topgrain2

That’s… about how I might have written that.

Yeah right after I posted I thought about editing in that a 3-4 all-programmer team with one person (maybe half-time) acting as basically team secretary was already the best unit for software writing, but bigcos seemed to have trouble forming them without adding a bunch of overhead and making their programmers often blocked or idle for some reason.

It’s just that now if I have an LLM that can talk to my business comms and reporting tools (jira was already mostly for managers to generate reports, not to help the people doing the work, that’s why it sucks so much as a tool for getting actual work done) and my first-pass at programming looks a lot like just writing a programmerly-flavored feature or bug ticket, having other people making useless first drafts of tickets for me to rewrite (and probably have to go clarify them with an SME or stakeholder anyway) and someone dedicated to poking around in Jira in general, is gonna start looking funny even to bigcos, I think.

As my company experiments with AI-heavy programming, I don’t feel like my job’s going away, but as a “full stack” programmer who’s also good at and comfortable managing a task board, walking “stakeholders” and SMEs through requirements-gathering, et c., I am increasingly wondering why our “teams” still have a couple non-programmers doing that stuff. Dedicated QA, for that matter—all that test-writing and test-data-generating and stuff is so fast now. It’d speed things up if one or two programmers just did the whole thing.

But maybe my particular skill set where all those roles were only really out of reach for me for time-constraint reasons is less common than I think… I dunno, though, between people who’d moved up into managing projects but can drive an LLM pretty competently for programming (ex programmers) and versatile can-talk-to-people seasoned programmers, it’s all the other roles that look increasingly like they’re slowing productivity, rather than increasing it, now.

Someone on a call the other day tentatively brought up that they were noticing it was taking longer to get all the paperwork right for a bug fix or even mid-sized feature than it was to actually write and test the fix, by the time they looped in some variety of person in a jira-wrangler role. It’s clear those jira-wranglers are gonna have to fight to keep their jobs (I don’t really know how they’re gonna do it, I feel apprehensive on their behalf in every meeting now)

Maybe it’s trying to split the output into more than two audio channels when in CarPlay mode? If it were only Apple Music doing this I’d be sure this was triggering its Atmos output, not sure how it’d be affecting other players, but maybe.

Companies’ executives and top investors should let us see their location data then. And open up every part of their internal comms that don’t directly disclose trade secrets. At least the metadata!

It doesn’t hurt them, just lets us make better decisions, after all. There does not exist a good reason they’d object!

Plenty of them hate at least some of it!

Source: have spent years at a stretch in pretty great shape. I definitely hated a good amount of what I had to do to achieve and maintain that. Disliked the activity, or simply would rather have been doing something else. But, lots of other stuff (including pretty much all other physical activity) is way more fun if you're at least somewhat in-shape.

Good Google was functionally gone when Doubleclick took them over. That was a loooong time ago.

They gave up trying to fight search spam and just permanently broke their search in like 2008.

Not long after that (IIRC) they started serving the same obnoxious ads as everyone else instead of their “nice” text-only ads, and stopped clearly marking inline ads in search results, so they could trick users and better-run their extortion racket (“pay us to advertise for your own company name or who knows where the people who are definitely trying to find your website might end up?”).

The notion that they were notably better in 2017 than today reads like some kind of joke.

On the other hand, a pill to replace all the un-fun activity needed to stay in shape while having a family and office job would let you enjoy fun activity a lot more, and want to do those things more often, since they’re all more-fun and safer if you’re already in shape.

The idea of simply mounting a filesystem and selecting from a list of titles which roms to download and add to your local games, unloading them and transparently re-downloading when you need to free up space, all without relying on a centralized host even for the file index, is pretty appealing. You can do similar things with torrents but it's not quite as "natural".

Most of the emulator frontends I've seen are pretty against integrating this kind of ease-of-piracy stuff, though, accepting recognizing and filling in metadata for well-known roms, but not making it easy to integrate with remote libraries of roms... except tools that run on "hacked" consoles, which seem to love just giving you a list of games with a "tap A/X to pirate" UI.

The worst is when you get a manager who’s either too clueless to realize you’re seeing a pay cut from an “increase” so small, or one who knows but is pretending otherwise.

That awkward pause in the comp update meeting when they tell you about the “increase” and seem to expect some positive reaction. LOL.

I was seeing the fake light fixtures in listing photos at least four years ago.

Fake furniture is bad enough (the scale issue you mention is the main problem) but fake parts of the house should definitely be illegal.

This has pushed me to high levels of brand loyalty with direct ordering from the brands I like and trust, plus a lot of buying used… also mostly products from a handful of trusted brands (this is largely clothes, nearly all of which I buy used except socks, underwear, and most sweaters)

I think all browsers have that now. I use it 3-4 times a year with Safari on both macOS and iOS. That way I feel comfortable closing them all without worrying about “losing” anything.

