phantasmish

Funnily enough, as a parent, I'd have loved for my (young-ish at the time) kids to have been on old-school pencil and paper stuff during the pandemic.

Tear-out worksheet books or a weekly trip to the schools to grab a packet of physical papers with the week's lessons and work (or, hell, send the buses around to drop them off) would have been SO MUCH easier to manage and help with than all the online horse-shit.

Like, I truly think my 80s and 90s classrooms would have been better prepared to deal with the pandemic than the modern computerized ones. You'd think it'd be the other way around, but from what I saw, no. It's just so much harder to keep track of what's going on in several different computer programs, than a stack of paper and a couple books for each kid.

Ever watch The Wire? The school in that show is a very accurate depiction of what a... middling-bad inner city school is like. There are tons of ones worse than it (they may have shied away from one of that sort either because it didn't suit the story, or because they thought too many viewers would think they were exaggerating)

There are schools where the administrators are too busy dealing with violence to have time for much else.

We weren't allowed to have any of several different individual devices the functions of which are present in a smartphone. Banning that stuff was more-or-less uncontroversial. Obviously kids in an ordinary classroom shouldn't have instant cameras, and video recorders, and audio recorders, and Walkmen, and radios, and game boys, and TVs, and flashlights, and...

Now we have devices that are all of those things in one and parents will fight you if you try to keep kids from having or using them. Go figure.

What's baffling is why so many more people started thinking all those devices were OK when they're combined into one device. Like, not much of this is novel, we could have had devices that did most of the relevant things a smartphone does, in class. But we didn't because of fucking course they weren't permitted.

> Which stands to reason you'll need less of them.

Depends on how much demand there would be for somewhat-cheaper software. Human hours taken could well remain the same.

Also depends on whether this approach leads to a whole lot of badly-fucked projects that companies can’t do without and have to hire human teams to fix…

History?

I didn’t say it was definitely the end or definitely would end up worse, just that someone who’s followed tech news for a while is unlikely to take this as increasing the odds Bun survives mid-term. If the company was in trouble anyway, sure, maybe, but not if they still had fourish years in the bank.

“Acquired product thriving four years later” isn’t unheard of, but it’s not what you expect. The norm is the product’s dead or stagnant and dying by then.

Yeah, no reader of tech news will take an acquisition of a company with four years of runway as anything but decreasing the odds their product will still be around (and useful to the same audience…) in four years. Even without being tied to a company with lots of exposure to a probable bubble.

Yes, the 2017 one is what I mean.

I think the overlapping names might even be why I overlooked it. Didn’t realize it was a new game.

Anyone who overlooked Prey (as I did for years) but loves the Looking Glass Studios games and successors (Thief series, Deus Ex series, System Shock series, Dishonored Series): just get it an play it. Read nothing. Just play it. You won’t regret it.

Which one’s getting integrated into business processes behind the scenes? That’s the thing that’s supposed to replace 12% of the workforce or whatever, not fancier ELIZA.

- Transparent text selection in images a few years back was the kind of magical thing I didn’t know I need, but now that I have it any platform without it feels broken.

- I haven’t had a chance to use it yet but Preview was just about the only thing keeping me on macOS for my personal computing, rather than going all iPad/phone. Now it’s on iOS, as of the (otherwise terrible, maybe my least-favorite iOS release yet and I hated 7) version. Provided it’s close on features, that’s one of the only things I’d have missed going iOS-only, gone.

But I can’t think of anything between those two.

Can AI vibe code a way to get a macOS keyboard layout, basic shortcuts, and macOS-style emacs navigation in gui text boxes across the OS, on Linux? Last I checked all of that is pretty much impossible to achieve without accepting a ton of jank and some parts of the system where it doesn’t work (even the keyboard layout thing!)

There were a couple Apple OS releases in the ‘10s where they were like “hey, not many new features and no big redesign, we mostly increased performance and squashed bugs”

It feels like we’re waaaay over due for one or two of those.

It was closer to being true (though I’d still not have characterized it as “approximate nobody”) when you didn’t need passports for travel to Canada, Mexico, and IIRC many Caribbean cruises. That change increased rates of passport-having a ton.

It helps that this one was entirely pointless except for generating more contracts to hand to pals, like a lot of the stuff around that time—say, when they created Homeland Security rather than just beefing up existing structures that served similar purposes (easier to direct contracts to friends and companies you own large stakes in when you’re setting up a totally new department with an excuse to get all-new everything!)

Like this doesn’t actually matter, at all, for security purposes. Which is why nobody’s cared enough to make it go faster.

If it’s like the identity verification services the CRAs offer, I’ve managed to fail one of those enough times that they said I’m not me and stopped letting me try (to be fair, it was only two tries IIRC).

The last attempt I even had my report from the relevant CRA in front of me as a cheat-sheet, at their suggestion. They believed I’m me enough to hand me (a version of) my report and let me into my online account with them, but not enough to tell someone else that I’m me. Go figure.

