Notices by Paul Reinheimer (preinheimer@phpc.social)

Not a bad day to read up on Stanislav Petrov, for no particular reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

The whole AI thing feels a lot like the bacon craze of the 90s.

From nowhere to everywhere seemingly over night.

Except with Bacon everyone wanted more money for it. They understood their product had value, and they wanted to get paid. A teenager would happily ask if you wanted to add bacon to your burger for only a dollar more!

With AI the bacon is already on the burger, and you have to talk to the manager to get it pulled off.

I turned off all the AI shit in slack *yesterday*.

I'm hearing a lot about "Right to compute" acts, which seem to be written by AI lobbyists to protect their interests. Maybe make it easier to build new datacenters.

What about "Right to create" laws. Giving creators the right to make things and not have them be ingested by billion dollar companies.

This very post may soon help train a model that will decide to kill a human being. I think about that a lot.

@evan Clear answer is wizard. Even if it was a fill in the blank that's where I'm going.

Car hot take: You should get 5% off your license plate renewal if your car is more interesting than black/white/silver/blue/red. 10% of it's got actual art on it.

If an "AI" company can sell you access to software that will replace a $250k/year software engineer. They're going to charge $249k/year for it.

That's how capitalism works.

Well, they're going to charge $20k/year at first, during the land rush phase. Wait for some competitors to die off. Keep it low a while longer to kill off the incumbents. Then it'll jump up a bunch, before finally being even more expensive than the original thing.

See also: Uber & AirBnB.

@evan I'm with @joergi

This morning my eldest child challenged me to say “I love you” to him a thousand times. I readily agreed. Then my youngest jumped on the bandwagon and requested the same. I agreed once more.

I’ve succeeded on both counts.

@evan I donate so they can buy more ads.

I don't put effort into "joining" because I'm not sure what value I'd get out of it.

That all said, I might be a member of the NDP just because of donations. I think I have a "leadership circle" pin somewhere.

@evan I've never taken a deliberate act to join a party.

But I've given several of them money.

If I worked at google I would absolutely change my friend's default search engine to Bing if they left their laptop unlocked.

Has anyone done research on the best place within a pull request to hide stuff?

I'm thinking it's 80% through a good sized PR. At that point the reviewer is probably tired, but you're past the end where they might scroll to and perk back up.

@sean @evan @maj

I feel like that train could be absolutely amazing (and maybe reduce air travel) with just tiny investments.

@evan I almost picked “by party” since I generally think more about that than the individual. But I’m selecting the party based on their position on multiple issues. So I’ve gone with the “mix” options.

Related: I believe political parties are bad for democracy. Their badness can be diluted by having lots of functioning parties.

@evan I’m concerned that we wouldn’t be able to feed that much of a displaced population. We’re also abandoning a lot of fertile soil.

@evan I don’t think 300km from the border and keep the economy running is possible. That’s the entire Montreal to Windsor corridor, and half the country’s population.

Never sacrifice your goals for your plans.

In order to say "X is really important to achieve Y" you need to try things other than X.

So if you write a blog post about how hiring engineers who are a great fit is the most important thing. And one of the 'tests' you give them is to see if they select grapes or candy as a snack, then only hire people who eat the candy. You don't actually know that eating candy is important, it's the only thing you've done. You need to hire some grape eaters and see if anything changes.

Posts that say "We tried A, B, and C, and things really took off when we tried C" are just so much more useful (and believable) than posts who just say "We've always done D and it's amazing"

The fact that companies are rolling out AI and refusing to give people ways to turn it off... shows me they're not so sure this is a killer feature either.

When you develop a killer feature you charge more for it.

I can't fully express how bad Adobe Acrobat Pro is.

After losing all my work on a health form once already, I've realized that I missed something. For some reason I can't actually edit any of the data, it's entered some alternate edit mode.

I am now printing it out to add the last thing with a pen, then scan it.

I attended my first programming class almost 20 years ago, and I am printing something out to scan it again.