kescusay

kescusay , 7 months ago

If this guy was in the United States, he’d be a MAGA Republican and spouting similar U.S.-focused conspiracy theories.

kescusay , 7 months ago

Do they rant and rave against Canada’s universal health care system while using it?

kescusay , 7 months ago

Ultimately, what it boils down to is that they want to force trans people to de-transition, go back into the closet, and hopefully kill themselves. The pain and aggravation caused by these stupid bathroom laws is quite literally the point.

kescusay , 7 months ago

They all got greedy. All of them. We wanted a streaming service to watch our shows and movies on, and they all decided to pretend that what we really wanted was a return to paying $100+ a month for a collection of channels with content that we mostly don’t watch on them, only this time with a bunch of additional apps you have to install for each one, most of them remarkably shitty. Like cable, but stupider.

Remember when the streaming setup was simple? There was basically just Netflix, it paid for licenses to content from Disney, Paramount, etc., and provided guaranteed income for those companies. Small income, sure, but steady.

Then each of them said, “Hey, why don’t we replace Netflix, only all we’ll stream is our own stuff! And sure, most of it’s trash, but people will stick around for the good shows!”

No. No, they won’t. They’ll go back to pirating it. No one is paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, Max, Peacock, AppleTV, ESPN+, Prime, and whatever other shitty “exclusive” streaming service pops up.

kescusay , 7 months ago

Where’s that shocked Pikachu meme when you need it…

kescusay , 8 months ago

Oregonian, here. Kinda not surprised this happened in Medford. There are parts of the state that have a serious problem with fentanyl, almost as bad as in the rural south.

kescusay , 8 months ago

Hamas has genocide as its openly, publicly stated goal.

kescusay , 8 months ago

I live in a non-prohibition state, so haven’t thought about the fact that there are still prohibition states for years.

kescusay , 8 months ago

It’s the Independent, not spam. Indy100 is part of the Independent.

kescusay , 8 months ago

It’s true, but I’m not sure how we do it.

Here’s the thing… Democrats could flip the House and increase their lead in the Senate easily. In fact, they could make their leads in both chambers practically insurmountable. All they’d have to do is have small numbers of Democratic voters in the large states move to states like Wyoming, the Dakotas, Idaho, etc. Have a few million people migrate from California, New York, and Illinois, and those deeply red states would instantly become bright blue.

The problem, however, is obvious: How do you convince someone living in New York to move to North Dakota?

kescusay , 8 months ago

I really hate that this isn’t an Onion headline.

kescusay , 8 months ago

Not exactly. Wonkette is more like Stephen Colbert, using factual news as the basis for mockery and derision aimed at the right. This article, for example, accurately quotes Trump on the horrifying “poisoning the blood” rhetoric, and then rips into him for it.

kescusay , 8 months ago

Just this last week, my youngest kid caught and brought home influenza-A, which I’ve been reading is pretty gnarly this year. But it’s been comparatively mild for us - probably because we vaccinate. Mostly just an annoying cough and some fatigue.

In my case, I didn’t get sick at all. My wife has mild symptoms, as does my oldest kid. The worst is actually my youngest, but still not particularly severe.

Moral of the story: Vaccines are fucking awesome and the fact that some people refuse to vaccinate just blows my fucking mind.

kescusay , 8 months ago

Oh, Drawfee is definitely worth watching. Damn near pissed myself during the Orbeez bit.

kescusay OP , 8 months ago

I mean, “after school Satan club” definitely sounds like something the Onion would come up with to make fun of the satanic panic Christian types.

kescusay OP , 8 months ago

Motto: “Come to school for a piece of ASS!”

… I feel bad about writing that.

kescusay , 8 months ago

Return? I never stopped wearing them. Or social distancing and avoiding indoor spaces packed with strangers.

Weirdly enough, I haven’t caught COVID yet, either.

kescusay OP , 8 months ago

Quite true. Given the reality on the ground, it’s a guaranteed clusterfuck no matter what policy the United States adopts.

kescusay OP , 8 months ago

It worked (and works) to head off criticism of the Israeli government because so much of the time there are antisemites whose supposed criticism of the government is there to mask hate.

But Netanyahu isn’t Judaism. He’s just a guy, and as a fallible human being he has made enormous errors of judgment and engaged in ludicrously unethical behavior.

kescusay , 8 months ago

Sorry, we accidentally released a beta democracy into production.

Planned changes include:

• bugfix: remove unneeded electoral college (slows progress down)
• bugfix: replace current hard-set limit on House with dynamic value that grows with population
• feat: add protection for voting rights to system firmware/constitution (current piecemeal legislative approach is difficult to optimize)
• bugfix: set polling location availability by population density, not population wealth
• feat: implement ranked-choice election system (deprecates first-past-the-post)
• feat: implement consequences for criminal actions taken by people who are white and conservative

Unfortunately, these changes are not yet available, but these and more will become possible to implement if we fucking vote like our country depends on it at every level.

kescusay , 8 months ago

It makes a sick kind of sense. If you’re one of the conservatives in power in Israel, and you oppose a two-state solution that would give Palestinians autonomy, keep two weaker factions fighting each other rather than stabilizing a new country.

It doesn’t excuse the inhuman barbarism committed by Hamas against civilians, but it does mean Netanyahu should be immediately removed from power and arrested.

