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zo1

3,319 karma · joined April 3, 2014

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zo1··on Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed
Reading the domain-name had the same effect for me.
zo1··on If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?
It's all too easy to dismiss valid concerns as it's just the boomers/somethings complaining about "back in my day" and everyone getting on their lawn.

Software definitely improved for many decades, then at some point started going downhill. Where that happened is up for debate. But UI/Software/Quality is NOT one of those "oh it's just the new generation complaining about the old days" or old people "reminiscing".

zo1··on Future euro banknote design proposals
One of the designs does! It lists the bird name and a few properties about them like their size and life-expectancy.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/banknotes/future_banknotes/ht...

The weirdest thing is that all the notes say "The President". Wtf is that?

zo1··on Future euro banknote design proposals
Case in point:

Nikola Tesla wasn't Croatian. He was Serbian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

zo1··on Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
Bankruptcy is such an alien concept. Adults took out consensual loans from another adult and now they get to just say oops "take backsies"?

It's one thing if you're in a crazy desperate situation and someone takes advantage of you, I could get that. But if you're not desperate and you took money from someone else and can't pay it back? Theft.

The rest is just how we manage to keep that low on an aggregate level in our society that takes care of our own - which we want to do.

zo1··on Mark Zuckerberg Lied to Congress. We Can't Trust His Testimony
It's human nature scaled up. Just isolate and zoom in on any single injustice or "how the sausage is made" scenario that you are privy to in your industry. Just a random water-cooler discussion about agreeing to a certain tech framework, or being 5% more likely to promote the project who's team is led by your friend, etc.

...And it gets worse and worse the higher I go in my career. Nothing is logical, nothing is purely organic and merit based. It's all marketing, promotion, personal-preference and plain old backroom deals. No amount of banging your head against any wall with logic or pros/cons can dissuade those in power from changing their mind, unless you force their hand with blatant lies/facts/bad-optics.

zo1··on Mark Zuckerberg Lied to Congress. We Can't Trust His Testimony
The additional problem to this is that they guided the industry and their own platforms to actively generate that much content. No effort was made to naturally or organically slow the creation or even perform any sort of de-duplication. So whatever argument they use for "we're too big, their is just too much content" is directly on them.

Social media is a slot-machine essentially, and in order to do that they had to mobilize and incentivize entire industries to revolve around generating millenias-worth of content.

zo1··on Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse
It's unfortunate that they are being repurposed to fix a problem entirely generated purposefully for political gain. Those individuals should never have been allowed to flood the system and take effort away from true egregious victims and crime.
zo1··on Ghidra by NSA
It's basically "VS Code" UX with dark mode. Come on, is this some sort of joke? Serious question.
zo1··on uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts
People subscribe so they can "get more" of a channel in their feed. As if that does that much.

It's not self-inflicted, it's purposefully done this way to take control and power away from users.

zo1··on Claude Code is being dumbed down?
> `For example, some of us have been regularly using the double hyphen since long before the LLM era.

This "emdash" and "double dash" discussion and mention is the first time I have heard of it or seen discussion of it. I've never encountered it in the wild, nor seen it used in any meaningful way in all my time on the internet these last 27 years.

And yes - I've seen that special dash character in word for many years. Not once has anyone said "oh hey I type double dashes and word uses that". No it's always been "word has this weird dash and if you copy-paste it it's weird", and no one knows how it pops up in word, etc.

And yes, I've seen the AI spit out the special dash many times. It's a telltale sign of using LLM generated text.

And now, magically, in this single thread, you can see half-dozen different users all using this "--" as if it's normal. It's like upside down world. Either everyone is now using this brand new form of speaking, or they're covering for this Claude code developer.

So yeah, maybe I've been sticking my head in the sand for years now, or maybe I just blindly ignored double-dashes when reading text till now. But it sure seems fishy.

zo1··on Tesla ending Models S and X production
And yet such a HUGE amount of time is spent by families around the world (mine included) just moving laundry around in various states:

Dirty -> Sort It Yourself -> Plan Washing Chunks -> Load into Washing machine -> Yay It "Washed it For You" -> wet pile of clothes -> Unload it -> dryer -> Dryer "Dries" it For You -> Fold It Yourself -> Storage.

Now do this for a family with 2 kids that go to school. Washing is literally an hour or two of collective human time every day.

I'd pay money to rather spend that time with my kids instead of yet another useless daily chore that can be automated.

Now also apply the same logic to dishes, clearing up around the house, sorting cupboards, Driving!!, and a host of other things. The market is absolutely huge, and people are sticking their heads in the sand because they know that once this drops, humanity will reach an inflection point and all pointless manual labor will disappear, which means saying goodbye to cheap third world labor and only capital + raw resources + energy will be the only things holding back all scaling.

zo1··on France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
But you could say the same thing the other way, that's the point. I.e. you're not listening to what Republicans are actually saying but rather what "Democrats" are saying the republicans are saying.

