's not that long and was written long enough ago that you can't say it was influenced by any of our current leaders.
maxfurman··on Warcraft III Peon Voice Notifications for Claude Code
First time I've been jealous of Claude as a Codex user. When does it say "Stop poking me!"?
maxfurman··on I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed
I'll join the chorus of praise for Homeworld. It was a big part of that era for me. I must have spent hours just zooming the camera as close as I could get to all the different ships, or just watching the harvesters do their thing. Almost meditative, looking back. Thank you for casting your spells!
maxfurman··on The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline
I see an em dash! Honestly, mixing cast members from different series might be exactly the kind of mistake that an LLM makes. But it made me smile, so score one for the robots.
maxfurman··on The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline
As much as I love this post, I have to be the one to point out that Uhura and Spock are from a different Enterprise than Picard, Riker, and Troi. Great work, though, I can practically hear Leonard Nimoy reading this dialogue.
maxfurman··on Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores
Wow, they just opened a brand new one in Philly less than two months ago. I've yet to shop there and I guess now I never will. It must have cost millions to clear that site and build a whole new building there. Just to abandon it. I wish I had money to waste like that.

Edit: it actually opened in August, so it was around for about six months instead of two.

maxfurman··on Scott Adams has died
Same! My dad worked in corporate HR and loved Dilbert (I guess it spoke to him), so we usually had a few of his books and/or a strip-a-day desk calendar around the house that I would read. I never considered it before, but maybe I'm the cynical software engineer I am today because of Scott Adams. The world is a funny place sometimes.
maxfurman··on iPhone Pocket
The iPhone Pocket is a pocket for your iPhone and not a pocket-sized iPhone??? Unbelievable. So disappointing.
maxfurman··on Florian Schneider Collection: Instruments and equipment up for auction
Kraftwerk were hugely influential on the pioneers of hip-hop. One clear example is Afrika Bambaataa sampling "Trans-Europe Express" for "Planet Rock," one of the earliest hip-hop records.
maxfurman··on Doctor Who archive expert shares positive update on missing episode
FYI pretty much nobody played live on Top of the Pops
maxfurman··on Evaluating the impact of AI on the labor market: Current state of affairs
Even a net zero effect would mean some people were replaced with AI and the same amount of people were hired to use AI
maxfurman··on Python developers are embracing type hints
It's the developer performance benefit of catching type bugs early, not the application performance benefit from a compiler, that Python developers find compelling
maxfurman··on EU age verification app not planning desktop support
GP has edited the comment to make more sense
maxfurman··on Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts
Paying their executives exorbitant salaries
maxfurman··on Weaponizing image scaling against production AI systems
But it can be tricked into delegating incorrectly - for example, to the "allowed to use confidential information" agent instead of the "general purpose" agent
maxfurman··on Brian Wilson has died
I never realized Brian Wilson and Sly Stone were the same age. Small world
maxfurman··on JavaScript's New Superpower: Explicit Resource Management
That's what's neat about the simpler C# version (and this proposal): it's bound to whatever block it's in and doesn't need its own scope/indentation
maxfurman··on Why I'm Resigning from the National Science Foundation
You are aware that scientists have to eat and pay rent, right? A lack of funding in the US will draw scientists to places that do have funding. You're confusing "science in the US now" with "all science globally."
maxfurman··on X’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, has left the company
He used a metaphor in which he slaughters his entire team? Sheesh, talk about making the subtext text.
maxfurman··on A look at the creative process behind Bluey and Cocomelon (2024)
> Bandit (the Dad in the show) has inspired me to be a better Dad and a better husband.

I had the same experience. I'm tearing up a little in the office thinking about a cartoon for toddlers! Incredible.

maxfurman··on A look at the creative process behind Bluey and Cocomelon (2024)
I'll add to the chorus of praise for Bluey here. I've never seen a show before so close to my actual life. There's one episode where Bandit pretends to be a crane game, and it blew me away because I had done exactly the same thing with my own daughter just a few weeks before! It captures being a kid and being a parent in a way that is so real. Most kids content doesn't have the courage to be realistic in that way, they just want to sell toys or ad impressions. My daughter is five now and on the verge of outgrowing it, and I wish we had started watching this show together sooner.
maxfurman··on Show HN: I built an app to get daily wisdom from Mr. Worldwide
This is one of the stupidest, most amazing things I've seen in quite a while. I'm glad to see someone doing something silly just for fun and not just hustling.
maxfurman··on Minimum effective dose
Some books are easier to read than others. They use more common words, or contain a more traditional narrative that is easy to understand, or both.
maxfurman··on Our phones are killing our ability to feel sexy (2024)
Do you have kids?
maxfurman··on Bacteria (and their metabolites) and depression
So if, for the sake of argument, the findings here are correct and causal and should be acted upon, what exactly is one supposed to do about it? We've got the technology to detect gut bacteria but we don't seem to have good targeted ways to affect it.
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