The Palestinian Authority is the only organization there with any actual legitimacy, and had Israel publicly, openly supported it, Hamas could never have gotten a foothold, while the Palestinian Authority would have had reason to normalize relations with Israel.

kescusay , 8 months ago

Ummm, are you sure you responded to the right comment? I didn’t suggest Israel install a government in Gaza. I described something Netanyahu and his fellow conservatives did to keep Palestine from stabilizing, and I said Israel could have avoided the current state of affairs by not doing that.

kescusay , 8 months ago

The article is literally about Israel stabilizing Hamas to keep it and the Palestinian Authority struggling for control and keeping Palestine destabilized overall.

kescusay , 8 months ago

If the far right in Europe is anything like the far right in the United States, she’ll retain a lot of support from them anyway.

kescusay , 8 months ago

…a month before Republican Gov. Mike DeWine nominated him as Ohio’s top utility regulator.

It’s always the people you most suspect.

kescusay , 8 months ago

As an Arch user myself… I feel seen.

kescusay , 8 months ago

I mean, it can be, if you do the right fine-tuning.

But yeah, I think they kind of missed the point. Arch seems to work pretty damn well for gaming with a completely vanilla, standard configuration.

kescusay , 9 months ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citation needed.

kescusay , 9 months ago

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

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

kescusay , 9 months ago

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

Inconceivable!

kescusay , 9 months ago

The funny thing is, last year when ChatGPT was released, people freaked out about the same thing.

Some of it was downright gleeful. Buncha people told me my job (I’m a software developer) was on the chopping block, because ChatGPT could do it all.

Turns out, not so much.

I swear, I think some people really want to see software developers lose their jobs, because they hate what they don’t understand, and they don’t understand what we do.

kescusay , 9 months ago

There’s more to it than that, even. It takes a developer’s level of knowledge to even begin to tell ChatGPT to make something sensible.

Sit an MBA down in front of a ChatGPT window and tell them to make an application. The application has to save state, it has to use the company’s OAuth login system, it has to store data in a PostgreSQL database, and it has to have granular, roles-based access control.

Then watch the MBA struggle because they don’t understand that…

• Saving state is going to vary depending on the front-end. Are we writing a browser application, a desktop application, or a mobile application? The MBA doesn’t know and doesn’t understand what to ask ChatGPT to do.
• OAuth is a service running separately to the application, and requires integration steps that the MBA doesn’t know how to do, or ask ChatGPT to do. Even if they figure out what OAuth is, ChatGPT isn’t trained on their particular corporate flavor for integration.
• They’re actually writing two different applications, a front-end and a back-end. The back-end is going to handle communication with PostgreSQL services. The MBA has no idea what any of that means, let alone know how to ask ChatGPT to produce the right code for separate front-end and back-end features.
• RBAC is also probably a separate service, requiring separate integration steps. Neither the MBA nor ChatGPT will have any idea what those integration steps are.

The level of knowledge and detail required to make ChatGPT produce something useful on a large scale is beyond an MBA’s skillset. They literally don’t know what they don’t know.

I use an LLM in my job now, and it’s helpful. I can tell it to produce snippets of code for a specific purpose that I know how to describe accurately, and it’ll do it. Saves me time having to do it manually.

But if my company ever decided it didn’t need developers anymore because ChatGPT can do it all, it would collapse inside six months, and everything would be broken due to bad pull requests from non-developers who don’t know how badly they’re fucking up. They’d have to rehire me… And I’d be asking for a lot more money to clean up after the poor MBA who’d been stuck trying to do my job.

kescusay , 9 months ago

In software development? Not many - and certainly not at smart companies.

ChatGPT is a tool. It goes in the developer toolbox because it’s useful. But it doesn’t replace the developer, any more than a really good screwdriver replaces the construction worker.

More and more, understanding how to use LLMs for software development will be a job requirement, and developers who can’t adapt to that may find themselves unemployed. But most of us will adapt to it fine.

I have. I’m using Copilot these days. It’s great. And the chances of it replacing me are roughly 0%, because it doesn’t actually know anything about our applications, and if told to make code by someone else who doesn’t know anything about them either, it’ll make useless garbage.

kescusay , 9 months ago

You’re welcome! And it occurs to me that the fact that it took a developer to explain all of that is an object lesson in why ChatGPT won’t end software development as a career option - and believe me, I simplified it for a non-developer audience.

kescusay , 9 months ago

In the early 2000’s, there was all this panic about how these newfangled languages and tools were going to obliterate the developer job market. They were too easy to use! Too simple for non-developers to pick up! Why, you could almost code in plain English now! Developers are doooooooomed!

Instead, demand for developers shot through the roof, because the barrier to entry for developing applications had been lowered enough that adding staff developers to your employee roster became a no-brainer.

Part of the problem is one of precision instructions. We call instructions that are comprehensive, specific, detailed, and precise enough to be turned into programs code, and ChatGPT doesn’t change that. It can only do what you tell it to do.

Maybe someday, a large language model will be so sophisticated, you can say something like, “Write a program to do X, Y, and Z. It uses (address) for authentication, and (other address) for storing data. Here are the credentials to use for each. (Credentials). Your repo is at (address). You deploy the front-end at (address) and the back-end at (address). Your pipelines should be written using (file) as a template.” And maybe what it does with that will truly be able to replace me.

But I genuinely doubt it. I glossed over an enormous amount of detail in that example. If I add it in, what it’ll start looking like is, well, more code.

kescusay , 9 months ago

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.