So sad to hear this. It sounds like gutting various agencies and public sector is being done for no real purpose other than to "save". What's being saved for is something apparently nobody knows. Probably not even the current top brass.
Readit Newscrnkofe commented on Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com' krebsonsecurity.com/2025/... · Posted by u/mmsc
I still can't believe Musk came up with a name that shortens to DOGE. This is next level political trolling. Then again people got what they voted for.
This is a good write up that is sure to trigger a lot of people. The main two things I see coming out of this aggressive militant moralism is the death of public and to some degree private dialog. This is especially apparent in left-wing medias who seem to have completely cleaned up their writings to the point that now in order to get informed about what's actually going on you literally need a separate news source. Interesting discussions have also died out because there is one right way that everyone must adhere to, one correct language, one correct behavior. They died out because any voiced opinion that is slightly off is going to get canceled by the moralists so we're left with silence and private echo chambers. At this point its a religion where the tenets are more important than actual reality. As a fellow atheist I can't wait for it to dissipate.
crnkofe commented on I am rich and have no idea what to do vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-ha... · Posted by u/vhiremath4
I’ve long been of the opinion that you can’t love others until you love yourself. Between the NPC comment and breaking up with his girlfriend, I’d say he has a long way to go, if he ever gets there at all. Hope he does.
Hard to stomach but you can't deny honesty. I wouldn't be surprised that more business high brass people think that way about the workers but are smart enough not to be open about it.
Otherwise the guy doesn't seem to be having a crisis at all. The problem is he's been doing business for the past 10 years. Likely put in a lot more hours than needed. Now business is all he knows and catching up to doing something more meaningful is hard.
Would that be, possibly, because:
- brighter headlights are falsely perceived to be of better quality, or,
- they are but more prevalent because of COVID economic downturn necessitating upsells, or,
- 2019 is simply 5 years ago, or,
- undocumented neurological long-COVID effect is affecting engineers?Sure some of it is subjective. I'm a big fan of dark UIs. But the fact is that when I say 3-way blinded my entire car is objectively brightly lit so its definitely not just an eye thing. Happy to hear I'm not the only sensitive person around.
crnkofe commented on The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding addyo.substack.com/p/the-... · Posted by u/mooreds
Surely not 70% but like 5-10% might be a better ballpark figure. Coding or generating with LLMs is just part of the problem and always the fastest part of software building. All the other things eat disproportionately larger amount of time. QA, testing, integration testing, making specs, dealing with outages, dealing with customers, docs, production monitoring etc. etc. It would be cool if we get AI involved there especially for integration testing though.
I really dislike the entire narrative that's been built around the LLMs. Feels like startups are just creating hype to milk as much money out of VCs for as long as they can. They also like to use the classic and proven blockchain hype vocabulary (we're still early etc.).
Also the constant antropomorphizing of AI is getting ridiculous. We're not even close to replacing juniors with shitty generated code that might work. Reminds me of how we got "sold" automated shopping terminals. More convenient and faster that standing in line with a person but now you've got to do all the work yourself. Also the promises of doing stuff faster is nothing new. Productivity is skyrocketing but burnout is the hot topic at your average software conference.
Post-Corona cars are all much brighter. Its gotten so bad that I'm frequently left wondering if people are driving with high beams or just regular new-age lights. Got to wait to see if the person on the other side drops the lights to be sure. SUVs in particular are bad especially during acceleration which points the lights higher and on inclined road. I also regularly "switch" rear-view mirror to dim mode otherwise I'm literally 3-way blinded also from side mirrors. I didn't do any of these things regularly 5y ago. I'm still wondering if this is just automotive industry incompetence of making safe vehicles or an "incentive" to buy a SUV yourself so you don't get blinded all the time.
Here are two FOSDEM guides, I found interesting when researching my trip.
https://petersouter.xyz/fosdem-survival-guide/
https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/2015/09/07/my-guide-to-fosdem-eu...
It will be the first time at FOSDEM for me, so I cannot confirm or deny much, but I've definitely heard from multiple sources that it is very crowded. If want to attend a certain talk you absolutely have to arrive early.
I have not booked a hotel yet, so if you know a good place to stay, especially near the venue, pointers would be appreciated. My contacts are in my profile.
Finally a shoutout to the Rust crowd, links to the track and the Dev Room:
Having been there last year I can attest to that it's crowded however that's only a problem the first few talks of the day when motivation is still high. I've got a seat on the greater majority of the talks.
Only two regrets from last FOSDEM'22 were not having some large water bottle with me and not having cash on person. There's no (were no) ATMs nearby and not everyone takes cards.
crnkofe commented on A coder considers the waning days of the craft newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/jsomers
Am I the only one becoming less impressed by LLMs as time passes?
I will admit, when Copilot first became a thing in 2021, I had my own “I’m about to become obsolete” moment.
However, it’s become clear to me, both through my own experience and through research that has been conducted, that modern LLMs are fundamentally flawed and are not on the path to general intelligence.
We are stuck with ancient (in AI terms) technology. GPT 4 is better than 3.5, but not in a fundamental way. I expect much the same from 5. This technology is incredibly flawed, and in hindsight, once we have actual powerful AI, I think we’ll laugh at how much attention we gave it.
AI is the next bubble. VCs are really pushing it but I don't see this solving day to day software development problems anytime soon. Solving difficult CS problems is one thing and I do find it impressive, unfortunately the greater majority of everyday work is not about generating Snake games or 0/1 knapsack solutions.
Also the idea that we'll need less engineers is bogus. Technology doesn't reduce the amount of work we do, it just increases productivity and puts more strain on individuals to perform. With AI spitting out unmaintainable code nobody understands I can only see more work for more engineers as the amount of code grows.
I did find they very useful when writing completely new stuff (things like "write a <insert your favorite API" client or making test boilerplate ie. as a copy&paste replacement tool.
It'd be nice to hear in detail how its been useful for other devs. There's too much propaganda around on how amazing it is and not nearly enough use cases.