“Where does this green wire go?”

I appreciate HW engineers and techs. I’m not afraid of datasheets, circuit diagrams, or a mso and they’re always patient enough to explain things to me so I can make the rocks behave. Or at least tell me how to go from diagram to board lol.

That’s crazy. You can’t do six. It’s seven! SEVEN MINUTE ABS!

“the serial output from my test unit turns into garbage and it happens at completely random times!”

“Did you make sure they were plugged in all the way?”

“WHAT?!?! ARE YOU SUGGESTING I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING?!?!”

Some time later

“Yeah, it turned out to be the serial connection was loose.”

It’s a surprisingly good comparison especially when you look at the reactions: frame breaking vs data poisoning.

The problem isn’t progress, the problem is that some of us disagree with the Idea that what’s being touted is actual progress. The things llms are actually good at they’ve being doing for years (language translations) the rest of it is so inexact it can’t be trusted.

I can’t trust any llm generated code because it lies about what it’s doing, so I need to verify everything it generates anyway in which case it’s easier to write it myself. I keep trying it and it looks impressive until it ends up at a way worse version of something I could have already written.

I assume that it’s the same way with everything I’m not an expert in. In which case it’s worse than useless to me, I can’t trust anything it says.

The only thing I can use it for is to tell me things I already know and that basically makes it a toy or a game.

That’s not even getting into the security implications of giving shitty software access to all your sensitive data etc.

I try to not buy any Wi-Fi smart home devices anymore. I try to stick to zwave or zigbee, zwave I have better luck with generally. I even left my nest thermostat at my old house and installed a 10+ year old zwave thermostat at the new one. Way happier. I’m not relying on googles API to be stable anymore for home assistant interaction.

Beer Hall Putsch

They’re they’re, it’ll be all right.

“It’s not an ethnostate! Also, you’re racist if you criticize our ethnostate!”

Used to be, gm rule 1 was “everyone should be having fun”

I, and it’s been awhile, have changed my personal rule 1 to “every player has autonomy”

Nobody came to watch your one person play, it’s a group storytelling game, if it’s not collaborative you’re doing it wrong.

Welcome to late stage capitalism where the game’s made up and the points don’t matter.

Privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

I’ve tried to use “AI” to help me with minor programming tasks, or to start basic projects, it’s really bad. As in, it takes me more effort to fix the garbage it outputs than it would have to write it from scratch. In addition to that, it writes things badly in non-obvious ways. Junior engineers make similar mistakes to each other, because they’re working logically. “AI” makes weird mistakes because it’s not working in the same way a human mind does.

Haha! Jokes on you! It was mostly gnu makefile calls to ruby scripts!!! You’ve just broken the build a million different ways!

Last time somebody did this to me there were a lot of sit downs about how to properly chop up large scale code changes and why we don’t sit on our own branch for two months.

“How long will this take to get in?”

“Well, two weeks for me to initially review it, a week for you to address all the changes, then another week or so for me to re-review it… Then of course we have to merge in all the changes that have been happening in primary…”

Short answer: No, this guy is all the way up his own rear end.

Longer answer:

Author: “C is not ‘close to hardware’”

Also Author: “Successful one to one struct comparisons may require padding, which isn’t automatically applied!!!”

Like if you have an entire PhD on this stuff and you don’t understand how and why you need to pad, when you need to do it, and how to calculate the proper amount of padding, maybe somebody should’ve stopped you before you showed your whole ass on the Internet like that.

(Padding is applied to align chunks of data more closely to the size of memory writes possible in a given architecture, it is extremely system dependent and you use it in very specific circumstances that you, a beginner, do not need to understand right now other than to say that if the senior says thou shalt not fuck with my struct you better not)

Til cromulent, thank you.

To save the Google: adjective with a humorous connotation meaning acceptable or adequate.

Good ones don’t.

Gotta be able to boot Nazis. Otherwise it’ll be Nazi bar.

We no longer have humor, it’s been beaten out of us by code reviews and merge conflicts.

DATA ABORT

I’ve just rejected firmware updates and will continue to do so as long as possible. If it gets to where I can’t do that anymore for some reason I might leverage my professional expertise into remedying the situation more permanently.

They’re getting worse too. Retroactively blocking third party toner cartridges.