(The trouble, I’m pretty sure, was that both times I encountered two “I have literally no idea what relevance any of the addresses you named have to me” answers and I think they only put one of those in each set. Even reading the sheet I never managed to figure out WTF they were talking about. One I got both times, which I suppose was the one I was supposed to know, didn’t even name a state I had lived or owned property in. But nothing about it on the report, so what do I dispute? Luckily I only needed it for a temporary rental and that ended up working out fine—it’s way easier to buy houses than rent one, I guess, which is pretty weird)

GP’s behavior is what I see, it usually doesn’t shut itself off while I’m connected but once it’s on I have to act fast to get connected or it’ll shut itself off in a minute or two. And if I disconnect for a second, it’ll be off and I have to turn it on again. Really annoying the rare times I use it.

Been like this many versions, but dunno if it does it with the latest.

> In my area, 20 percent of homes are owned by investors and realtors delist homes that don’t sell as opposed to drop price.

This has been so weird to see over the last couple dips.

In the ‘08 crash, banks were sitting on houses that were developing mold issues because they had been sitting vacant so long. These houses were getting more damaged and less desirable by the day, and before long would require hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix (up from the low-tens already evident) but they still preferred to sit on them. They weren’t listed, or were listed but at too-high prices and they were just ignoring offers, not even responding.

Then you look at “depressed” housing prices that are still way over historic norms, so you’d think builders would keep going… but no, they totally halt all work, no new houses until prices are heading up again.

Something’s super messed-up about the housing market in ways that it wasn’t in the last millennium. Recessions don’t even fix it, they just make everything pause.

Healthcare employment’s guaranteed to keep rising until they’ve soaked up all the would-be inheritance from the Boomers.

Millennials are a large cohort, too, so it may stay steadily high for a good long while after that, after perhaps a small dip for X. Depends how much money they have for the healthcare sector to scoop up. Savings-at-same-age has been really bad for them relative to boomers, so we’ll see. May see healthcare employment shrink even as need (sans the dollars to back it up) grows, next time a demographic “lump” gets old.

A lot of lower-end housing spends some years in the hands of people who can’t afford to keep up maintenance, and/or are too old to keep up with it well (… or to keep up with cleaning). As a result, it’s all but ruined by the time someone else gets a crack at it.

If house prices and rent being this much higher than they were in, say, 2000, relative to wages, wasn’t enough to trigger an enormous housing construction boom, I don’t think further-increasing rent or house prices are likely to do much good. Something about that “signal” is already badly malfunctioning.

I love Ruby (… contextually, with the most important part of that context being “for small programs”) and its general culture (_why is/was amazing) but hate Rails.

In practice this means I don’t use Ruby professionally any more, because there aren’t a lot of non-Rails Ruby jobs. And since I write a lot of python at work, that’s my go-to for my own quick little personal scripts, too, just for simplicity’s sake as far as what I have to keep in “working memory”, if you will. Plus it’s already installed on most systems I touch, unlike Ruby.

Like I do care about how “joyful” a language is but I also care about how hard it is to work with if a codebase has been through a bunch of contractors’ and agencies’ hands and it’s kind of a mess and the test suite hasn’t been updated during two full years of active development. For my own “joy”’s sake, give me Go or c# or maybe even Java if you must, under those circumstances. It’s unlikely I’ll find much joy in Ruby when that’s happened, which is often.

What’s tough for me is figuring out where people are realizing significant improvements from this.

If you have to set up good tests [edit: and gather/generate good test data!] and get the spec hammered out in detail and well-described in writing, plus all the ancillary stuff like access to any systems you need, sign-offs from stakeholders… dude that’s more than 90% of the work, I’d say. I mean fuck, lots of places just skip half that and figure it out in the code as they go.

How’s this meaningfully speeding things up?

My company’s spending a lot of money doing things they could have done fifteen or more years ago with classic computer vision libraries and other pre-LLM techniques, cheaper and faster.

Most of the value of AI for our organization is the hype itself providing the activation energy, if you will, to make these projects happen. The value added by the AI systems per se has been minimal.

(YMMV but that’s what I’m seeing at the non-tech bigco I’m at—it’s pretty silly but the checks continue to clear so whatever)

To be fair, it can be hard to define “chair” to the satisfaction of an unsympathetic judge.

“Do chairs exist?”:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fXW-QjBsruE

Yep. All these do is “hallucinate”. It’s hard to work those out of the system because that’s the entire thing it does. Sometimes the hallucinations just happen to be useful.

I directly use Yandex sometimes, because there are huge blind spots for all the US-based engines I'm aware of, and it fills some of them in.

If someone can point me to a better index for that purpose, I'd love to avoid Yandex. Please inform me.

Eh, one's ability to communicate concisely and precisely has long (forever?) been limited by one's audience.

Only a fairly small set of readers or listeners will appreciate and understand the differences in meaning between, say, "strange", "odd", and "weird" (dare we essay "queer" in its traditional sense, for a general audience? No, we dare not)—for the rest they're perfect synonyms. That goes for many other sets of words.

Poor literacy is the norm, adjust to it or be perpetually frustrated.

It's crazy how strong the Eliza effect is. Seemingly half or more of tech people (who post online, anyway) are falling for it, yet again.

They're also useful for industrial espionage. It gets laundered as "industry best practices" and it's part of what you (may) pay them for.

It's so hard to tell whether these people are genuinely stupid, or just pretending to be because that's what they think will be rewarded (and the latter might be correct and a non-stupid thing to do!)