We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync

It’s institutional food - a restaurant can serve 1500+ people if they’ve prepared for it. For example, take a college cafeteria - the food usually isn’t bad, even though it’s made in massive quantities

Institutional food only comes into play when the institution takes the lowest bidder. Like most public school districts, prisons, and whenever else the state runs cafeterias directly

It’s a small but very meaningful distinction

If there’s any chance they’ve heard about a concept, I’ll ask if they’ve heard of it and take them at their word (without comment either way).

And if they’re kinda nodding impatiently, I’ll wrap up the explanation and move on to the deeper level

At first, people will sometimes be defensive or lie about knowing a topic, but after you establish there’s no judgement either way with you I’ve found people become less hesitant about admitting ignorance and will even want to hear your explanation of something to check their knowledge

I also do the flip side - I pride myself on admitting when I don’t know something, so that might play in too

Exactly… And ultimately they are beholden to shareholders. Which are largely in it for the stock price, not the dividends - they want numbers to go up, and they don’t care if it crashes the company in a few years when they’re no longer holding the bag

Money today is worth more than money tomorrow. With enough data and analysis, riding companies into the ground is the optimal way to make money

People just don’t get it… LLMs are unreliable, casual, and easily distracted/incepted.

They’re also fucking magic.

That’s the starting point - those are the traits of the technology. So what is it useful for?

You said drafting basically - and yeah, absolutely. Solid use case.

Here’s the biggest one right now, IMO - education. An occasionally unreliable tutor is actually better than a perfect one - it makes you pay attention. Hook it into docs or a search through unstructured comments? It can rephrase for you, dumb it down or just present it casually. It can generate examples, and even tie concepts together thematically

Text generation - this is niche for “proper” usage, but very useful. I’m making a game, I want an arbitrarily large number of quest chains with dialogue. We’re talking every city in the US (for now), I don’t need high quality or perfect accuracy - I need to take a procedurally generated quest and fluff it up with some dialogue.

Assistants - if you take your news feed or morning brief (or most anything else), they can present the information in a more human way. It can curate, summarize, or even make a feed interactive with conversation. They can even do fantastic transcriptions and pretty good image recognition to handle all sorts of media

There’s plenty more, but here’s the thing - none of those are particularly economically valuable. Valuable at an individual/human level, but not something people are willing to pay for.

The tech is far from useless… Even in it’s current state, running on minimal hardware, it can do all sorts of formerly impossible things.

It’s just being sold as what they want it to be, not what it is

That’s such a naive bleeding heart take. If you look at the numbers, every American is making more than ever on average.

So problem solved, we’re killing it. No need for a second metric or to think about the implications of that statement any further.

… What? Code quality is “does it work” followed by readability, only then do you get into performance and other things

Good code is better than shitty code by definition.

Well on the flip side, I somehow ended up doing legacy projects with a dude that has been coding for decades and is still actively developing in VB and asp.net. Weirdly, the guys not dumb - he asked me for an API and I blew his mind with generics and cut the code down by a third. I then introduced him to the concept of (primitive) components, he isn’t quite sold on the importance of code reuse, but every time I delete 1k lines of old code and replace it with a 20 line function my soul grows

When we do code reviews, it’s basically pair programming sharing screen… Usually we just push everything and wait for bug reports, because this crazy ass company has been using a reference book, a calculator, and hundreds of people were manually re-entering things by memory into QuickBooks until January 1st this year. They were thousands of dollars off in the second week… We thought it was a bug. It was all user errors

He’s been working on this system for 15 years, I ran into a table with 126 columns the other day. Somehow, this dude manages to swim through a database with hundreds of tables and just as many triggers with rawdog sql.

It’s fucking wild…I split my time between that and working on my virtual assistant that brainstorms it’s own development with me, and an app that I’m trying to make into a unified fediverse client.

I know what a tight ship looks like and I push for best practices when I think there’s something to gain worth the fight, but the sheer spectrum of software dev is incredible. My legacy guy told me about what’s been taking all his time lately today - he has to build a system to screen scrape from an emulated IBM mainframe… And I spent my morning working on a unified activity pub interface and my evening testing my weird observation that LLMs speaking UwU seem to perform significantly better

My point being, there’s a sweet spot between methodology/process, and it’s very rare to hit it. And also, software dev is playing in realms beyond human comprehension, and no matter how orderly if seems it should be, every senior dev who still writes code is superstitious, and often correct to be so

Notify the people you have to notify for your blockers, then embrace the absurdity

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk

We need to compromise. Bike to work, but leave your car idling in your driveway while you’re gone

Data poisoning is part of my moral system. If a company asks me a personal question, I give them a slightly incorrect answer

I’ve been doing it since I started using the Internet, and it pays off. My information is all scrambled… It’s still out there since it’s all been leaked, but it’s enough to make it hard to process my info

Sort of, but good Samaritan laws generally would protect the person. They still could be fired for helping even if nothing goes wrong, because they’re not trained for that and immediately firing you might help a potential legal defense (and they don’t care at all about employees or morale because of the brutality of late stage capitalism). The company would be on the hook either way

A brave person would have helped anyways and took it online if they faced repercussions, a smart person would have whispered to the guy “I could lose my job if you tell anyone I told you this, but if you take a stand you’ll win. Obviously we need the plane, and it’s not like we can put you on the no fly list for this. I’m sorry, this isn’t right, but I need my job”

A person working for a healthy company would’ve apologized profusely for the wait and called around the airport until they found a chair… There’s a 0% chance this wasn’t an option, it would’ve made the airline look bad, but not publicly… Unless they’d already burned so many bridges they couldn’t ask the airport (or even other airlines, competition or no it’s not a hard sell if you’re cordial to the people you work around)