V0ldek

xD

My favourite dotcom is Ford

I just want to harp on this one:

“Existing methods for testing are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for developers nor for users.”

Wtf, can you imagine saying something like this about literally any other profession than software engineering? "Existing methods for checking brake pressure are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for mechanics nor for users". "Existing methods for sterilising surgical equipment are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for surgeons nor for patients". "Existing methods for checking voltage are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for electricians nor for users".

The lack of any fucking standards that devs are held to is insane, so the excuse for accessibility in the web being shit is that it's TOO TECHNICAL and kinda annoying for web devs??? Again, can you fucking imagine saying this about anything else, "ye, cars kinda suck because making sure they don't is all technical and kinda boring for mechanics to do".

It's YOUR JOB. Literally YOUR PROFESSION. PROFESSIONALS ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE STANDARDS you fucking piece of shit, have you no honour, not a single care in the world for your craft, you fucking babies. "Oh but it's very technical" YOU'RE A TECH SPECIALIST. THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU GET YOUR SALARY FOR????

I think most of this was caught immediately when the announcement was made (like the edited live coding), and in any case I can't stand watching this video to the end. "This scared the pants off every software developer in the world" no. No it hasn't. That's just not true. Why do you even say that. The immediate first reaction of any SE with even a passing awareness of how marketing of software tools works and not completely high on genAI farts was "ye that won't work" and, fucking shocking, it doesn't work, wow, no way.

People were trying to sell you that software engineers will be obsolete because "codeless apps" like 10 years ago. Wizards were supposed to eliminate jobs because they'd generate code so well. Knowing SQL was supposed to be completely obsoleted with ORMs. I'm too young to have been there but apparently XML was supposed to "solve networking" or something nonsensical like that.

Those ads aren't targeted at software engineers. They're targeted at execs. It's execs who get all excited that they can start firing their expensive and pesky developers that complain so much. Software engineers worth their salt don't buy this shit because bollocks like these come as part of the job description.

Anyway, trying to frame it as "it was supposed to be this revolutionary tool to replace developers" without mentioning that this is a song that's been sung for fucking decades is a disservice to the topic. Nothing makes executives as wet as the thought of not having to deal with those fucking "specialists" that they need to pay actual salaries and can't huff down their necks 8h a day with a whip to use if they don't hit KPIs. And that's extremely important to have in focus when you talk about shit like this and wonder "why did they raise so much money". Because VCs hate labour that's why. The answer is always that.

I like the format of this video except for that mid-plug for Patreon. Leave it for the end.

As to the actual text of the video:

At the end of my short adventure at MSFT I realised I organically obtained the abiity to read through Satya's emails. He had the uncanny ability to take a single sentence and extend it into a 3-paragraph email. Like, he would send a message whose actual information content was "we're cancelling the annual base salary increase" but it would take up your entire fucking screen. However, after receiving so many of those, after some time I was able to read it effectively -- skip the first paragraph, there's never anything of worth there; if the sentence starts as if it weren't leading anywhere then it's not, don't bother; read every second word -- there, you just saved 5 minutes and learnt exactly the same thing.

I never considered language ability to be any indicator of smarts. I've learnt your godawful language from scratch, literally anyone can do this, Elon Musk spoke reasonable English (before drugs and 4chan ate his brain). I don't mean it as something virtuous, as if I was better by not having this "flaw", but rather as... I never realised just how much of your image comes from that. So you're telling me people think this guy is smart because he uses four-syllable words? Wow. One of the best engineers I've met speaks like B1 English, makes constant grammar mistakes, and speaks with an accent thicker than Yud's skull, who the fuck cares, everything he says about software is pure gold. And now I realise he probably never got that promotion he was aiming at because some dipshit above him thought he sounded dumb?

There's no wonder the managerial class loves genAI so much, their entire shtick depends on copious amounts of form hiding the roughly five words of substance they come up with monthly. At least Satya doesn't have to spend so much time writing that slop I ignored anyway...

‘no im gonna do physics’ (like elon).

At first I was like "wait, didn't Elon have a B.Sc. in Economics" so I searched him and apparently he also has a... B.A. in Physics?

How do you get a liberal arts degree in Physics, what is this even

EDIT: Apparently there are allegations he didn't even finish that and he's lying about it, I don't care enough to actually look into it

I think there’s a framing issue with that entire illusion since the question presumes that one of the two is bigger

I disagree, or rather I think that's actually a feature; "neither" is a perfectly reasonable answer to that question that a human being would give, and LLMs would be fucked by since they basically never go against the prompt.

