pseudocomposer

So there were a lot projects listed here, but the one word used to describe the actual work being done by folks at 18F was “technologist” (in the sole bolded phrase of the article).

I know what devs do, QA folks do, product owners, scrum masters, UX specialists, etc. But what were these folks doing as “technologists?” I have my own understandings of the term that are, well… not biased in the direction of “valuable work.”

I’m all about calling out DOGE firings as problematic. But this particular post read as a lot of emotional language, but very specifically sparse specific details about what work they were doing and what they were being paid for it. And that’s, well… how you would actually demonstrate that it was problematic.

I get a vibe here of “politicians’ friends and family paid a lot to write how they think tech should work and wave their dicks around a bit,” to be honest, but really want to be wrong. Are there any substantive PRs to major GPL/MIT repos from 18F folks? Or more tactile explanations of their work? And some accounting of what they were paid for it?

As a human, I oftentimes can solidify ideas by writing them out and editing my writing in a way that wouldn’t really work if I could only speak them aloud a word at a time, in order.

And before we go to “the token predictor could compensate for that…” maybe we should consider that the reason this is the case is because intelligence isn’t actually something that can be modeled with strings/tokens.

Many credit card companies make it easy to generate one-off card numbers/“virtual cards” you can use to subscribe to services that are hard to cancel or otherwise questionable (so you can cancel just the card you used for that company).

I’d argue that number of languages is less critical than how well-supported/stable the languages/frameworks chosen are, and whether the chosen tools offer good DX and UX. In simple terms… a project using 5 very-well-supported languages/frameworks (say, C, Rust, Java, Python, modern React/TS) is a lot better off than one with 3 obscure/constantly-shifting ones (say, Scala, Flutter, Groovy).

Anyway, I’m a bit of a Rust fanboy, and would generally argue that its use in kernel and other low-level applications is only a net benefit for everyone, and doesn’t add much complexity compared to the rest of these projects. But I could also see a 2030 version of C adding a borrow checker and more comparable macro features, and Rust just kind of disappearing from the scene over time, and its use in legacy C projects being something developers have to undo over time.

You’re definitely right that the CEO class was furious about the social progress made by working people. But in terms of purchasing power, I think you’re wrong about working people making appreciable financial progress. Secondly, both major US parties serve the CEO class; our only choice is between covert and overt subservience. Finally, you should be aware that flippantly dismissing egg prices - or really any humans’ food security - makes you come across as privileged and out of touch.

This is the same thing Google did with Google Home. For a few years, a new Spotify subscription, Nest subscription, I think certain Google Drive storage subscriptions, etc. would give you a free Google Home Mini.

I do now have one in nearly every room in my house, and Google Home is pretty dominant in its field. I’m not convinced Meta glasses will have the same effect (I hope not) but it does seem possible.

The post mentions an ORM, but the docs don’t provide any examples of how it works. How does the Cot ORM compare to Diesel? There are certainly places where I find Diesel falls short of, say, ActiveRecord (like traversing relationships via “includes”/“eager_load”/etc.). I’m not convinced that these shortcomings warrant a separate ORM as opposed to making contributions to Diesel, but I’m open to being wrong. Are there any particular shortcomings that motivated starting from scratch? One thing I really like about Rust dev is the way ORM and API server concerns are separated. Will Cot’s server support using Diesel? Can it be used without the ORM package being involved at all?

You’re not a senior engineer until you understand the difference between necessity and sufficiency.

Subtly designed subvocal sensors, paired with an earpiece providing LLM output, could potentially be pretty powerful as a wearable. Not as invasive as glasses-type implementations - no camera or screen needed at all, really.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition

I think metered pricing makes sense for a service that's $10/mo (which the base Kagi w/ AI features is).

However, Kagi search unlimited is $5/mo. And, especially because of the whole "payment providers taking their cut" thing, I'd argue for services that are $5/mo or under, metered pricing doesn't really make sense.

Finally, I'd argue that this approach has other advantages over metering, even for higher-cost services:

* It's easier for devs to implement. Just one search needs to be recorded a month for an audit trail, rather than all search history.

* Keeping a search history for users is not needed at all, really (or, again, at most, one search per month). It's much better for user privacy.

* Most countries/states would have much more luck passing legislation forcing companies to implement this than metering, as well as enforcing it.

