throwyawayyyy

A story that popped up in my Google Now (or whatever it's called these days) feed: "Princess Bride Still Cherished by Fans". With an image from the Fellowship of the Ring. And in tiny text at the bottom, "Generated with AI, which can make mistakes".

It's all so dispiriting: produced without thought, consumed without pleasure.

Interesting! I've never seen a flat rental in the UK without a fridge (washing machine mostly yes too, depending; dishwasher mostly not).

If I recall, in the novel Solaris, set largely on a spaceship orbiting a distant, sentient planet, one of the characters uses a slide rule.

Idea for a sci fi novel: total reliance on chatbots that predict what you want to hear based on the average of the internet ends the astonishing run of innovation we've had since the industrial revolution, and returns us to the situation humanity has been in for most of our history, in which technology develops slowly, if at all. What do things look like in a thousand years, when we're still relying on the current equivalent of slide rules and analog film?

Pretty sure you can thank the FCC for that :)

` August and September:

* Improving Volume responsiveness ... `

On the one hand: I'm a software engineer, I know none of the engineers involved wanted to put out a bad product or are happy about the situation. On the other hand, my Sonos system became almost unusable with the latest update. One would think that the ability to control the _volume_ is part of a speaker's MVP. It's now unbelievably laggy, when it works at all.

Agreed. And a point that keeps getting missed whenever this discussion comes up is there's a big difference between junior and senior programmers. What should a junior programmer do? Write as much code as possible! KLOC is a pretty good measure of progress for junior programmers, how else do you get better at programming? To know when not to write a line of code, you have to know how to write the line of code in the first place.

That's one ideal, sure. I don't see it though -- who's going to keep all these individual driving pods clean? How is access going to be gated to them? SF is a dense city, only New York has higher population density. Its BART and muni and bus service isn't bad, either -- and partly because it's such a pain to drive downtown, it gets used, and being used keeps it safe.

Oh my goodness the lights! Am I misremembering or is it really only the past few years that it's felt like half the cars on the road have their highbeams on constantly? Not even a big car thing, though big cars make it worse; it's any car with LED headlights.

How much was it the advent of better technology that didn't require those supply chains? Iron. In which case the lesson is: have more and more complex supply chains, tie us all together, don't allow us to be independent because civilisation _is_ that interdependence.

That's what I got from this too. Copywriting is about the only thing ChatGTP _is_ good for.

Pretty sure the commenter is referring to what, in London, are called Chelsea Tractors.

Who knows! Maybe? The email that's written by ChatGTP, but no human actually reads it because at the other end it's summarised by ChatGTP too: maybe that'll be it. LLMs almost but not quite cancelling out the meaningless guff they add to the world.

It can both be true that a) LLMS and their successors will be the sort of huge multiplier for intellectual pursuits that _machinery_ is for physical work; and also b) they are AWFUL for education, and will result in the general population losing skills.

Right? I'd have been entirely unsurprised if Bing saw a 100% increase, given how buzzy all this has been. (Finally, an actual reason to use Bing!) 15% seems like a failure.

...And no one can write anything without profanity. It's so ugly! Why make the world an uglier place?

Somewhat sarcastic, but I'm making a point too...

A nice read.

Slightly off-topic, but Stargate is one of those movies, like the 90s Mummy, like Tremors, that's really much better than it needed to be, and remains greatly entertaining today. The care they put into the Egyptology really speaks to that.

Agree!

An example I like: the Fargo TV series. Each season is self-contained and none outstays its welcome.

It's a... weird list. Why is number 2 the UK rejoining the EU? Even if Labour get into power tomorrow, that's not going to happen. (Even if the _Lib Dems_ somehow get into power tomorrow, it's not going to happen.) That boat has sailed and everyone knows it (and I'm saying this as someone who'd like us to rejoin, but also as someone with, apparently, more understanding of political possibility than him). Number 4, "the formerly existing Ukraine". Riiight. But I thought it never existed, according to Russian propaganda..?

In Number 6 "Poland repartitioned in the process" I'm seeing maaaajor projection. It's not the West that wants to storm in and repartition it though, right?

Number 7, Northern Ireland rejoining the rest of Ireland is... actually kind of plausible. Could totally happen. Few people in Britain would care very much any more, and demographically it's been on the cards for a while. It's a totally reasonable prediction in an otherwise batshit list.