I’ve been doing this, or something similar, for at least 15 years now. Dozens of mass-bookmark “folders”. I’ve never once looked at the bookmarks I made, not a single time. I even have old bookmark files archived here and there, from machines and browsers for which the bookmarks weren’t auto-backed-up to “cloud” storage like my Safari stuff is. As soon as I can get a local llm running that’s up to the task, I’ll probably have it build some kind of table with categorization out of all of them, then have it edit out entire categories of crap until I have something I might actually scan over to recover a few interesting tidbits. Finally make some use of them, now that tools can take enough of the pain out to make that a less-daunting prospect.

1800s? We had actual open borders with the rest of the Americas until, like, the 1950s.

Farmers at the time were super-worried about the shift, since they already relied heavily on immigrant labor. Their concerns didn't manifest as major problems for them mostly because until very-recently enforcement was (pretty much intentionally) half-assed, such that the border remained de facto kinda open for immigrant farm labor (even, and especially, the illegal kind).

Now that situation's arguably not good for a bunch of reasons, but we've never had a strongly-enforced border, and in fact didn't regulate Western hemisphere immigration to any meaningful degree within living memory. Changing that to a highly-selective system with strong enforcement of immigration laws to keep out a large majority of prospective illegal immigrants would be a totally novel approach to US immigration. (Good or bad, either way, you can't really appeal to US history in its defense, and "without it the country will be destroyed by immigration!" demands an answer for why that didn't already happen, to remain a viable point)

There are more taxes than federal income and corporate taxes. State taxes and especially the ~15% of wages that go to FICA also matter (the topic was small businesses, so presumably the owner's not making so much more than the FICA limit that this becomes negligible).

> I don't think the second amendment is particularly relevant. The point of the second amendment is defense against a tyrannical government so by definition we're in extrajudicial territory and don't care if it's legal or not.

Governments can be locally tyrannical, or tyrannical in-the-moment with the actors immediately involved, but not at all levels or not over a span of time as the pool of people involved grows.

In fact 100% of the cases I know about, of the second amendment's consequences being successfully used against a tyrannical government in the US, it's been a local government that's turned tyrannical (usually very-corrupt local cops and city or county government[s], coupled with a bunch of racism).

(To be clear, though, I'd not personally advance that fact as a strong point in the 2nd's favors as an actually useful-in-practice amendment for the supposed purpose of "defending liberty", as there are at least as many cases of private arms propping up local tyranny, or sowing political terror in the name of tyranny; "a mixed bag" would be a very generous reading of the history, and "net-harmful to the cause of securing liberty" is probably the fairer judgement)

> Incidentally, corporate taxes are why many small business owners pay themselves wage income, rather than doing stock buybacks or dividends.

You've been sold some BS. Usually this is because you're required to take a "reasonable" wage for your role in a company. Otherwise I guarantee you every independent contractor out there (among others) would be operating in a way that made 100% of their income business profit, rather than wages, as it has enormous tax advantages. Approximately everybody tries to find out the least they can take as wage income without pissing off the IRS, and sets their "wage" to whatever that is.

I do at night, just for the bedroom. Need it to sleep well. I Keep it around 75-78 in the house in the daytime, on hot days, and just dress for it, no problem then.

I've lived in a house with no AC and even slept outside on a hammock on the hottest days (luckily that was a house built in the 19-teens so it could cope with AC-less heat better than modern houses, but still, on nights when your nighttime lows were still in the high 70s and the air wasn't moving, outdoors was cooler than indoors) and I didn't acclimate, I just only got like 3 hours of sleep a night when it was hot, every single time it was hot.

Need the cold for sleep. I'd have to move farther north for my own sanity if not for AC (and I'm already far enough north I only need AC to achieve low-60s nighttime temps for 60-70 nights per year). I could lay off it a little if work didn't still expect me to function when it's hot, but they do.

Who had much more firepower? That the cops knew about? The shooter was accused of ambushing the cops, but didn't fire until the cop drew on and aimed at a retreating protester (that part wasn't in dispute, it was part of the cop's testimony). AFAIK none of the other protesters had firearms, just the single shooter hiding on the edge of the woods.

This was shortly before two people got murdered on camera by cops in Minneapolis, and after/around the same time as several other attempted murders (that would have been successfully spun as something chargeable on the victim, if not for video evidence showing plainly that the cops were lying)... so... it doesn't seem like a totally crazy notion to me, that a person might have shown up armed intending only to fire if it looked like a cop was going to shoot someone without a great reason. Maybe a jury would still have convicted (there was a bunch of fuckery with jury selection on this case, incidentally, and I mean way more than usual, even, it's worth reading about; like after what the court selected for on the jury, I believe they almost certainly would still have convicted) but not even being able to raise that defense seems nuts.

