kescusay

kescusay , 8 months ago to technology in Arch and other Linux operating systems Beat Windows 11 in Gaming Benchmarks

As an Arch user myself… I feel seen.

kescusay , 9 months ago to technology in Amazon exec says it’s time for workers to ‘disagree and commit’ to office return — “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”

How about… No?

I’m one of the folks who actually likes to go in to the office every once in a while, but I’m never making it a daily commute. Never again.

Hell, I’m on an international team now. Over the course of the pandemic, we built ourselves up with folks from multiple states and multiple countries. There is exactly one person on my team I could see regularly if we went back to the office. Literally everyone else is hundreds of miles away at a minimum. Many would need passports.

And that one person? He’s got an immune-compromised family member, so he’s never going back to the office and risking his loved one’s life.

Fortunately, my employer knows it would make zero sense to require all of us to go back to the office. My boss doesn’t even live in the same state as me.

kescusay , 9 months ago to technology in Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset'

Only the beginning. Their absurd attempt at a licensing money-grab backfired so badly, they couldn’t have screwed themselves over any worse if they’d just put it a statement saying, “Stop using Unity. Unreal is so much better!”

kescusay , 9 months ago to linux in Ultramarine Linux Flagship is a contender for desktop of the year

I mean, it looks okay and I’m glad to see competition, but yeah… Snoozer of an article with very little that makes me want to format and give it a go.

kescusay , 9 months ago to technology in AWS turns Amazon's Fire TV Cube into a thin client

Again, it’s probably down to the hardware. They already had firmware that fully supported it, and they knew what they wanted to add and remove as far as features for this other use-case. It probably would have been more work to grab an off-the-shelf Linux distro and tune it to the same specifications.

kescusay , 9 months ago to technology in AWS turns Amazon's Fire TV Cube into a thin client

Android is Linux. Also, they already have an android distro that is fine-tuned for the hardware, so why not reuse it?

kescusay , 9 months ago to showerthoughts in Coffee is a mana potion and Cough Syrup is a health potion

From now on, when I’ve got a cold and I’m working on fixing bugs in our code while living off coffee and cough syrup, I’m calling it a dungeon crawl.

kescusay , 9 months ago to world in Intercepted calls from the front lines in Ukraine show a growing number of Russian soldiers want out

Citation needed.

kescusay , 9 months ago to technology in Blade Runner director Ridley Scott calls AI a "technical hydrogen bomb" | "we are all completely f**ked"

I use Copilot in my work, and watching the ongoing freakout about LLMs has been simultaneously amusing and exhausting.

They’re not even really AI. They’re a particularly beefed-up autocomplete. Very useful, sure. I use it to generate blocks of code in my applications more quickly than I could by hand. I estimate that when you add up the pros and cons (there are several), Copilot improves my speed by about 25%, which is great. But it has no capacity to replace me. No MBA is going to be able to do what I do using Copilot.

As for prose, I’ve yet to read anything written by something like ChatGPT that isn’t dull and flavorless. It’s not creative. It’s not going to replace story writers any time soon. No one’s buying ebooks with ChatGPT listed as the author.

kescusay , 9 months ago to world in Intercepted calls from the front lines in Ukraine show a growing number of Russian soldiers want out

Unlikely. The Ukrainians are literally fighting for their homes and their lives. While I’m sure they’re sick of warfare, it doesn’t follow that their morale would at all be similar.

kescusay , 9 months ago to news in Derek Chauvin, officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, expected to survive prison stabbing

Inconceivable!

kescusay , 9 months ago to news in ‘Archaic’: the Tennessee town that made homosexuality illegal

They’re still doing the Pepe thing? They do know Pepe’s creator hates them and killed Pepe in his comic, right?

How embarrassing and stupid of them.

kescusay , 9 months ago to showerthoughts in When someone starts with I'm not racist it usually means they are.

I’m not [INSERT_BIGOTRY_TYPE], but [INSERT_TEXTBOOK_BIGOTRY_EXAMPLE].

kescusay , 9 months ago to news in Derek Chauvin, officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, expected to survive prison stabbing

No, I’m glad he’s going to survive. I want him to live a long time knowing what he did.

kescusay , 9 months ago to technology in OpenAI's reported 'superintelligence' breakthrough is so big it nearly destroyed the company, and ChatGPT

I didn’t find it surprising, because I do stuff like it every day (except I’m using Copilot integrated into my IDE, not ChatGPT).

What he did was very cool. But he’s a game developer who already knows all the parts he needs and what to ask for, and he still has to do a lot of work by hand. He glossed over it quickly, but there are parts where he had to add code to specific, already-existing blocks of code in his program, and in order to do that, he had to know and understand what the current code was doing.

And throughout the video, he had to know not only what to ask for, but how to ask for it. That takes experience and understanding.

It’s possible that eventually, programming for a lot of people will mean expertise in interacting with large language models + lesser expertise in the actual programming language, but I don’t see that as likely to end programming as we know it. In fact, it might cause a surge in developer demand as the bar to entry lowers again, much like it did in the 2000’s. And there will always be demand for people with a deep understanding of the actual code, because they’ll be necessary for things like performance improvement, bug fixing… and writing the next generation of large language models.