I was in Westminster Abbey a few weeks ago. It's arranged, in so far as it's planned at all, to lead you to the tomb of Henry Tudor, who (in sharp distinction to the other kings) is locked away in what resembles a giant iron cage -- presumably owing to his own paranoia.

Anyway, I like the idea of saying that _this_ dynasty which won the throne through vast acts of violence is legitimate, and any subsequent wresting of the throne through the sword is illegitimate. Wasn't legendarily Briton originally settled by refugees from Troy? I wonder if we can determine which of us is the closest male patrilineal descendant of Brutus. Make them king.

Edit: got my ancestors and descendants confused :).

Yup. And so we get: https://area120.google.com/

This is a very good point. An overworked, under resourced team is running just to stand still. There's no time to take a step back, consider what might be done differently. It just has to be done right now. It's a recipe for stagnation.

Indeed. And let's say you made the cut, you're staying, phew. What about next year, when there's the next cut? And the year after that? You've every incentive to hire _bad_ people, to protect your good ones. It's in your interests that other teams fail so that yours can survive.

Sure, you can cut 80% of anything and things will run just fine for a while. You could even stop paying your bills, and nothing bad would happen for a month or two, as invoices pile up. In fact I'd guess that you could cut 100% of UX and Product and no one would much notice for a year or so. So, why not do that? Because for all that we talk about short-termism, companies are long-term entities. Shares in a company are valuable now _because they will probably be valuable in 20 years time too_. So such self-mutilation is rare.

> And one last thing. The company that has deep enough pockets can survive tons of shit. If you wave a check big enough, you will find people willing to go through hell and back and who will drag the company forward. I believe this is a very important point. I felt that we (software engineers) sometimes have too big egos believing that if enough software engineers left, the company will fall apart. The reality is that (big money) can help navigate quite dire circumstances for companies.

Does Twitter have deep pockets? And if it offered you whatever it would take for you to spend some months in hell, do you trust that it would be able to pay? Twitter is in an awful situation, and in sharp distinction to Musk's previous near-death experiences, there's no government coming to bail him out.

It's a crisis of productivity that Brexit has made worse.

Question for software engineers in the UK: how good are companies these days at training up junior engineers? One of the starkest differences I saw on leaving London for Silicon Valley was how much better SV is at training up young engineers. But I left a decade ago (in what was, in retrospect, a high watermark for the UK); perhaps matters have improved?

Yup. There _is_ a bottom line.

I remember a few years ago taking Ubers and thinking: "so cheap! But, well, this can't possibly last". And it didn't.

This was the Wes Anderson movie that would (in my very humble opinion) have benefited most from being a limited TV series instead. Have five or six episodes, one per story. As a film, like every anthology film I can bring to mind, it's a curate's egg. Good in parts, not good as a whole. (Of the three stories, the first is wonderful; the second insufferable; while the third relies too much on a thing, the policemen's chef, that isn't a thing.)

I'll give you the pork-markets speech, yes. No, please, take it! :)

Maybe the word is bathos. She wants to be Thatcher but is cursed with a modicum of humanity.

In fairness, the set of lunatics currently in charge are anything but banal. Banal and insipid would be lovely. Banal and insipid wouldn't e.g. blow up our relationship with Europe, or attempt to out-Thatcher Thatcher. I'd love banal and insipid right now...

"[FAANG] jobs tend to be quite demanding and require developers to put in a lot of extra hours when compared to smaller businesses."

They're more demanding to _get_, I wouldn't say they're more demanding to do. At a FAANG there's also more scope for intra-company hops too. People frequently switch teams immediately after getting promoted.

Fair, and we do use A LOT of macros in general.

I think I had the same reaction.

How useful is the word "happiness" here? "Pleasure" seems a better term for the author's first sort of happiness. So, sure, pleasure is important in life but cannot be the only thing. The second sort, is that happiness at all? Striving towards a sense of accomplishment or satisfaction.

The problem in this world we've made is not that people choose to spend a fun time with friends rather than run a marathon. It's pleasures that are hardly even pleasures. It's getting angry on the internet, or gambling, or taking this or that substance because it's easier than living.