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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • As someone whose employer is strongly pushing them to use AI assistants in coding: no. At best, it’s like being tied to a shitty intern that copies code off stack overflow and then blows me up on slack when it magically doesn’t work. I still don’t understand why everyone is so excited about them. The only tasks they can handle competently are tasks I can easily do on my own (and with a lot less re-typing.)

    Sure, they’ll grow over the years, but Altman et al are complaining that they’re running out of training data. And even with an unlimited body of training data for future models, we’ll still end up with something about as intelligent as a kid that’s been locked in a windowless room with books their whole life and can either parrot opinions they’ve read or make shit up and hope you believe it. I’ll think we’ll get a series of incompetent products with increasing ability to make wrong shit up on the fly until C-suite moves on to the next shiny bullshit.

    That’s not to say we’re not capable of creating a generally-intelligent system on par with or exceeding human intelligence, but I really don’t think LLMs will allow for that.

    tl;dr: a lot of woo in the tech community that the linux community isn’t as on board with





  • This reminds me of the time my group played a kobold campaign. We found a halfling scout and dealt with him. Then we made an improvised catapult and launched his corpse into the middle of his camp. And then we snuck in and wiped the rest of the halfling party while they were trying to figure out what was happening.

    One of the guys in our party put skills in cooking and rolled a nat 20 making halfling jerky. A few sessions later a wizard or whatever granted us a wish, and we wished for our supply of nat 20 halfling jerky to never run out.

    So now we’re rolling around the countryside raising hell and handing out halfling jerky to everyone because it is now the most powerful diplomatic tool in our arsenal. We never told anyone what it was made out of and pretty much any NPC who didn’t want to kill us on sight got a piece.

    I don’t remember what happened to the party. I think our GM gave up in disgust after a while. Good times.




  • The final project in my instrumentation class was to tune a PID controller for a hot/cold mixing valve. I (CS/ENG) was paired up with an engineering student and a lot of it was throwing parameters in, seeing if weird shit happened, and then turning down or up based on the result. I had a programming final and something else I was supposed to be studying for, so I just started doing a binary search with the knobs. We got the thing tuned relatively fast and my partner acted like I was a wizard.




  • For some more context, when I was in my 20s I decided I’d never have kids because I didn’t want to have to spank them. My dad always said if you truly love your kids you’ll spank them to keep them from sinning. His parents beat him, and in his mind he was doing it right and not being abusive.

    I have a lot of issues and it took a lot of time to unlearn that mindset. I have a daughter now and she’s great! She’s also exhausting but we’ve never spanked her and never will.


  • I was interning at a power company at the time and they were mostly worried about weirdos and militia trying to pull a stunt. I walked into Operations one day and there was the scariest man I’ve ever seen, in a black suit with a shoulder holster. He said his job was to keep an eye on things and get to know everyone. He looked like a Dashiell Hammett character and smiled all the time, especially when nothing was funny.

    IT came around, pulled everyone’s computer apart, and then sealed them back up with tamper-evident tape. And of course everyone asked me if their power would be ok and I legally couldn’t answer. Clock hit midnight and nothing happened except Scarface wasn’t around when I got back from holiday vacation.

    We’d handled everything like a year beforehand but it was a weird couple of months.



  • I do most things on the command-line and for me, the trick is not having a lot of scripts laying around. If it’s a common action I do a lot (like running the local test bed), I rely on shell history. Beyond that I just start chaining stuff together on the fly. It forces me to keep knowledge of the utilities fresh, and also keeps me from having a ~/bin folder full of outdated crap that almost does what I want.