The next time you feel imposter syndrome and are convinced that everyone is better than you, just remember that someone got paid for this hospital design.
A mix of "On simulation, that was very nice (see a 3D drawing, don't realise the red will not be orange-red or pink-red but red-red)" and "I've a total confidence in your capacities (I don't even opens the files, if you bring it to my attention, I assume you've done my job and I'll sign)" and "I'm tired, not my job", "I will not be the one calling out my bosses, thank you very much", "FFS, I TOLD YA, DON'T I ?!" maybe ?
I've been think a lot about how often people who demand action on climate change, but only if someone else is inconvenienced. I think I've found a synergy of ideas that helps with this.
Some of this is odious and predictable, such as oil companies agreeing that something must be done, so long as it doesn't hurt their record-breaking profits. 1/9
@wordshaper Expanding public transportation effectively might take many years. That means infrastructure must be built out, organizational structures grown, and convincing people to change habits. I don't think it solves as many issues as UBI could.
@ovid yep. Sorry, I wasn’t clear—raising prices to alter people’s behavior is only useful when there’s a viable alternative or the behavior is optional. For things like raising gas prices there isn’t a good alternative in the short term for many people which makes them punitive rather than motivational.
I think that higher gs taxes are a good idea but there needs to be an alternative or help. (Which UBI can be, and I rather like UBI)
OK, now I'm totally sold. Turns out that because of my history of building open source projects, I get to use #github#copilot for free. Kind of hard to beat that deal. I am definitely going to hype this project, even though I know some are not happy with it.
I got tired of using my #iPhone Notes app for shopping. I wanted to be able to sort items by name, or purchase frequency, and not add duplicate items. That would make it much easier for me to do my shopping.
I created an iPhone app to do this in about two hours. Note that I said "Created" and not "Wrote." I used #ChatGPT. I don't know #iOS programming, nor do I know the #Swift programming language. I'll write more about this later.
@mjgardner@fuzzix I've tried to kickstart something for project-specific environments for core Perl. There's been some P5P discussion, but no traction yet.
@holgerschurig@luap@l13u7anant Though I recall a time at the BBC where they concluded an unmaintainable Perl monolith was too slow and spent years rewriting it in C++. They not only created a new, unmaintainable monolith, but it was also too slow. Turns out no one profiled the original software to find out the real reasons it was slow.
Once you have AI grabbing recent headlines, writing the script, assembling the video, and narrating it, you can get your content out before "real" videos. Once the software is written, start repurposing for different niches, create new channels, sit back and let the money slowly trickle in. 11/12
We're already flooded with bad content, this is just going to make it worse. In the long run, AI might get to the point of being better, but that's a long way away. In the mean time, I wonder how advertisers are going to react, paying to advertise on low-quality content? The repercussions of this will be fascinating to watch. 12/12
My unpopular opinion: I remember when I was first introduced to #scrum. My first thought was "this is conceptually similar to #xp (extreme programming), but with best practices removed."
Two decades later and my views have evolved considerably, but I still see that projects developed under Scrum often fail, hard, at the technical best practices.
@mjgardner@ovid@scrumschau Thanks! I really wish that public education the world over taught logic rigorously through the use of syllogisms like the ancient greeks. It really would help all of society.
I can't tell count how many IT troubleshooting calls are laden with instances of the Post Hoc fallacy specifically.
What is fascinating about the new #AI#LLM revolution is that a storm is coming, the experts are telling us, we can see it, and it will be fascinating to see how industry reacts.
In short, #programming as a profession is going to largely die. I hear numbers like "in ten years" being bandied about, though I'm skeptical of the timeframe.
Developers are the 21st century version of the well-paid #Luddite textile workers, except we have years of advance warning,.
I'm dubious. LLMs are programs that, given a sequence of symbols, output symbols likely to follow it. There's no thought there (in the LLM, at least). At best, it's laundered plagiarism.
LLMs claim to solve the same problem COBOL (and 4GLs, visual languages, genetic algorithms, etc.) claimed to solve: that rich people who own software companies need to hire those pesky skilled workers who can demand respect. It's a grift but the suckers are vastly rich so the press takes it seriously.
If you really want to be scared about AI, it's not that it's taking away the jobs (which it is), it's that it's being heavily pushed by Accelerationists. Many of them cite Nick Land, a British philosopher who argues for eugenics, "hyper-racism," and authoritarianism.
There are also tons of accelerationist neo-Nazi groups around the world.
These groups assume everything is failing and we need to accelerate the collapse and get it over with.
For added fun, read about how many billionaires such a Zuckerberg and Thiel who are building, or trying to build, massive compounds to ride out the collapse.
Zuckerberg's is in Hawaii and Thiel is trying to do New Zealand (the latter of which is apparently very popular with this crowd).
They're a bunch of white, billionaire little boys with fantasies of being the king of the Mad Max apocalypse.
Some have openly worried about how they keep their guards in check after the collapse.
I've just submitted my talk, "The Search for Extraterrestrial Life
(in our solar system)" to a conference.
It's an "off-topic" talk, so it probably won't be accepted, but I've been constantly updating it with the latest scientific information I can find.
Did you know that Venus may have had an Earth-like climate for three billion years? And those "unknown absorbers" in the Venusian clouds are fascinating.
@benjaminhollon I've never found that idea very compelling due to the difficulty of creating a self-sustaining colony there. Resource acquisition would be difficult.
@ovid
Yeah, resources is the one tricky thing about Venus colonization. In some sci-fi I've tried using it as a trade hub, but it's still tricky to justify.
A mini-rant about IT project management and those who approve IT projects.
There is this pernicious belief that being a PM is about delivering a project on time and on budget. The people who believe this often also naïvely believe that being a manager is about giving orders. They're dead wrong on both.
The dirty secret: costs and deadlines are not the droids you are looking for. 1/11
Douglas Hubbard has written and talked about the problem extensively, but he's found that most project estimates focus on costs, not benefits, and as a result, they get their value calculations wrong. He calls this "The IT Measurement Inversion." https://www.cio.com/article/274975/it-organization-the-it-measurement-inversion.html 8/11
In reality, the two biggest concerns you have for a project are, in order, the likelihood that it will be cancelled and the rate of project utilization (this is the value!) When was the last time you included the chance of project cancellation in a project estimate? This is why investors want to see financial projections. They know the numbers are often found by a proctologist with a flashlight, but they're focused on potential value, not just potential risk. 9/11