Because every way, say, the Partiful devs could ask for $3/mo for months you post parties (like Kagi’s new pricing) is gated by payment providers that will either take 30¢ of every dollar, be expensive to implement, or provide a bad experience for users.

This is a nice way to convince people to dip into the Kagi ecosystem. I use Kagi full-time, by default in all my browsers and love it! So this won’t save me a dime (which is still totally cool). It would be nice if they implemented it (or some metered pricing) for the extra-cost AI/LLM features, though (since I pay for them but rarely, if ever, use them).

I also really like this model for subscription services in general. It would be nice to, say, not be billed by Netflix (though really, I’m looking at Paramount+ or Peacock) for months when you don’t use the service. It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t be hard for companies to implement, and could potentially be regulated into existence everywhere by bodies like the EU or the CA state government.

Antarctica is a larger “island” than Australia. But both are also continents, while Greenland is not (yes, this is rather arbitrary labeling, but it is what it is).

I have a theory that extreme levels of VC investment mean, relative to whatever ownership shares the employees doing the actual work get, the original VCs have extreme ownership over whatever profits the business might generate (including from an IPO/sale).

Well, that’s just a fact. But my theory is that this ultimately incentivizes the employees to invest in their own skills and maximizing their salary-earning potential, rather than making the business succeed - the behavior you’ve described here.

If the market were sane, I think VCs would be averse to investing in already-highly-invested-in companies that don’t have clear paths to profitability. But, well… our markets aren’t really sane or sensible in that way. Many VCs and managerial types would rather crack whips or institute OKRs/other MBA-type nonsense than simply make sure employees are both adequately salaried and adequately invested in the success of the company.

Not sure how old you are, but WolframAlpha has been exactly that for a solid decade and a half. (It was a little late for while I learned calculus, but I used it for reference afterwards.) Also, I’m curious - are GPTs/LLMs actually able to provide consistently accurate explanations and solutions for calculus? They’re historically notoriously bad at even basic arithmetic and algebra, and a quick search seems to confirm them performing similarly with calculus, but I’m open to being wrong and things having improved on that front if you have some evidence.

Finally, echoing the other commenter, you really shouldn’t need a GPT-type tool to do math. If you do, you arguably don’t actually understand the concepts. And I’d honestly be shocked if a LLM could break things down well enough to genuinely help someone who doesn’t understand how to do a calculus problem, having myself tutored friends who didn’t understand things back when I was in school (and using LLMs extensively for my own work).

Some of the best math classes I took didn’t grade homework at all, only exams for which we only had pencil and paper (or some weighted homework as 10% or less of the final grade). But of course, if you didn’t do all the homework, you’d never pass the exams.

What do you mean by “instance owners can’t deplatform?” Is this about being able to port your data (and username/handle) out to a different instance?

When, of course, the reality is no one ever got rich by simply doing good things, treating others fairly, and conducting themselves in a way that overall benefits others.

And any individual "employing thousands of people" is really "exploiting thousands of people" unless the thousands of employees' wealth is increasing at a faster rate than the employer's.

From that site’s own info page: “The DB-Engines Ranking does not measure the number of installations of the systems, or their use within IT systems.”

Their methodology, even as stated, seems to be pretty flawed.

Which billionaires are good?

I think we're very much in agreement on most of these things, and our "platform loyalty" led us to perceive different options as the "least bad" - that's totally okay, though! I was an Android user from 2009-2020 because I agreed with you, up until I started working on my own music software, which pushed things the other way for me.

For your last sentence, though... user data and its utilities are arguably not a "bubble." And as we've seen with AI training, use of data being illegal doesn't really stop companies from doing it. I think we'll have better actual results from governments forcing Apple to let us run our own software on the hardware we buy, as opposed to governments trying to prevent Google, Meta, et. al. from abusing customer data.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that the former is about regulating our rights with hardware, while the latter is about software. Hardware is just easier for governments to regulate. When you try to regulate software, companies will do things like the deliberately-annoying cookie popups we got after GDPR/CCPA, because it's cheap to produce lots of bullshit to experiment with ways around those regulations.

