That’s generally not what they’re really concerned about. “I don’t want teachers teaching my children to be gay” is just code for, “I don’t want teachers teaching my children that it’s ok to be gay.”

I hate that more people don’t understand this. It leads to a bunch of discussion and anxiety about nothing at all.

Rough day, huh?

Parents can be overprotective, (I.e. become shitty parents) and you can’t really do anything about that, except hoping that the universe educate them.

Also, that software engineer and IT are not interchangeable terms

“Can you hack my ex-girlfriends Instagram?”

Or, “I have an amazing idea for an app…”

Or how to fix your printer.

Eh, you probably do, you just don’t want to spend three hours wading through mountains of malware for free.

I mean, 90% chance it’s because: still using a hard drive, old ass CPU/heat issues+throttling, OS and software bloat.

I mean if their hardride isn’t full, and their task manager isn’t showing a bunch of bloat, then it’s 95% of the time a hardware issue.

Yeah, but what could it be though?

As a software development expert, I take issue with

“our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die.”

That’s way off base.

She under-stated the hell out of that.

Our average practitioner is bad at both their own job, and at the jobs of those whose lives their shoddy work complicates.

Anyone trusting us with their lives or livelihood should be very very alarmed.

We’re also now producing artificial intelligence tools that allow us to do equally shoddy work, but now in dramatically greater quantity.

Edit: Let’s say this is 60/40 sarcasm and sincere, and I’m not sure which is the 60%…

I work with some of the best, and I’ve worked with plenty of the worst. I’ve also been both, on different days.

I have never volunteered to count or observe elections. However I am a professional programmer, and I absolutely agree, electronic voting opens up tons of new attacks, whereas paper voting “security” is basically a solved problem at this point

We don’t have a unified thing. We definitely don’t.

Brazilian elections continue to be fine for decades, this fear mongering is precisely what the right does whenever they lose.

If code was impossible to make safe banks would still be doing manual labour and ATMs would’ve been phased out.

Works fine in french election abroads.

But yes vote by mail is best.

I’ve been there too. It’s works pretty good. Voting machines don’t always for whatever reason, even though it’s a simple problem.

I don’t really buy the conspiracy theories, but it should be waaay down the list of things that need automation, since elections are only occasional.

But someone who is better at managing computers than 99% of people.

Next you’ll be telling me Serverless is just code on servers!

Not if I’m Jeff Bezos.

Also when “you’re the product” that doesn’t just mean that your data is the product. A user is a person whom you can influence. “You’re the product” means this company can direct you, influence you, change your behavior. They can offer your behavioral changes, as a service to their other stakeholders.

If they don’t accept donations, well, I hate to tell you, you’re the product.

A statement has never been truer than this

Yep, I turn off my devices when I’m done with them. I’ll restart my phone from time to time.

Most software isn’t made for patchwork while running. Sometimes even if it’s on a server lol. The stuff that is gets tested quite a bit.

Also do trades. People seem to have no perception that quality varies. They assume it’s busy work, it’s either done or not done, works or don’t work. All as if you flip a couple magical switches and everything’s finished.

Always frustrating to explain how the electrician that’s 15$ an hour is gonna get you killed, and that wiring isn’t just snaking cords through a conduit.

Just show them some of my work as an amateur just sticking metal together and surely they’ll pay for your work.

Like I try to at least measure, do some math, clean it up, and be steady but anybody looking at can know its my day job lol

A huge, HUGE amount of a welder’s value - nay, almost any skilled worker’s value - is in the years you’ve spent gettin’ good.

Yeah I don’t hire tradesfolk thinking I’m getting something cheap. I hire tradesfolk thinking I’m getting something that’s gonna fucking work when I need it to for as long as it can be expected to. That weld ain’t the cheapest part of the bridge by any means but it cannot unexpected fail without catastrophe, so if trained and reputable welders are expensive then welds on that bridge is expensive.

I can run my own wires when the wife lets me. But I won’t because that expensive electrician will do it safely and in a way that doesn’t cause even more expensive problems in the future

Good labor isn’t cheap and cheap labor is rarely good.

“What does the error message say?”

