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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Reddit sucks for many reasons and I refuse to use it, but as a software engineer, this hardly looks nefarious. That looks like a pretty typical event gateway in networked applications, which is used for all kinds of things to make a platform run. We have one in our application, and it’s not used for any kind of privacy-invasive tracking. We use it for things like bulk data processing for things like userbase-level analytics (like, how many users are using this feature?), or for billing purposes for our customers (since we bill based on usage).

    And calls to /api/* routes are absolutely completely normal for any SPA (single page app), and are required for them to function. There’s certainly a technical argument to be made against SPAs in favor of more traditional server-side rendering (augmented by tools like https://htmx.org/ for dynamic content), which could be used to avoid these kinds of API calls (and, in fact, it’s a model I’m very much in favor of), but that kind of architecture is far from the norm these days. The SPA model is the current (IMO bad, from a technical perspective) standard.

    We have many reasons to shit on reddit and their behavior, but this honestly isn’t one of them.


  • I didn’t play BB when the official servers were live. I played on Dreamcast originally, starting with Phantasy Star Online and later Phantasy Star Online Ver. 2. Mostly offline, but got to play online with dial-up sometimes (which was awesome, because hacking was rampant and a lot of times people would hop into games and do a “rare dump” of tons of powerful hacked or duped items). Eventually switched over to Episode 1 & 2 on Gamecube. Probably put thousands of hours into the games growing up.

    Much later as an adult I spent a decent amount of time playing Blue Burst on the private Schthack server with the friends I played PSO with growing up, which was a lot of fun. Really got more of the online experience that time around (and quest access is much better in the online version of the game).

    Oh, and I also played Phantasy Star Universe for a bit on Xbox 360 in between, but it uh… Really sucked.

    I also played PSO2 a bit off and on, and it’s not bad. Much more fun and faithful to PSO than PSU was, but still somehow lacking the magic of PSO. Haven’t tried New Genesis.

    But yeah, PSO easily was THE game of my childhood. Amazing stuff.


  • None of what you described requires a video. Articles can be written for different audiences, and, in fact, are much more capable of mixed-media content. Text can be selected/copied/consumed by screen readers etc, graphics can be embedded with accessibility information (unlike videos, which can easily contain inaccessible content), images can contain controls that allow one to pan, zoom, etc. and can be separately downloaded, other file types can be embedded with their own controls (including animations, as needed). Relevant related content (like, say, documentation) can be linked inline where it’s referenced, rather than dropping a huge bag of links in a video description. Articles can be indexed, searched, translated, and more. Articles also allow each person to consume the content at their own pace, rather than whatever pace is determined by the person in the video. I personally find videos agonizingly slow compared to how fast I can read.

    Videos are an ineffective mechanism for communication of information, particularly for information that is more complex or technical in nature. They are popular due to the ever-shrinking attention span of people, but that doesn’t mean we should optimize for that.


  • Cute. I’m a senior software engineer that has trained many different models (NLP, image classification, computer vision, LIDAR analysis) before this stupid fucking LLM craze. I know precisely how they work (or rather, I know how much people don’t know how they work, because of the black box approach to training). From the outset, I knew people believed it was much more capable than it actually is, because it was incredibly obvious as someone who’s actually built the damn things before (albeit with much less data/power).

    Every developer that loves LLMs I see is pretty fucking clueless about them and think of them as some magical device that has actual intelligence (just like everybody does, I guess, but I expect better of developers). It has no semantic understanding whatsoever. It’s stochastic generation of sequences of tokens to loosely resemble natural language. It’s old technology recently revitalized because large corporations plundered humanity in order to brute force their way into models with astronomically-high numbers of parameters, so they now are now “pretty good” at resembling natural language, compared to before. But that’s all it fucking is. Imitation. No understanding, no knowledge, no insight. So calling it “inspiration” is a fucking joke, and treating it as anything other than a destructive amusement (due to the mass ecological and sociological catastrophe it is) is sheer stupidity.

    I’m pissed off about it for many reasons, but especially because my peers at work are consistently wasting my fucking time with LLM slop and it’s fucking exhausting to deal with. I have to guard against way more garbage now to make sure our codebase doesn’t turn into utter shit. The other day, an engineer submitted an MR for me to review that contained dozens of completely useless/redundant LLM-generated tests that would have increased our CI time a shitload and bloated our codebase for no fucking reason. And all of it is for trivial, dumb shit that’s not hard to figure out or do at all. I’m so fucking sick of all of it. No one cares about their craft anymore. No one cares about being a good fucking engineer and reading the goddamn documentation and just figuring shit out on their own, with their own fucking brain.

    By the way, no actual evidence exists of this supposed productivity boost people claim, whereas we have a number of studies demonstrating the problems with LLMs, like MIT’s study on its effects on human cognition, or this study from the ACM showing how LLMs are a force multiplier for misinformation and deception. In fact, not only do we not have any real evidence that it boosts productivity, we have evidence of the opposite: this recent METR study found that AI usage increased completion time by 19% for experienced engineers working on large, mature, open-source codebases.



  • I mean, there’s no real reason laptops shouldn’t like any desktop computer with parts that can be swapped out. Maybe when laptops were first coming on the market with a difficult form factor to work with, but it’s been long enough that modularity should be easy and the default.

    If you can swap out tiny little SIM cards in a phone, you should be able to slot in standardized, smaller form-factor components like RAM, SSDs, etc.

    And by the way, people can and do swap out motherboards all the time for desktops. There is no good reason to need to buy all new components all the time.






  • Actually typing out code has literally never been the bottleneck. It’s a vanishingly small amount of what we do. An experienced engineer can type out bash or Python scripts without so much as blinking. And better yet, they can do it without completely fabricating commands and library functions.

    The hard part is truly understanding what it is you’re trying to do in the first place, and that fundamentally requires a level of semantic comprehension that LLMs do not in any way possess.

    It’s very much like the “no code” solutions of yesteryear. They sound great on paper until you’re faced with the reality of the buggy, unmaintainable nightmare pile of spaghetti code that they vomit into your repo.

    LLMs are truly a complete joke for software development tasks. I remain among the top 3-4 developers in terms of speed and output at my workplace (and all of the fastest people refuse to use LLMs as well), and I don’t create MRs chock full of bullshit that has to be ripped out (fucking sick of telling people to delete absolutely useless tests that do nothing but slow down our CI pipeline). The slowest people are those that keep banging their head against the LLM for “efficiency” when it’s anything but.

    It’s the fucking stupidest trend I’ve seen in my career and I can’t wait until people finally wake up and realize it’s both incredibly inefficient and incredibly wasteful.