Actually, I was disagreeing with the GP specifically about Apple products. I'm an Apple user, but very much because they're the "least bad" option. De-Googled Android phones still have awful audio latency (I'm a musician who makes a music app on the side), very limited messaging and notification features, and integrate poorly with desktop OSes. For how I use my devices, open or no, Android simply isn't a viable option.

The thing about all this is, Apple's products being well-integrated and well-designed doesn't require them to be locked down the way they are. The EU move to force them to use USB-C/Thunderbolt over Lightning is a perfect example of this. It unilaterally improved things for users, and iPhone 14 vs. 15 sales reflected that pretty clearly.

So I'd especially describe Apple as the "least bad" rather than "completely acceptable." They're specifically what I had in mind saying that.

“The least bad option in a market oriented against users and designed to maximize profit” is not the same as “completely acceptable.”

I went to UNC Chapel Hill, and this was already done back in 2005 there. CS major intro classes were numbered in the 400s (401, 402, etc) with a focus on data structures, basics of big-O (later refined in algorithms), etc.

CS 101, 102, etc. were the “non-major” intro CS classes and exactly what you describe here. They didn’t count towards a CS major at all. Neither would non-calculus-based physics classes.

Note that, at least at UNC, in every other department I know of, 400-series classes were generally graduate level. But UNC CS operated a bit differently.

I loved the challenge and the knowledge I gained, but it’s worth noting that CS at UNC was much, much harder than nearly any other major there (Chemistry may be the one exception).

I find it interesting that the article doesn’t question whether lower birth rates before the drop in relationships are the cause of this phenomenon.

Speaking for myself, I want kids, frankly more than I want a relationship. I will not enter into a relationship with someone who that isn’t feasible with (be it her socioeconomic situation, health, or simply her not wanting them).

I think the marketing of more and more expensive hobbies and travel, combined with less and less support for education/families, is leading a lot of folks to make the same decisions I’m making. Meanwhile, our popular culture makes saying this sort of thing explicitly something of a taboo, even if it happens to be the logic many of us are following.

I’m no real physicist, and know that light and sound waves are largely unrelated, but I like that this approach makes light behave more like sound.

We’ve long accepted that the speed of sound is variable based on atmospheric conditions. So why should the speed of light not be variable based on gravitational (or other) conditions?

A social life is a dynamic, changing thing. "Full" vs. "empty" is an obvious way of measuring it, but I think "stagnant" vs. "dynamic" is a more important metric that we don't take into account as readily.

It's quite possible to have a "full" but stagnant social life (which is where I think some older software folks with families are finding themselves). It's also possible to have a dynamic social life without large numbers of people involved.

To avoid stagnancy, you always need new friends. This doesn't mean you have to kick others out. It just means accepting the natural flow of friends and relationships in and out of our lives, and accepting that this is something we don't have full control of.

People you meet later in life - even much later, even when you have a wife and kids - can absolutely come to know “the real you.” (I might describe “closeness of relationships over time” as “asymptotic, with an upper limit” or at least “with diminishing returns,” if we want to get really math-y about something that is not really measurable.)

But you have to be open to that, and it also requires a lot of social skills that are not really otherwise demanded (in fact, arguably discouraged) among, particularly, men in developer/software engineering roles.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t maintain relationships with school friends. But, especially if none of them are nearby, you owe it to yourself and your family to build a local community for yourself that’s on that same magnitude of closeness. It’s a process that takes 5-7 years (again, just making up numbers here - this depends on your personality, how far along you are learning social skills, and who’s in your community), but the best time to start is always now.

One-arm handstand.

And I wanna play keys (and ideally also sing) in a band again.

I’d argue that targeted advertising and unprecedentedly-centralized corporate control of what text, images, and video we see online is just as potentially harmful as (recreational) drug use, if not worse. And online-shopping/adventure-travel/other addictions facilitated by targeted ads and targeted content algorithms can definitely leave people unable to achieve goals in life.

Creating a new addiction to replace the last generation’s isn’t really something to be proud of. As developers, we should be aiming to create ways to communicate that aren’t addictive and facilitate genuine connection with others that includes their highs, the lows, and financial/socioeconomic transparency.

What’s your company? What exactly do you pay? I haven’t done linear algebra in a while but certainly remember enough from graphics programming (and of course physics and linear algebra proper) in undergrad. Feel free to check out and contact me via any of the routes available on my GitHub: https://github.com/JonLatane