You can stop making trucks taller at any point, but everyone else’s LED headlights will be right at your eye level

This sounds eerily familiar…

I don’t know if Hearst told him to use a chatbot to generate their “Best of Summer Lists,” but it doesn’t matter. When you give a freelancer an assignment to turn around ten summer lists on a short timescale, everyone understands that his job isn’t to write those lists, it’s to supervise a chatbot.

But his job wasn’t even to supervise the chatbot adequately (single-handedly fact-checking 10 lists of 15 items is a long, labor-intensive pro­cess). Rather, it was to take the blame for the factual inaccuracies in those lists. He was, in the phrasing of Dan Davies, “an accountability sink” (or as Madeleine Clare Elish puts it, a “moral crumple zone”).

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/

I feel like I’ve been saying this every day since like 2015 (Or maybe 2001. Or maybe 1999. Idk. Anyway…) but: This is a really bad idea.

Well-argued.

Unlearning Economics has a similar analysis of AI through the lens of cybernetics: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg

AI (through agents, but even completions to an extent) extends your reach and reduces your grasp.

For some sectors, that’s perfectly acceptable. There are plenty of codebases that don’t need to worry about keeping devs accountable.

There are also plenty of business models these days (especially in the Trump era) that face no downside from failing to keep devs accountable even if they should. VC-backed vaporware looking to exit before they drown in tech debt, private equity acquisitions that just need to bleed existing customers dry while disemboweling the productive capacity of the firm, or even publicly-traded brands that are chronically unable to think past next quarter’s P&L. And especially if they’re already a monopoly.

The trouble is really when a CTO misunderstands what kind of business they’re running, and considers the wrong folks to be their “peers”. There’s a big incentive to just copy whatever Amazon/Microsoft/Google says. It’s the new “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.

Idk if that’s your situation or not.

I’m guessing they meant “raw milk”?

He’s even got some yellow as a backup

Is there a perfect building?

Probably not, since they exist in an environment — which is constantly changing — and are used by people — whose needs are constantly changing.

The same is true of software. Yes, programs consist of math which has objective qualities. But in order to execute in the physical world, they have to make certain assumptions which can always be invalidated.

Consider fast inverse sqrt: maybe perfect, for the time, for specific uses, on specific hardware? Probably not perfect for today.

Not my own invention, but I’m glad you appreciated it: https://www.thenerdreich.com/

We had tons of help and the easiest baby ever, and I think I managed to pull off two 15-minute gaming sessions in the 4 weeks I had saved up.

Also: company established 3 months paternity leave about 6 months after I came back to work. I’ve never identified more with the boomers who oppose student loan forgiveness out of jealousy.

vendor whose major investors include Thiel’s Founders Fund

To be fair, most SaaS vendors probably have investors associated with the nerd reich

Codes of conduct*

Need the long-form neck certificate

In order to be effective at software engineering, you must be familiar with the problem space, and this requires thinking and wrestling with the problem. You can’t truly know the pain of using an API by just reading its documentation or implementation. You have to use it to experience it. The act of writing code, despite being slower, was a way for me to wrestle with the problem space, a way for me to find out that my initial ideas didn’t work, a way for thinking. Vibe coding interfered with that.

If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.

– Leslie Lamport

Yep. This what I don’t get about people who are using these spaghetti-bots. How do they figure out the right solution to a problem without actually walking around the whole perimeter of the problem?

My guess is they are not, and they’re just waiting until someone complains and they’ll get a job somewhere else and leave the mess for someone else(‘s chatbot) to clean up.

Between that and the death of open source, our industry is about to become a disaster area.

I mourn it too, because there are dumbasses like this who are buying the hype and setting the industry back by decades as a result.

When the moon hits your knees
And you mispronounce trees
Sycamore

Same as the question of “abolish the family” or “make more family shapes”?

Imo, with both gender and family… the problem is not individuals/groups using these constructs for self-organization and self-expression. It’s government granting legal recognition (and benefits) to some kinds of gender/family but not others.

Hey there, cutter.

If you’re really after the deconstruction aspect, then I’m not sure there’s a whole lot out there. But if you zoom out to the level of “methodically tinkering with a system that requires careful attention”, there’s a lot of those.

Hardship Breakspacer is part of a (pseudo-)genre known as “dad games”.

• Powerwash Sim
• Viscera Cleanup Detail
• Goblin Cleanup
• Pacific Drive
• Papers Please
• Quarantine Zone
• House Flipper 2
• Star Trucker
• Dredge

On the “hardcore nerd” end of the spectrum, there’s even:

• Satisfactory
• Factorio
• Scrap Mechanic
• Any Zachtronics game

A little more chill:

• Unpacking
• Potion Craft
• Please Fix The Road

Edit: Or for the “scraping my way through out in space” vibe, but less tinkering:

• Endless Sky (free and open source!)
• FTL

Edit 2: Also, repair is probably an applicable theme:

• ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs
• Car Mechanic Simulator
• Space Mechanic Simulator

Pleads for asylum for a persecuted refugee

DHS: “And I took that personally”

The horrible names of these things…

o4-mini, not to be confused with 4o-mini

And 4o, not to be confused with 4 (aka 4.0 or v4, but 4V is different)