A City on Mars by Zach Weinersmith goes over a lot of these points and many others, like politics and laws of space. Like the title of this article, the tldr is "life in space would suck".
Readit Newstaysix commented on Wish you could escape the planet? Too bad life in space would suck (2024) salon.com/2024/11/22/wish... · Posted by u/voxleone
taysix commented on GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom techinasia.com/news/githu... · Posted by u/andrewstetsenko
I had a fun result the other day from Claude. I opened a script in Zed and asked it to "fix the error on line 71".
Claude happily went and fixed the error on line 91....
1. There was no error on line 91, it did some inconsequential formatting on that line 2. More importantly, it just ignored the very specific line I told it to go to. It's like I was playing telephone with the LLM which felt so strange with text-based communication.
This was me trying to get better at using the LLM while coding and seeing if I could "one-shot" some very simple things. Of course me doing this _very_ tiny fix myself would have been faster. Just felt weird and reinforces this idea that the LLM isn't actually thinking at all.
taysix commented on Executive wealth as a factor in return-to-office twitter.com/EthanEvansVP/... · Posted by u/kappi
When I plead with my direct reports to please comply with the company policy of in the office 3 days a week, and I am deluged with a flood of complaints, I suppose sometimes I’m less empathetic than I might be. It’s not because I’m rich. I am not. I don’t own a home nor do I retain any personal assistants.
I’m less empathetic than I might be because I came into the office 5 days a week for 30 years. My wife also worked. We raised three kids. I went to night school. It’s all very doable, and honestly not that hard.
Now I understand that technology has changed circumstances, and what was not technologically feasible 30 years ago is easy today.
But with respect to empathy, most of the commenters here could bear to examine, if only just for a minute, the idea that the executives are acting in good faith, and just trying to run the company effectively and efficiently.
> I’m less empathetic than I might be because I came into the office 5 days a week for 30 years. My wife also worked. We raised three kids. I went to night school. It’s all very doable, and honestly not that hard.
To me this sentiment reads as "It sucked for me, therefore it needs to suck for you too. Feel the pain of previous generations!"
What happened to wanting to make life BETTER for people? Better for the next generation?
As someone that would complain about RTO mandates if I had to, I know that it's do-able, but does it make my life better? No, it doesn't.
Imagine your last 30 years of not having to go in 5 days a week? Think how much more time you would have had to do all the things you listed: raise your kids, spend time studying night school, etc. How much further ahead would you have gotten with that extra time?
Hmmm. What is “ctvnews.ca”? I do not have any prior reason to trust this news source but would welcome some kind of hints.
Edit: I show my ignorance of north of the border! It is a major Canadian news station. Thanks for the replies.
One of the largest Canadian news broadcasters
taysix commented on Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software alinpanaitiu.com/blog/woo... · Posted by u/imaq
As a lawyer, I find the law (which is supposedly 'logical' and 'rational') to be highly absurd at times. It's unavoidable, given that the law heavily involves humans.
I am in part drawn to software development and programming, because it's logical and comparatively rigid (at least programming itself is, if you take away the environment/ecosystem/cults that develop around the idiosyncracies of different languages). I find programming very far from absurd.
I am therefore surprised to see software programmers claiming that software development is absurd - and that woodworking could somehow be less so.
The grass is always greener on the other side. (And I still can't accept that programming itself is absurd.)
You are correct to a point. Programming is not absurd until you involve the humans! Your end users will end up driving you crazy.
taysix commented on BC Supreme Court bars man from calling himself an 'engineer' cbc.ca/news/canada/britis... · Posted by u/whycome
British Columbia, not Alberta.
You can’t call yourself Alberta unless your a registered Alberta.
Yes, the article is talking about stuff that happened in BC. The last paragraph references legislation in Alberta.
Link from last paragraph in the article: https://engineerscanada.ca/news-and-events/news/alberta-gove...
taysix commented on BC Supreme Court bars man from calling himself an 'engineer' cbc.ca/news/canada/britis... · Posted by u/whycome
From the article, "software engineer" is exempt but the plain "engineer" is not. They should just settle on "professional engineer" or "licensed engineer" like "registered nurse".
edit: the term "software engineer" indeed is not exempt but an attempt to exempt it is part of Alberta legislation that has been tabled
For anyone that didn't read the article but reads this: it's only in Alberta and it's tabled legislation. Hasn't passed yet.
taysix commented on Colorado ski town fielding dozens of automated 911 calls from iPhones coloradosun.com/2022/12/2... · Posted by u/pxeboot
> surprised instead by an actually pretty cool feature TM from Apple.
In what world is generating false positives spamming 911 and potentially displacing actual emergencies a "pretty cool feature"??? This "feature" is doing more harm than good in Summit County, it's trash:
“We are not in the practice of disregarding calls,” said Trina Dummer, the interim director of the Summit County 911 Center. “These calls involve a tremendous amount of resources, from dispatchers to deputies to ski patrollers. And I don’t think we’ve ever had an actual emergency event.”
I think OP was being sarcastic. I think that because they added TM (for trademark) after "Feature", which I take to mean sarcasm is being expressed in the sentence.
All that to say, myself (and likely OP) agree with your thoughts.
taysix commented on If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? abhinavsharma.com/blog/go... · Posted by u/abhinavsharma
Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search.
These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that democracy has failed so lets replace it, replace with what? Its the best we can get given the alternatives, and its flaws will always be exploited.
Not sure if you read the post. They don't advocate for replacing Google. They want to add onto Google and other search engines.
Off topic question on off topic comment: HN, what are your thoughts on Sidebery?
Didn't know about this! Looks so much cleaner than the other extension