Even your response is oblivious to the point, and you're doubling-down on "only the other side (Republicans) is liars, my side aren't liars" as a way to address the fundamentally different realities you and them seem to occupy.

zo1··on France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
I don't think we conceptually live in the same universe if you think those things about the democratic 2024 messaging. I just don't understand how you and your opposing commenters can have any meaningful discussion if you're so wildly differing in interpretation of such a public topic.
zo1··on We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
Yet again poor communal behavior ruining it for the rest of society, and why we can't have nice things and colonize the stars.
zo1··on Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home
Twitter was a dumpster fire of hateful leftist echo chamber activism. X is much better and way more balanced.
zo1··on Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism
That sort of thinking needs to first and almost-entirely be directed at China, India and Africa, then we can talk about sustainability and what the West can do.
zo1··on MCP is a fad
Have you been in the same industry as the rest of us? 90% of all developers out there in the wild create "legacy code very quickly" anyways, they too create "slop" before we coined the term "AI slop". This mythical "someone who is actually qualified in the problem domain" you mention is maybe 5% of the entire software development ecosystem. If you work with only those developers, you're extremely privileged and lucky, but also in a very isolated bubble.
zo1··on AI coding assistants are getting worse?
I'm a "backend" dev, so you could say that I am very very unfamiliar, have mostly-basic and high-level knowledge of frontend development. Getting this thing to spit out screens and components and adjust them as I see fit has got to be some sort of super-power and definitely 20x'd my frontend development for hobby projects. Previous to this, my team was giving me wild "1 week" estimates to code simple CRUD screens (plus 1 week for "api integration") and those estimates always smelled funny to me.

Now that I've seen what the AI/agents can do, those estimates definitely reek, and the frontend "senior" javascript dev's days are numbered. Especially for CRUD screens, which lets face it, make up most screens these days and should absolutely be churned out like in an assembly line instead of being delicate "hand crafted" precious works of art that allows 0.1x devs to waste our time because they are the only ones who supposedly know the ancient and arcane 'npm install, npm etc, npm angular component create" spells.

Look at the recent Tailwind team layoffs, they're definitely seeing the impact of this as are many team-leads and managers in most companies in our industry. Especially "javascript senior dev" heavy shops in the VC space, which many people are realizing they have an over-abundance of because those devs bullshitted entire teams and companies into thinking simple CRUD screens take weeks to develop. It was like a giant cartel, with them all padding and confirming the other "engineer's" estimates and essentially slow-devving their own screens to validate the ridiculous padding.

zo1··on 39th Chaos Communication Congress Videos
This "anti-fascism" talk sounds all nice and noble. But we all know that actual left-wing extremists have taken over the term now and most members are terrorist-adjacent. The irony is that antifa and other such "anti-fascists" are way more fascistic than their hypothetical and currently non-existent "fascists".
zo1··on Tongyi DeepResearch – open-source 30B MoE Model that rivals OpenAI DeepResearch
If you think these things are just using a "dumb" search query, and using the top 5 hits, you're in for a lot of surprises very soon.
zo1··on Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
Yes, but only after fracturing the ecosystem even further unfortunately.
zo1··on FSF announces Librephone project
I would imagine because women are under-represented in this field, so naturally we have to weight gender over qualifications. It's just the way things are. I wish it wasn't and qualifications/ability played a 100% part in these decisions.
zo1··on Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
We're nearly-there. The humans then become the capital/resource to be acquired, not money.

That's why every country is somehow chasing that elusive "population growth". It creates more "things" to own, whether that be money by virtue of more people creating more money through economic activity or simply more people to claim as "yours" (for the elites/leaders).

zo1··on Python developers are embracing type hints
Sounds to be more of a symptom of the types of programs and functions you have written, rather than something inherent about types or Python. I've never encountered the type of gerry-mangled scenario you have described no matter how throwaway the code is.
zo1··on Microsoft has urged its employees on H-1B and H-4 visas to return immediately
That is exactly what Democracy is. The only difference is people that are now complaining have, up until recently, actually been "the wolves", and now that they're outnumbered on certain topics and country-wide decisions they complain about the concept itself.

How do you think the people on the other side have felt till now?

The checks and balances only acted as a way to hide the true nature of government.

zo1··on Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers
Judging by what I've been seeing in the field in the last half-decade, this doesn't surprise me one bit. Zero forward thinking and comprehensive analysis of features before they are built, with tickets just being churned out by incessant meetings that only end because people get tired. And the devs just finish the tickets without ever asking why a feature is being built or how it actually has to interact with the rest of the system.

Multiply that by years, by changing project managers and endless UX re-writes, huge push for DEI over merit, junior & outsourced-heavy hires and forced promotions, and you end up getting this mess that is "technically" working and correct but no one can quantify the potential loss and lack of real progress that could have been made if actual competent individuals were put in charge.

zo1··on PuTTY has a new website
It was bad enough that we had to tell developers to trust some rando website to download a tool that we'd use to potentially plug in sensitive production usernames + credentials.

A link that looks like this:

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.ht...

And now they've gone and made it worse by posting some new site and confirming the new link is real on their weird "hachyderm" social media post thing. Yeah, talk about a grey-beard get-off-my-lawn developer screaming at the wind and wanting to make it worse for themselves and their "brand".

zo1··on PuTTY has a new website
This seems similar to the Notepad++ team using their platform to promote political viewpoints.

The same thing happened with Facebook "pages", when they became a personal "soap box" by the owner of the page. It was downhill from there... You might as well turn the whole web into FB/Twitter/X/Insta promotional spam at that point.

zo1··on Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
We should coin a new term: "Straight to Netflix"
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