bonesss

I use PowerPoint for that.

Draw outlines, or use graphics, wire up clickable areas, and interaction flows, and you’ve got a presentable “live” demo that doesn’t run afoul of issues presenting demo sites to non-techies (placeholder text, ugly buttons, test domains, colours, etc).

“Eating less” is the bottom line, but the road there can be fraught.

Many people don’t understand what the high calorie drivers in their diet are, many wildly mis-estimate how much they’re eating, most people inflate the weight loss impacts of training and neglect the appetite rebounds, and the interplay between insulin and appetite and how to manage satiety signals is voodoo for even a lot of doctors. Availability of proper food and time to prepare it are hurdles on top of hurdles.

My estimation is that a lot of people are using way, way, more energy and willpower in their ‘diet’ cycles than necessary but tragically getting poor results because of miscalibration. Our society is geared around profitable food delivery, not healthy dietary wisdom.

“You can’t outrun the fork.”

Nuclear doomerism is what has lead us to this silly "status quo" and the subject of the article/thread.

There is more than one kind of nuclear, and the fuel situation has known reserves that aren't being used because of lack of demand. Fuel costs in reactors are only a very small part of their operational costs so new mines are not the priority. We also have viable seawater extraction technologies that are waiting for appropriate demand. Past that, there are also breeder and waste-burning reactors long held-up as a vital and fuel-conserving part of a complete nuclear eco-system.

Bluntly: the nuclear build-out France achieved in the 70s, scaled globally, would solve the climate problem and position us for synthetic fuel production at a civilizational scale. Modern technologies & robotics have us on track for facilities producing low greenhouse energy for more than a century. Global shipping, transport fuels, and energy-intensive industry require high-energy inputs. WWS are wonderful, but very awkward in those domains.

The other problem is the prisoners dilemma: if the west stops having children and not-the-west does not stop then within a short time we will have replaced the west with an equivalent population breeding much faster for cultural or religious reasons.

There is also a world of social disruption, which could lead to environmentally disastrous wars, that come from those kinds of demographic inversions. The combination of worsening climate issues with those destabilizations might lead to acute depopulation at the global level, but not likely of a climate-friendly variety.

Destroying the world to improve some portion of the climate experienced by some portion of some population at some unspecified later date a century or more in the future versus, say, geoengineering and attacking the present-day cost structures of nuclear energy strikes me generally as a Bad Plan.

Oil drilling helps oil companies.

Nuclear power threatens oil companies.

We used to talk about replacing transportation fuels and low-carbon shipping (global energy). Now we talk about personal responsibility and rooftop solar (residential electricity). You can find oil company PR slide decks explaining why and how. Greenwashing worked, pushing the renewable ‘debate’ worked. We missed the windows on critical infrastructure change, and seemingly enjoy an unstable chunk of desert dictating global energy, inflation & food prices. <shrug>

Hypothetically: perhaps they are trying to curtail users spiraling during episodes of frustration or worse, impacting their own mental health, presentation, and product affinity.

Kinda like how if I break some plates at a restaurant I have to pay for it, but if Tony Soprano breaks them the restaurant pays him.

Protection is a heck of a business model, if you can get away with it.

I landed a massive database upgrade on a payroll system years ago, end-to-end standardization, cleanup, and improvement with a seamless rollout.

Our back clapping was interrupted by an angry customer phone call. One of our customers had gotten access to our internal schema and had a massive reporting setup in Access solving most of his needs.

I ended up converting his reports using some internal tools we had. Customers will grab anything to give them.

[The caliber and depth of his reports were such I wish we would have bought them instead of making me spend months building out our own reports.]

Having built a hobo version of something similar (serving a minimal subset of the Kafka API on top of CosmoDB): there’s also the hybrid scenario where the cheap serverless streams are used for scalability and broadcast while a low-latency core is maintained on sharply reduced compute resources. An 80/20 approach that saves a lot and, in our case, reduced cluster (mis)management risks at the same time.

In our case BLOB and large document transfers were handled in parallel, merging them together through object storage is a highly appealing package. Great work!

There were a lot of arms used over the border on October 7th, more confiscated on video and being used on video against the IDF, and the constant stream of unguided rockets being shot at civilians year after year. Rockets are weapons.

Hamas describes its fighters as their “military wing”. They engage in military training exercises and wear uniforms (when not fighting). That’s a military.

While it may be dumb, gross, and a hate crime against their civilians: war was the exact and predicted outcome of the attacks Hamas launched. They made statements to that effect, kicking off a regional war was central to the plan on October the 7th.

Like how Tony Soprano sold sandwiches and ‘protection’ at the same time. Two income streams are better than one.

Blowing something up so hard it almost gets into space is a feat of engineering, even if all it does is rain debris from ahigh.

I believe it’s checkbox-filling in the acquisition process for enterprise contracts, like a lot of other half-baked capabilities in their flagship products.

It doesn’t matter how they work, it matters you can tell leadership “yes, they have that too” to maintain existing contracts and vendor relationships.

Speculation, but: if tech over hired during COVID our section of the market could be experiencing a corrective slowdown while others are booming in aggregate.

I think we can all agree No True LATAM company would have 10,000 employees.

