• 12 Posts
  • 222 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • The Telegraph is outright terrible. The only more right wing paper is probably GB News.

    I’d focus on using left or center-left publications like The Guardian and The Independent.

    There are some further left publications such as Novara Media and The Canary (they’re better on some issues where others are too cowardly, like Gaza or trans rights). Though I’m not sure how accurate they are on everything.

    On some issues the BBC is fine too, just not Israel and trans rights.

    My point being, we are stopping pretty low if we reach for the Telegraph.




  • That’s true, but spaghetti code was always faster to write than good code before as well. I will agree that the speed gap probably has grown though. That’s why tools like AI need discipline.

    If managers and engineers don’t understand that their code will turn into garbage and the business will get reputational harm and lose customers / get sued / have more tech debt to fix and they’ll eventually learn their lesson. In the meantime it’s going to be a painful process where upper management see extra speed, expand their scope or downsize their staff, then learn that they have crumbling foundations and need to adjust. This has publically happened a few times already. Things will stabilize in time.




  • In my experience, AI is an amplifier.

    Good engineers will produce more good code, because they ask the right questions, know what good looks like and check the output.

    Bad engineers will produce reams more bad code. The mistakes they make will be amplified. They will give wrong and incomplete instructions, won’t see what the problems are with the result and will ship it anyway.

    This amplification also means people will spend a larger proportion of time reviewing than coding, which I think is less interesting.

    All of this is stuff that can, to some extent, be addressed with policy. You help and instruct juniors, encourage people to better understand and own their code, or at worst reprimand them if they don’t.

    You can adjust expectations of product managers and explain to them that more is not better, as it always has been. Faster development can often come with bugs and tech debt and this is more of the same.

    All I’ve said above is puts aside the ethical arguments of using or not using AI of course. That’s a separate can of worms entirely.







  • Another minor point of contention: Lamborghini’s are at best 4-5 times faster than a shitbox car. A single-billionaire earns 20 000 times more than the average person. The scales are all out of wack.

    A closer comparison would be the difference between a private jet and a person walking. Even that would only be a 200x difference. A snail and private jet is much closer to that 20 000x difference.

    It’s so absurd a difference in scale that the comparison is hard for people to imagine.

    A world where the difference between the average person and the richest people is only as large as a shitbox and a Lamborghini’s speed would be actually be a pretty palatable society to live in.


  • Presumably this is satire, as these are clearly not equivalent statements.

    We don’t share limited horsepower, but we do share limited wealth, and it can be redistributed.

    This anaology also implies there is an essentialism to people’s financial situations. That rich and poor people are inherently different. In reality rich people have been allowed to be rich by current societal structures.

    Looks like I have over-analyzed the meme. If you are a troll, you’ve got me.




  • Google actually already has a system to automatically detect and filter incoming nude pictures. It allows apps to blur then and you can then opt to view them. It’s a separate application and uses locally running machine learning.

    I can’t remember the name of it and if it’s just on Pixels, nor what applications it works with. Might just be for their own messaging apps or it might be more deeply integrated. If anyone is curious I’ll try to look it up after work.

    The point is they already have something similar to this they could maybe leverage.