“I already closed it. Those things are always gibberish”

I literally once got an email from another engineer using our internal tool at the big tech company I used to work for which said something like, “the page isn’t working. Please help. Attached screenshot of error.” The attached screenshot showed the error message, “Your authentication token has expired. Please refresh the page.”

I emailed him back, “oh yeah, that happens when your authentication token expires. Try refreshing the page.”

He emailed me back, “that worked, thanks!”

(For anyone wondering, no, we can’t refresh the page for the user, because they might have unsaved data on it.)

I’ve had this and similar conversations far too many times, I keep professional but holy shit, and then when they do get a call going with a screen share they zoom past the error every. Single. Time.

Isn’t a true air gap pretty solid though? Aside from someone actually coming into your house and interfacing directly it would be pretty hard to bypass, or am I on Mt. Dunning-Kruger over here this time?

Yeah just think about BIOS and drivers, and again some vulnerability in SSH…

Learned something today. Thank you

Does this affect any fire evacuation procedures? For example, would it be likely that the nearest exit stairwell happens to be the source of the fire? If so, how would that change the plan?

It might turn into dumb skynet though. Like a version of skynet that does malicious things, but not because it’s trying to hurt people, just because it’s really stupid and we put it in charge of things.

I’ve begun to think of LLMs as compression algorithms for patterns. It can take an existing pattern and apply it on unusual subjects. Like take the pattern of a limerick and apply it to the patterns of Danny Devito, that’s the upper limit of their creativity. So rather than storing information, it stores these patterns making it seem more dynamic.

The way I see it, human creativity is the combination of patterns but in a chaotic non-analytic way. We make leaps of logic that without precise knowledge of our brains can’t be exactly replicated. Meanwhile LLM’s just do the basic combination of patterns that result in the most generic realization of any idea.

However the well dries up as soon as we stop training them. They’ll store the basics of any field but fail to replicate new developments or conclusions until trained.

At least personally, the idea is that I will die before I get old.

“Everything that happens happens to someone else”

Also the reason people don’t buy even the most basic insurance, or take even the most basic disaster preparedness steps.

Hello Google! Hey I was trying this function in Android and it’s not working. Plus when I search the first link is to your bug tracker and it’s marked as non fix.

What do you mean this is a Wendy’s? What do you mean that’s a free product and there’s no support?

I once interviewed to be a delivery driver for Domino’s and my Dad was adamant it was a bad idea and I should find different work and then insisted that I ask them about insurance if I was going to do it.

It felt super awkward because I was pretty young and people just don’t ask those kinds of questions for minimum wage. He wanted me to ask them if they provided insurance to their drivers when they’re driving cars for them on the clock and explained to me that if there’s an accident while using the car for work then my insurance wouldn’t cover it which I checked and indeed they wouldn’t.

The interviewer said they didn’t provide insurance but asked if I was insured and if I was, wouldn’t I be fine anyway? I said the insurance was not going to cover me while using the car for the job and the guy had this answer in a different tone like a kind of I’ve got this super clever scam that no one’s ever thought of but I’ll let you in on it vibe and leant forward and said “oh yeh, we know what to do here in that situation, what you do is you just say you weren’t working at the time”. I was incredulous but still a nervous teen and kind of meekly protested “but like what about the several pizzas in a bag and the uniform?” And he’s like “oh you just tell them you were on your way home from work and that’s your dinner”. That, along with many other fucked up things that occurred in the brief space of time this interview occupied convinced me to nope out of there.

Yeh dude, I’m going to try and commit insurance fraud… very poorly… for Dominos… who can’t simply provide the necessary protection to allow people to do the job they’re asking them to do. If I have to get my own insurance, if it has to be a special kind of more expensive insurance that’s going to cover me driving for work, then I’m a contractor, not an employee and I’m going to set my own rates and they’re going to be a lot higher then what they were offering considering I also have to maintain my own vehicle and pay for fuel and insurance, to a certain extent I even arguably have to use the skill of knowing how and also being licensed to drive in the first place which makes it not exactly “unskilled” labour in this first place.

To play devil’s advocate, it’s not just the delivery that’s included in those costs. It’s also the development and maintenance of the ordering platform, vehicle maintenance, etc.

Edit: thanks for the downvotes even though I specified I was playing devil’s advocate. Also, in the Netherlands, pizza companies provide their own vehicles which seems normal to me.