em-dash's recent activity
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Comment on Any software engineers considering a career switch due to AI? in ~comp
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Comment on Any software engineers considering a career switch due to AI? in ~comp
em-dash Link ParentMy company is... more optimistic about AI than I would like, but isn't forcing it on employees who don't find it useful. These jobs still exist, at least for now. I have heard horror stories from...My company is... more optimistic about AI than I would like, but isn't forcing it on employees who don't find it useful. These jobs still exist, at least for now.
I have heard horror stories from friends, though. Several of them have AI tool adoption as a metric they've been told to optimize for, which is maddeningly backwards. Some of their bosses have "engineers don't read code anymore" as an explicit goal.
I miss when blockchains were the hot new thing everyone was trying to shove into their products.
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Comment on Passing question about LLMs and the Tech Singularity in ~tech
em-dash LinkThe problem with that is LLMs don't have source code in the way that would be meaningful here. You have a program that provides an interface, of course, but the "running the LLM" part of that...The problem with that is LLMs don't have source code in the way that would be meaningful here. You have a program that provides an interface, of course, but the "running the LLM" part of that program consists of loading a really big array of numbers and doing math on them. The array is just data, not code, but that's the part where the "thinking" happens, to the extent these things think.
You can (and people definitely do) use the LLM to generate increasingly fancy wrappers around this process, but it doesn't make them smarter.
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Comment on What are some of your recent "little" failures? in ~talk
em-dash Link ParentI do this all the time. It's gotten to the point that I know which dishes will do it, and will preemptively take the kitchen's smoke detector off the ceiling and leave it outside until I'm done...I do this all the time. It's gotten to the point that I know which dishes will do it, and will preemptively take the kitchen's smoke detector off the ceiling and leave it outside until I'm done cooking.
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
em-dash LinkI'm writing firmware for my little combat robot control board. It's a STM32 microcontroller, an ELRS radio receiver, 8 half-bridges of onboard motor drivers (configurable for whatever arbitrary...I'm writing firmware for my little combat robot control board. It's a STM32 microcontroller, an ELRS radio receiver, 8 half-bridges of onboard motor drivers (configurable for whatever arbitrary combination of motors one wants to attach to them), and some extra PWM outputs for controlling servos or bigger motor drivers (the onboard drivers are intended for wheel motors; spinny weapon motors typically want more power than they can provide). The whole thing is a few square centimeters, the size of a Malenki Nano but with more stuff shoved into the same space. Designing PCBs zoomed in on a large screen and then seeing them at actual very-tiny size in your hands never ceases to be a weird experience.
I started out wanting to play with embedded Rust and Embassy, but the Rust toolchain seems to not get along with this board for whatever reason, and I decided I really just wanted to get on with making thing go spinny instead of debugging that, so I fell back to C++. I don't actually need an RTOS for what I'm doing, I suppose; as long as I can run the main loop at a few hundred hertz
The other problem I have is that I only ordered a pile of 3.3V voltage regulators because the board is mostly 3.3V, but the radio receiver needs 5V, so I haven't gotten the remote control part working yet. So tonight I am going to order some of the 5V ones, and then probably do a ridiculous bodge involving very thin wires to get 5V to the receiver, so I can start on the code to talk to it.
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Comment on RCS — SMS via the internet — is good, but it doesn't matter in ~tech
em-dash LinkUgh, RCS. I'm the one person in my group who doesn't use it, because it's apparently implemented in the Google messages app and not at the Android level. I don't use that app, so I don't get RCS....Ugh, RCS.
I'm the one person in my group who doesn't use it, because it's apparently implemented in the Google messages app and not at the Android level. I don't use that app, so I don't get RCS. This is fine.
But when I moved last year, I left my phone in the moving truck and had to go buy a temporary replacement, the cheapest phone the AT&T store would sell me at the time. Which, of course, came with the Google messages app, as Android phones do. It silently autoregistered itself as RCS capable, and caused mass chaos in my friend group's MMS chat, since I was the last member to do so and that allowed the other phones to switch over.
