I recently finished Book 6 of The Wheel of Time, and if Sanderson didn't finish out this series, I definitely wouldn't still be reading.
For a genre that is pretty notoriously misogynistic, Robert Jordan is a whole nother level. Wild he decided to write so many women.
Politicians are constantly sending out emails being like "Polls show my race is in a dead heat with my opponent!" without ever once considering that maybe it's because voters don't see them standing for anything.
Google owns a ~6% stake in SpaceX, which IPOs on Friday.
This news is very conveniently timed.
And I strongly suspect this deal will quietly die in a short while.
Malicious Compliance Thought: My employment contract has some language (that should be illegal) where The Company lays claim to everything I produce even outside of Work Hours and not using Work Equipment. They require I get permission from The Company to contribute to Open Source Projects.
But LLM-Generated Code isn't "mine" legally, it has no Copyright. So they *shouldn't* be able to come at me for submitting generated code.
I have no intention of doing this, but it's a curious quirk.
Watched Wonka with Timothee Chalamet. I understand why it was reasonably well rated on release, but I really doubt many people have felt the need to rewatch it. Just didn't have the feeling of a classic to me.
I had three trees fall down during yesterday's wind storm, and none of them were the one I *want* to fall down.
Middle Management is absolutely desperate for us to find a use case for LLMs that they can attach themselves to. I'm pretty sure they're starting to realize their "jobs" are at least at risk as those of us who are builders, if not more so.
Reading The Wheel of Time and it's wild how much Robert Jordan clearly dislikes women for a guy who centered his narrative around a lot of women.
The number of Engineering Managers excited to use LLMs to destroy the training pipeline of Junior -> Senior Engineers is deeply upsetting.
Yeah, our Bosses won't give us enough headcount to do everything they demand, but that does't mean that we should destroy the field by kicking down the ladder that the next generation needs to climb.
And learning Prompt Engineering isn't a replacement for skills and knowledge. If you don't know the correct questions, you can't craft a workable prompt.
So, this guy goes to TED to try to legitimatize his "Data Centers in Space" business, mocks critics by only choosing unspecific criticism, and then ends his talk by demonstrating that he doesn't know Freeman Dyson's Sphere proposal was meant to mock ignorant people.
There is also some not-so-subtle Network State ideology thrown in.
I don't imagine Alex Garland's Civil War was an easy film to watch in 2024.
I do think it's harder to watch now. The cinematography is fantastic, and it evokes the feeling of the chaos of battle (or, I imagine it does).
It's also not a particularly introspective film. It doesn't really seem to have much to say beyond "War Bad", and I think other movies have done that better. And to make this movie, at this time, and work this hard to make a political statement is cowardly.
Almost all the advice about potty training a toddler acts like you just need to take a week or so where they don't wear pants and will pee and poop on the floor, and then they'll figure it out and be fine.
That is lies. Not a single parent will corroborate it being that easy.
It's a part of the process, absolutely. But there will still be days where your child just pees all over their chair because they're too busy eating dinner
OMG, Realtors are starting to use GenAI to "stage" photos in their listings.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/6-Abbey-Rd-Bow-NH-03304/113449047_zpid/?
Fully convinced after today that part of the reason Big Tech is so in love with "Agentic" AI is because for decades we've measured success by "Queries per Second" because it was easier then measuring quality of interactions, and this is a "cheap" way to increase the number of interactions without worrying about quality.
* cheap only in as much as working in Big Tech tends to make the actual computers so abstract that most folks never consider things like performance and compute cost.
I'm not saying Software Engineers aren't being negatively impacted by the LLM craze, but the colleagues I worry more about are the UX folks.
Design has gotten so flat over the last couple of decades that Management is going to view them as replaceable MUCH more quickly, and we're already seeing that.
Started watching #Mountainhead. This movie might be more than I can bear.
I've just met too many guys who think like this.
Absolutely wild for this article to talk about how this GenAI Voice company helps link Celebrities to companies who want to use their voice in a way that suggests the Voice Donor maintains control over how their voice is used, and then lists a bunch of dead celebrities the company sells voice services for.
"This Vibe Coded Tool should have been a Spreadsheet" is the new "This Meeting Should have been an Email."
Reading H.P. Lovecraft's Wikipedia page makes it really clear how much Lovecraft would have just been the most insufferable kind of Poster.
One major issue with coding with an LLM is that they regularly make the kinds of mistakes that I'd see non-Computer Science Majors who had to take beginning programming classes for their majors make, but are unable to learn not to do that.
So it takes a while to debug when they get into a ridiculous state because the mistake they've made is so fundamental you're probably not looking for it.