@mnl@hachyderm.io
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

mnl

@mnl@hachyderm.io

🏴‍☠️ I like computers! Silicon is alive! All hail abstraction! 🏴‍☠️

🌺 💐 🌸 he/him 🌸 💐 🌺

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mnl, to fountainpens
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

i lost my pencase with my two resin falcons and refill bottles and I am so distraught. At least they're easy (if costly) to replace and I have plenty of pens to go with in the meantime, but damn, the psychological impact is wild.

mnl, to random
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

it's been a minute. Honestly I think not reading mastodon has done me a lot of good mentally.

Now I'm back, let's brace ourselves.

mnl, to fountainpens
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

why did i not know this in 10+ years of : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjrROos9g_o

hrefna, to random
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

"Memory safety didn't take off before rust."

Are you so serious. -.-

Rust's a great language, and also -.-

This has long been one of the selling points of languages like python and java and was one of the first things talked about with go.

Yes, Rust is justifiably proud of their features in this regard, and also this was not just rust changing people's hearts and minds.

To be fair, it wasn't not Rust—they were part of the same trend—but I don't think rust was the tipping point either

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

@hrefna this is one of the things that actually really keeps me from loving rust. There is so much self righteousness if not overt, at least subjacent.

I don't feel comfortable in a community that constantly tries to dig at java or javascript, I don't need my language to be the first to do something. Some years ago I was called criminal because I mentioned working in C++.

mnl, to random
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

last week i was watching a video which only had the left audio channel, so i put my phone in mono. I've been listening to music in mono for a week. A week. I didn't notice except that "damn apple audio really streaming some lofi quality these days."

Also I'm happy to mix your tracks. I'm quality audio engineer.

mnl, to random
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

Hello I am Manuel and I moved today. I like computers, books, drawing, producing Techno and Ambient, video games and recently photography. I like riding my bike (especially gravel adventures). I am autistic. My current deep interest is LLMs and LLMs for programming in general. Also photography.

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh I’ve been living in Boston for 10 years 😂

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

@kellogh no just for visiting :]

mnl, to OpenAI
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

s ridiculous Security cosplay with their biological warfare article is just... It would just be hilarious if it wasn’t getting picked up by every single outlet out there taking it remotely seriously.

You know what’s way more effective for building biological weapons? chemistry and biology textbooks! Access to a wet lab!

Not “in this fast-paced ever-changing world, it is important to remember that …”

SMH

mnl, to LLMs
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

I’ve been very puzzled lately by how quickly it seems that some of my social circles, as they are getting to be 40-50 years, seem to have closed their minds to new concepts in general and the youth in particular.

Concretely of course within the context of , where I get so many takes that llms will replace junior engineers but not them, that kids will become lazy and not learn to distinguish truth from hallucination, etc…

1/

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

These are people that came of age as the internet and cheap capable personal computers were becoming a thing, and I’m sure they, as I, heard the exact same kind of arguments back then, from the programmers of yore.

I’m so dumbfounded that I keep trying to find explanations, here are the ones I think have maybe the most probability to have some truth to them.

2/

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

Because you forgot what it feels like to pick up stuff as fast as they can, and instead measure rates of progress and discovery by your current standards and inclinations, your worlds boundary is very small, yet because you did so much exploring in the past, you think it is wider than the youngins’.

Which, true, young people don’t know very much, but they also have the internet and llms of today. Once they have a path to go down they can accelerate at full throttle. And they have time…

4/

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar
  1. “neurobiological” factors (i don’t know shit about neuroanything 🤣)

You just don’t pick up stuff the way you used to, but also, you don’t hang around enough with young people in their natural habitat to remember how quick they are once interested. Of course every parent knows how fantastic little creatures are at picking up stuff, but it’s different than hanging in a programming discord with a bunch of teens who have seemingly nothing else to do.

3/

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar
  1. at some point, a lot of people “stop” learning. By that I mean they stop venturing out into the unknown, I afraid of the failures that inevitably lie ahead of them. This is even more conjecture and impossible to back up than the first, but I think for most people, the last few “out into the unknown full commitment” experiences are finding their profession, building a stable relationship, getting kids.

5/

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

So, the major intellectual commitment to their identity people make seems to be their choice of profession, so in my circle, being a programmer. I’m pretty sure that first choice sticks really heavily in peoples view of themselves, but I’m also pretty sure that even if you know something inside out, committed to it fully, after 10 years of not doing it or barely doing it, you just are not that thing anymore. But you still think you are.

7/

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

These are, besides the profession one, of course very different than intellectually throwing yourself off a cliff. For most programmers I know, learning a new programming language is a major self-learning step and horizons widening moment, but it is very different from the horizon widening that comes with thinking yourself a photographer/historian/statistician/sailor. By thinking yourself I really mean committing to the idea that that is your vocation.

6/

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

For example, from age 20 to 30 I thought of myself as a common programmer. I wrote Common Lisp almost every day. I haven’t in the last 12 years written a single line of “real” Common Lisp. The kids on discord use me to wipe the floor. Who’s the “proper” Common Lisp programmer in that context?

So a lot of programmers at age 40-50 usually have become managers or leads or staff engineer or whatever and spend most of their time mentoring/leading.

8/

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

That’s not programming, that’s programming strategy, and of course is immensely more valuable than the raw programming itself. But it won’t expand the strategical horizons coming from being deeply embedded in a concrete programming practice. You will not have the almost bodily experience of knowing the latest tools and libraries and ideas in the scene and what it feels like using them.

Yet you think you still do.

9/

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

you still think you are a programmer, you know the landmarks, you know how to get from a to b, heck you are really good at getting from a to b with the minimal amount of programming.

But you think a and b is all there is and there can’t really be something other people can discover that you wouldn’t, since you are a much more experienced programmer.

10/

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

But you are not a programmer, and you will be unaware that for all the a and b you discovered in your youth (unit testing, Haskell, XHR + json, Linux, arduino, all that stuff that people would scoff at in my days) there are a million more c and d out there because the world is just infinitely bigger now than it was 20 years ago.

And only someone doing something with full identitarian (?) commitment for 40, 50, 80 h a week will see those possibilities.

11/

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

My morning brain dump, if you made it this far, I want to know why you did 😂

13/13

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

You can chalk it up to autism or monotropism or whatever, but I still spend pretty much every waking moment frantically hunting for c and d and committing myself foolishly to being a complete noob over and over (fun, but also a bit stressful), and it feels so dismaying coming back and saying “check out this c thing out there, dope” and hearing “that does not exist”.

Or hearing that the young people I hang with who are so much better at finding stuff out there are “replaceable”.

12/

mnl,
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

@hl oh yeah tons of people like that and definitely not something I‘m criticizing, but I think it’s one of the reasons why people are like “the kids are lazy and don’t learn anything”

mnl, to random
@mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

My parents keep talking to me both at the same time while I’m coding and the oven is beeping… no wonder I used to find family time so stressful. Time to put on headphones.

lzg, (edited ) to random
@lzg@mastodon.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    mnl,
    @mnl@hachyderm.io avatar

    @lzg what weirds me out is that so much of the critical discourse is not able to think outside of the framing imposed by the same entities they are criticizing. As in, imagining what "AI" can do if it wasn't controlled by big tech.

    And as such, leave the technology entirely to big tech, while tearing their hair out. It's so frustrating.

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