A lot of the "I'm a senior engineer and it's useful" people seem to just assume that they're just so fucking good that they'll obviously know when the machine lies to them so it's fine. Which is one, hubris, two, why the fuck are you even using it then if you already have to be omniscient to verify the output??

Also I'm sorry but

Why the discrepancy? A footnote in the CE Delft report makes it clear: the price figures for macronutrients are largely based on a specific amino acid protein powder that sells for $400 a ton on the sprawling e-commerce marketplace Alibaba.com.

this is exactly the sort of magical thinking I'm talking about "it will scale because we can order tons of the stuff off Alibaba" just what the fuck are you smoing mate, this can't be good faith analysis

I think it forces us all to ask an important introspective question -- if I were to become the target of a national manhunt, would my posting history look cringe?

Very good read, but throughout I can't help but say to myself "ye so the issue is scale. AS ALWAYS"

This is a tale as old as time. Fusion energy is here! Quantum computers will revolutionise the world! Lab-grown meat! All based on actual scientific experiments and progress, but tiny, one-shot experiments under best-case conditions. There is no reason to think it brings us closer to a future where those are commonplace, except for a very nebulous technical meaning of "closer" as "yes, time has passed". There is no reason to think this would ever scale in any way! Like, there is a chance that e.g. fusion energy at any meaningful scale is just... impossible? Like, physically impossible to do. Or a stable quantum computer able to run Doom. Or lab-grown meat on a supermarket shelf. Every software engineer should understand this, we know there are ideas that work only when they're in a limited setting (number of threads, connections, size of input, whatever).

The media is always terrible at communicating this. Science isn't fucking magic, the fact that scientists were able to put one more qubit into their quantum computer means literally nothing to you, because the answer to "when will we have personal quantum computers" is "what? how did you get into my lab?". We have no idea. 50 years? 100 years? 1000 years? Likely never? Which number can I pull out of my ass for you to fuck off and let me do my research in peace? Of course, science is amazing, reading about those experiments is extremely interesting and cool as all fuck, but for some fucking reason the immediate reaction of the general public is "great, how quickly can we put a pricemark on it".

And this leads to this zeitgeist where the next great "breakthrough" is just around the corner and is going to save us all. AI will fix the job market! Carbon capture will fix climate change! Terraforming Mars will solve everything! Sit the fuck down and grow up, this is not how anything works. I don't even know where this idea of "breakthroughs" comes from, the scientific process isn't an action movie with three acts and a climax, who told you that? What even was the last technological "breakthrough"? Transistors were invented like 70yrs ago, but it wasn't an immediate breakthrough, it required like 40yrs of work on improving vacuum tubes to get there. And that was based on a shitton of work on electric theory from the XIX century. It was a slow process of incremental scientific discoveries across nations and people, which culminated in you having an iPhone 200 years later. And that's at least based on something we can actually easily observe in the natural world (and, funnily enough, we still don't have a comprehensive theory of how lightning storms even form on Earth). With fusion you're talking about replicating the heart of a star here on Earth, with lab grown meat you're talking about growing flesh in defiance of gods, and you think it's an overnight thing where you'll wake up tomorrow and suddenly bam we just have cold fusion and hot artificial chicken?

I hate how everyone seems to be addicted to, I don't know, just speed as a concept? Things have to be now, news is only good if it arrives to me breaking in 5 minutes, science is only good if it's just around the corner, a product is only good if it gets one billion users in a month. Just calm the fuck down. When was the last time you smelt the roses?

If you keep running through life all the roses are gonna burn down before you realise.

Salvation Army

they are certainly mostly doing worthwhile things

No. Nope. Not in the slightest. Crucially, they're not even a charity! They don't get any financial transparency scrutiny a charity gets! It's a church! We don't even know how to evaluate them because there's literally no way to check what percentage of it is actually spent on charity. Their primary mission is to evangelise!

Also Chick'fil'A had to distance themselves from SA because of their egregious track record with gay rights. The Bigotry Chicken deemed them too bigoted.

This is completely off topic I think but I need you all to see this, it's important on a spiritual level

This map is infinitely sneerable, every region you look at is somehow worse than the previous one, regardless of the order in which you do that.

Tag yourself, I'm Cracked Coast, population 17.