I did not realize this had happened, and also it seems to take nontrivial time to unregister from RCS after clicking the button to do so (I assume caching somewhere), and also some of the other people in that chat had buggy RCS implementations, so there were a couple of weeks of the chat spontaneously splitting and some people not receiving messages from other people, even if I wasn't either of the people involved. (And, memorably, one person not being able to see their own messages.)
It was a mess and it soured me on RCS as a whole. It could have been great.
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Comment on Theme reset? in ~tildes
em-dash LinkI had this happen the other day! I do not know why and didn't look very closely since it's stayed set since I changed it back. I blame aliens.I had this happen the other day! I do not know why and didn't look very closely since it's stayed set since I changed it back.
I blame aliens.
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Comment on What private companies are you happy doing business with? in ~talk
em-dash Link ParentValid question. I think the answer is that I do more subtle threat modeling than most people do. My hot take on warrant canaries is that don't actually do anything. If I was running a service...Valid question. I think the answer is that I do more subtle threat modeling than most people do.
My hot take on warrant canaries is that don't actually do anything. If I was running a service where people expected them, I'd provide them because they make people feel better, but there's not much functional difference IMO between "we secretly read your emails" and "we secretly read your emails but people know that we read someone's emails".
In practice, I just treat email as an untrusted channel anyway, because it's not end-to-end encrypted - that is, even if my end is encrypted at rest (e.g. what protonmail does when interacting with other email providers), the other end probably isn't (or effectively isn't), and so I can't rely on the secrecy of it. I just switch to something else for anything sensitive.
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Comment on What private companies are you happy doing business with? in ~talk
em-dash Linkrsync.net and purelymail.com are services that do offsite backup storage and email hosting, respectively. That is all. Their marketing strategy is "you need thing? we sell thing. tell us how much...rsync.net and purelymail.com are services that do offsite backup storage and email hosting, respectively. That is all. Their marketing strategy is "you need thing? we sell thing. tell us how much thing you need and we will sell you that much thing at a reasonable price." The world needs more companies that do one thing well, aren't trying to expand into an all-encompassing megacorp, and trust you to know better than them what you need.
I've also been happy with LittleMachineShop, who sells home-workshop-sized machine tools and machine tool accessories, and is generally less sketchy and has better QC than the other places one can buy similar tools.
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Comment on Draw an iceberg and see how it will float in ~science
em-dash Link ParentIn my defense, I wasn't trying to draw phallic shapes, I was trying to see how much of the sun I could block with an implausbly shaped but stable iceberg, and giant erect ice dicks happen to be a...In my defense, I wasn't trying to draw phallic shapes, I was trying to see how much of the sun I could block with an implausbly shaped but stable iceberg, and giant erect ice dicks happen to be a good strategy.
my high score is more of a weird whale-adjacent creature though
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Comment on What are some stories of progressivism gone wrong in implementation? in ~society
em-dash Link ParentYeah, what @CannibalisticApple said. Everyone involved, including me, was on board with the name change itself. I include it only as backstory for the actually bad part after it. I've edited an...Yeah, what @CannibalisticApple said. Everyone involved, including me, was on board with the name change itself. I include it only as backstory for the actually bad part after it.
I've edited an extra sentence into that paragraph to hopefully make it more clear.
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Comment on What are some stories of progressivism gone wrong in implementation? in ~society
em-dash (edited )LinkI've told this story before elsenet, but this question reminds me of it, so I'm reposting it here: So [the company I previously worked for] was loudly pro-queer. I've applied to several places...- Exemplary
I've told this story before elsenet, but this question reminds me of it, so I'm reposting it here:
So [the company I previously worked for] was loudly pro-queer. I've applied to several places that weren't transphobic, but this is the only one I've applied to where it wasn't even a question I had to consider. In the end I started to find it actively exhausting, and when job searching after that I looked more for companies who were more quietly supportive, like "just consistently call me Emily and move the fuck on please".