Or, in parallel, the research showing LLMs intelligence will operate on an S-curve, eventually hitting a long valuation deflating plateau, is dead on the money and The Big Guys are trying to delay that inevitability for as many quarters as possible…

I’d add on to that lifecycle demands: a development project with no users has a tight cheap feedback loop with high quality bug reports with relatively obvious bug sources, once issues start working through layers of QA and customers the per-issue costs raise by several factors (50x to 200x are numbers I’ve seen from research, YMMV).

I would feel very confident slapping something onto Chrome ‘back then’ with only internal users. Today, with millions of users and CEO-level attention to screwups, I’d use a lot more time per issue. It’s a fundamentally different risk/reward/confidence situation.

It’s pelicans, all the way down.

> The software will suck and will not really innovate, but it will make a ton of money

Microsoft’s goal isn’t to provide high quality software that outperforms other software, their goal is to provide an obvious and reasonably proximate answer to clueless execs trying to check things off of a procurement list so that existing contracts can snowball and competition is excluded.

We, collectively as a global species, really lost out when MS wasn’t divvied up in their anti-trust trial. Office as its own corporate entity would be in a radically different place right now, as would their enterprise customers.

How do you work on Windows in the age of LLMs?

That’s easy: you activate WSL and then ask the LLM how to get networking and stuff working since they changed it with WSL2. You need a config file flag to setup network mirroring now.

I babysat for a military fighter jet mechanic when I was young, he said when they dismantled and rebuilt planes there was a drawer for all the spare parts that were left over.

A large majority of windows devs choose Apple hardware has to major challenges for MS.

If devs just want shiny flashy then MS has failed at providing that directly or through their partners. If devs are able to make credible technical reasons, year after year, that sustain IT & budgetary scrutiny, that also is a failure from MS.

Personally “being able to run docker without this bs” was credible for many years, tech that now is a de facto expectation for most .NET dev jobs and well-integrated-ish into windows and WSL.

My personal challenge is that if c, generate then review, isn’t pretty close to a one-shot then I am almost certainly negative for time versus creating from scratch (accounting for over-documenting, prompting, and enforced pauses for generation).

The sunk cost fallacy bites and then bites again and again.

Sam Altman says a lot of crazy stuff, but I don’t think that is where the ‘bubble’ is coming from.

In recent months we’ve had the first automated unmanned amphibious assault, the daily drone count in our hot wars is jumping by leaps and bounds, and arms suppliers are promising future drone shipments in the hundred thousand unit range. The ten year picture for reactive combined swarm intelligence on the battlefield is promising to be widespread, highly lucrative, and in need of constant adaptation to near-peer efforts. Datacenters in space are dumb, datacenters in space to power orbital weapons networks and rapid response capabilities make sense.

On top of that we have international trade, scalable customer service, and a first pass 80/20 answer for businesses focused elsewhere. Shitty, maybe, overpriced, maybe, but useful enough our grandkids are gonna use ‘em.

In both cases, as well as potential new LLM-like tech, there’s an argument to be made for being a leader now to dominate the future. That means compute and tech positioning, and memory & GPU deals.

YouTube was a money loser, Google was ‘losing’ money on them for years, YouTube didn’t have a sustainable business model. YouTube was the biggest, though, and whatever premium Google paid to be #1 then meant they were #1 when the online video business model matured. Now they’re printing money with a platform outcompeting news, social, and video platforms.

In .Net-land we have access to a lot of the underlying MS library code, and reflection/decompilation if needed.

MS has layers, there are A-teams, B-teams, and so-on. Simultaneously they are dropping both world class work and, to your point, a statistically much larger pool of just pretty good code.

A lot of that work is perfunctory and somewhat bloated/weakened by the scale of publishing and their internal tech-political requirements. Components for component I’ve seen in-house replacements for many MS projects from mid-tier devs that are better, smaller, and less brittle over time.

I’d compare it to baking: a home cook or tiny bakery have the advantages of time and focus, perpetual consistency at scale is a whole different baking challenge, one that doesn’t necessarily yield better individual loaves. It doesn’t mean WonderBread is bad at bread, just that they’re optimized for something other than maximal loaf quality.

I have a sneaking suspicion that if everyone proffering an LLM coding opinion stated their languages and area of focus/expertise we’d all be in a lot more agreement about the output…

Example 1: “as a JavaScript front-end developer working with React and node, I think LLMs save 500 hours a week and are better than anyone on our team.” <— easy to believe

Example 2: “as a backend Erlang developer working on life-critical systems the inconsistent output makes LLMs dangerous and the code is tidy but terrible at scale.” <— fully congruent with the first example

Taking a multi-decade perspective, I wonder if our general analysis is focused too much on the initial wave of LLM tech and current gen GPUs.

Owning a massive data center connected to water and power and network that can be targeted or converted to developing needs seems like a decent problem to have for the big cloud companies. We have compute hungry companies and media, in addition to cryptocurrencies etc, and we’ll have more of them in 2045.

I don’t know if I’m underestimating how purpose-built these datacenters are, or overestimating the accountants in the corporate vehicles building them, but the broader situation doesn’t seem as fragile as 1929 or 2008 (even if the businesses are overvalued and LLMs fall totally out of fashion).

Xursor?

> making goblins less likely to over-appear or show up in inappropriate contexts

So inappropriate goblins are still likely, just less so…

Hey, remember when tech bugs were things like buffer overflows or cross-thread performance impacts? I miss the days when our war with system goblins was purely metaphorical.