Can it be defense of self or others, to shoot a cop who draws a lethal weapon on someone who's not an immediate threat?

If it can't, the second amendment is even more pointless than it already appears to be.

> Uh, I think firing a gun at someone is a bit more than "inciting violence", more like attempted murder?

The shot cop had drawn a gun on someone who was running away.

The judge didn’t even permit the defense to argue “defense of self or others” as a justification.

It used to be possible to bust up a company based (more or less) simply on their having too much of the market.

Right wing interests built up think-tanks after the Second World War, having seen the success of especially the Brookings Institution during the New Deal and world war eras in pushing technocratic-liberalism and wanting to fight fire with fire by creating their own credibility-laundering offices for propaganda advancing the desires of the rich. This effort bore its first great fruit in the mid '70s as Chicago School economists and lobbyists successfully overthrew that enforcement regime and replaced it with one in which specific harm must be proven to win an antitrust case, which de facto ended meaningful anti-trust enforcement in the US and led to the consolidation of money, power, and media over the following decades.

Aaaand... here we are, in the endgame of that movement.

> There's no difference between what you can do in a "real" computer and what you can do on a smartphone.

In fact, it kind of runs the other way: even my "portable" "real" computer is terrible as, say, a camera, or level. It's a bad GPS navigation device, both due to the form factor and it's entirely lacking the hardware for it (technically they can have this, but very few do).

There are lots of things my phone can do that even my laptop, let alone my desktop, practically can't.

Same here, apparently it’s a major ADHD thing. I can take notes or I can pay attention and try to understand, but I can’t do both, you have to pick one (a calculus teacher in high school was very insistent that constant note taking for her rapid-fire example-heaving lectures was required, so… yeah I didn’t have a clue WTF we’d even been covering after each of those classes, though I’d have lots of notes!)

A person can take a shot every week.

What’s a person supposed to do about a problem that’s probably tangled up in several major areas and would require large reforms across the economy? We can’t even get mandatory minimum paid leave or healthcare for everyone (both of which might well be components of fixing it “right” anyway!)

This is likely a problem that spans our food culture, business culture, economic structure, built geography, and social benefits system, among other things.

You can spend a lifetime fighting those and be fat the whole time because despite massive effort and objectively incredible achievements you and your movement only got us 5% (that’s a lot!) down the road towards fixing these things, in fifty years.

Or you can take a weekly shot and be well on your way in a month.

Working on the “real” fix is definitely something we should do (it’s not like the causes of this aren’t causing other things to suck, too) but even people doing that would probably like something available that they, not just their great-grandchildren, can have.

The drug is more likely to work long-term. Diet & exercise, as a treatment plan, are distressingly ineffective.

Well-studied problem.

It makes more sense when you realize that something like sheer dieting/exercising willpower isn't why some populations are skinnier than others. Pick another country with a healthier-weight population, start placing some of them in the US, and they'll gain weight. Put them back, and it'll drop again.

If "just diet and exercise" (the advice, and individual effort to that effect) aren't what are keeping some populations skinnier, why would it cure a population with an obesity epidemic?

It got rare enough that by some time in the '90s they stopped even using solid wood for trim and doors in mid-priced houses.

Before the '60s or so, you'd see a lot of narrow-ring old growth flawless, knot-free stuff used in framing and even huge support members, of a quality that'd be reserved for things like solid wood furniture, trim & finishes, and veneer after that (and then phased out of trim and finishes somewhat later).

What happened is it stopped being just as cheap as new growth—that is, it got rare enough and new growth got cheap enough that farming new growth finally became viable, and soon dominated.

Something "funny" related to this happened with wood-shingled housing in the US in the '80s: wood shingles had a reputation for being premium, long-lasting roofing, but this was a reputation built in the era when all of it was thick shake made out of that excellent old growth stuff. It got trendy in the '80s, spiking demand, just as the material for the real stuff, the stuff that was the reason people wanted it, got too rare to practically use for that anymore (except for way higher prices). What was installed was thinner, and made of worse wood.

The roofs installed on new houses in that period soon became notorious for leaks and often ending up covered over with desperately-applied asphalt shingles within 15 years, while the wood roofs were supposed to last closer to 50... but that was the old material, the new stuff was still wood but was not the same product, as that no longer existed as something Mere Mortals could afford.

It’s tricky. Buy 1970s or earlier and risk asbestos and lead issues (look how late asbestos was still used in a few things! It’s surprisingly late). Buy later than about 1985 and all the good old-growth wood was gone so it all sucks in different ways.

I learned the rules to and terminology of (American) football by playing football video games (mostly nfl2k1 on the Dreamcast). Similar story for ice hockey.

What’s the video game to play to understand cricket?