We had a group called something like "the future is female", open to non-men generally. One day the person running that group decides she'd like the name to be explicitly nonbinary-inclusive, and proposes some new names, and in explaining her reasoning, says something about "female" being unnecessarily exclusive, and that some transphobes use it in an exclusive way and it'd be nice if someone looking at just the name could see that it's explicitly inclusive. We all agree this change is good, the group is renamed, and everything is fine.
Later, another person (often privately ridiculed for being over-the-top supportive of us while clearly not having done the research), who writes a lot of our company announcements, is writing a company announcement about this change. She latches onto that last part, horribly misinterprets it, and writes something to the effect of "we're abandoning 'female' because it's a biological term and we want to include people who identify as women but aren't biologically female".
So I reply-all, and call this out as a very weird thing to say, and explicitly state that Well Actually, As A Trans Woman, I am cool with being called female and do not consider it to exclude me. She quickly backpedals and apologizes, and we all move on.
But that incident has stuck with me, because it's a demonstration of how easily a morally neutral term like "female" can accidentally become demonized. Nearly everyone else at that company was ready to go along with this surprise redefinition, and probably start calling out their friends for using the word "female", because they are all Loudly Supportive and actively want to avoid even the appearance of being on The Bad People Side of any issue.
And then we lose another perfectly valid word to fear, and also label a bunch of people as transphobes for no reason, and alienate a bunch of people who otherwise would've supported us, and everything gets worse for everyone involved. (Except the bigots. They just had language normalized in their favor again.)
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Comment on Scalable oral exams with an ElevenLabs voice AI agent in ~tech
em-dash Link ParentWhy, though? Writing a paper given a bunch of information one can consult as needed, and then editing it into the final result that people read, is an entirely different skill from answering...it seems like you should be able to have a conversation with someone who wrote a paper and they should be able to answer questions about it.
Why, though? Writing a paper given a bunch of information one can consult as needed, and then editing it into the final result that people read, is an entirely different skill from answering questions off the top of one's head.
... in much the same way as playing music, actually, though not in the way you describe: would you expect a great songwriter or composer to automatically be a great performer? I'd argue that writing a paper is analogous to writing a song, and answering live questions to playing arbitrary songs on request.
In the world of research, where the whole goal is figuring stuff out and writing the results down for future people to reference, I would greatly prefer to directly optimize for that and not for live performance.
(And yeah, same, re: interviews. I've started explicitly telling my employers that I am irreconcilably bad at it, citing vague handwavey neurospicy reasons, and they should prefer literally anyone else if possible.)
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Comment on Scalable oral exams with an ElevenLabs voice AI agent in ~tech
em-dash LinkSo, setting aside the utterly disrespectful absurdity of an LLM calling me on the phone: I would completely agree with this if not for "live". Instead, I find myself wanting to say many impolite...So, setting aside the utterly disrespectful absurdity of an LLM calling me on the phone:
If you cannot defend your own work live, then the written artifact is not measuring what you think it is measuring.
I would completely agree with this if not for "live". Instead, I find myself wanting to say many impolite things to this person.
It is a good thing to take time to think about what you're going to say before you say it. That is a skill more people should have and use. That's why I spend more time hanging out here and other text-based places than talking to people in person. (Yes, even at work. We send emails. It's great, more companies should try it.)
For example, over the few minutes I took to write and edit this comment, I had an additional realization, which would have come too late to say out loud in a verbal conversation: this is another instance of that thing where we're not sure anymore, as a society, whether the purpose of education is to prepare students for jobs, or to educate them more broadly. I would believe that this more accurately reflects the dystopia we're likely heading toward. I do not believe for a second that it is better at measuring actual in-depth understanding.
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Comment on What's something you're "in too deep" on? in ~talk
em-dash Link ParentIf they own the place, you may be able to find their names from property ownership records. this is how I knew a neighbor's name months before meeting them, and then when I met them I had to...If they own the place, you may be able to find their names from property ownership records.
this is how I knew a neighbor's name months before meeting them, and then when I met them I had to consciously avoid calling them that name before they told me
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Comment on Statement from Mozilla's new CEO in ~tech
em-dash Link ParentI copy my profile directory around when setting up new machines instead of using sync services, and I've never had anything get automatically turned back on by an update. It is indeed really weird...I copy my profile directory around when setting up new machines instead of using sync services, and I've never had anything get automatically turned back on by an update.
It is indeed really weird if sync ignores a few particular settings like that. Curiosity: what's the default value of services.sync,prefs.sync for those settings?
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Comment on Whatever happened to _____? in ~talk
em-dash Link ParentCompanies known to the public for one thing often have entire tangentially related product lines! Texas Instruments makes calculators and non-electronics people think they're a calculator company,...Companies known to the public for one thing often have entire tangentially related product lines!
Texas Instruments makes calculators and non-electronics people think they're a calculator company, but among electronics people they're more known for their chips made to be used in your own products. I use their power management bits a lot.
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Comment on Markdown/inline links don't work unless URL starts with http(s) in ~tildes
em-dash LinkTrivia: you actually can omit the protocol in an absolute URL, it just has syntax that'll look really weird to most people: //tildes.net for example It uses the protocol of the page you're already on.Trivia: you actually can omit the protocol in an absolute URL, it just has syntax that'll look really weird to most people:
//tildes.netIt uses the protocol of the page you're already on.
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Comment on Weathering software winter (2022) in ~tech
em-dash LinkI have always been fascinated by how different my computing preferences are from 100r's despite starting from what seems like the same principles. I seem to value all of the same things -...I have always been fascinated by how different my computing preferences are from 100r's despite starting from what seems like the same principles. I seem to value all of the same things - efficiency, fun, platforms that can be held entirely in one person's head, not actually liking computer-touching so much as just making stuff.
But then I follow where that takes me and I arrive at a totally different place, one with register machines, type systems, memory safety, and structured control flow. The computer can handle all of these things with minimal effort on its part; why not let it, so I can focus on making the thing I want to make?
The affinity for live coding systems (both the modern kind and the lisp/smalltalk image-based kind) among permacomputing people is also pretty weird to me. I want to make things and know that they will persist as I made them. That's a big part of the point of permacomputing to me. Editing a running application makes me instantly worried that I am creating a state that I will not be able to easily reproduce later.
I suspect a large part of the difference is that last value I ascribed to them: perhaps they're far less jaded on computing than I am, and still enjoy it for its own sake. I'm glad they're doing what they do, regardless. The world needs more of this weird stuff that doesn't scale.
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Comment on Library exhibit brainstorming in ~tech
em-dash Link ParentYou could cover the gears with clear sheets of something (polycarbonate?)You could cover the gears with clear sheets of something (polycarbonate?)
I am so very tired of this nonsense. It has crossed my mind to leave the field, but I don't know what else I'd do. I got lucky in that I am very good at something that people will give me lots of money for. I don't expect to have high chances at doing that for a second career.
It's frustrating to watch, because I empathize with the boosters. I like the idea of a development tool so high-level that non-engineers can use it effectively. But every time it's been tried, the result has been another thing engineers use, and usually don't particularly like using: COBOL, UML, low/no-code platforms, and now this. I like the idea of a tool that automates stuff I don't feel like doing, but it has to actually effectively do that. If I wanted another tech stack I had to babysit I'd just spin up another homeassistant instance.
I try again every few months, but I still haven't gotten results out of any of these tools that reach my standards of "I am comfortable submitting this as finished work". The most I'd trust them with is scripts I run once, verify the output, and throw away. The quality of the fully-vibe-coded software I've seen suggests that other people aren't getting significantly better results, they just have lower standards.
So I am optimistic that the fad will last just long enough that when the bubble pops and it's no longer cost-effective to run these things, I'll be one of the relatively few who remembers how to write code the normal way. Until then, I shall suffer through it.