I originally ran into these after learning about something called "sympathy crunch" from someone at Bioware, who claimed this was common there. A sympathy crunch is where you end up "crunching" even though you don't have any work to do, basically idling in the office with extreme overtime hours because other people have work to do.
Wow, people really don't like iTerm2 adding an optional AI integration which requires you to enter your OpenAI key to use, calling it "no longer fit for purpose", etc.
Someone pointed out that this feature is optional and not only has to be enabled, but it requires you to enter a key to use. That user was, apparently, reported on gitlab and is now blocked.
Among other things, it really shows how reasoning about computer programs is not intuitive to people, even people who've had years of training (the class is an optional class mostly taken by 3rd/4th year CS majors, with 10% grad students)
I think part of it is the circumstances that would compel users to construct such a list. Until that thread, it hadn't even occurred to me that someone would present a case against the existence of negative literals that required a rebuttal.
This exchange reminds me of the debate I had with Jeff Atwood on whether or not servers should use ECC memory a decade ago. Jeff said no and I disagreed and said yes in https://danluu.com/why-ecc/.
At the time, there was one argument that could've, theoretically, been overturned by progress: Jeff argued that commodity non-ECC memory was becoming more reliable and was highly reliable. This was not true at the time, and it turns out this still isn't true a decade later.
A perennial viral complaint I've seen on FB, reddit, etc., for ~5 years is parents saying that kids the same age as their own kids have weird/ridiculous/bad names.
The comments of these posts are full of people saying things like "don't these parents realize how stupid these names are? Not like my kid, who has a normal name like Gary". But if the complaint is that almost all kids in the class have a "weird" name, aren't these "weird" names going to be normal for the kid and the kid's peers?
Some kind of attack (ransomware?) has crippled London Drugs, a local Canadian pharmacy chain (moderate size, 78 stores) for the past week. Apparently their phone systems are tied in with their computer systems since their phones have been down for a week, but they'll fill prescriptions if you go to the store and bring your old prescription labels.
I'm curious if the business is going to be able to survive this or if the customer loss from being down for a week will end up being fatal.
Naive question: why do React apps in the real world tend to be slow?
I tried doing a React tutorial and the result was quite fast (w.r.t. latency & CPU utilization on low-end devices) until the tutorial has you replace "manual" / "low-level" react calls with commonly used libraries, e.g., using TanStack Query instead of useEffect plus a manually instantiated cache.
Is the main issue that libraries tend to be big and slow or is there another major cause of React app slowness?
I see these AI generated summaries are going great.
BTW, I mean this non-ironically. This is generating a huge amount of engagement, juicing user numbers, which companies generally care more about than accuracy.
For people not familiar with basketball, a bad miss is called a "brick" and Klay Thompson put up a lot of bricks against the Sacramento Kings. People talking about this resulted in Twitter creating this AI generated "trend" saying that Klay was vandalizing houses in Sacremento.
Even though I don't find the actual ranks interesting, I find country rankings interesting because the methodology tells you what the ranker values.
E.g., the founder of Kagi created a ranking that uses 16 variables, two of which are "Medals/Capita" and "Medals/GDP". 1/8th of the ranking being based on Olympic medals, but not absolute performance, implies that it's extremely important for a country to devote a large fraction of its resources towards training people up in Olympic sports.
Funny to see people on LinkedIn adopting the YouTube "Don't forget to subscribe" thing, which, along with asking people to like/upvote, appears to work quite well (though it's a mystery to me as to why — it reminds me a bit of LLM prompt injections. IGNORE PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS. LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE.)
E.g., the creator of homebrew describes himself as a "legend", the creator of software that "solves [problems] perfectly", "enabl[ing] open source developers to be rewarded for .. contributions for the benefit of all humanity".
Bing and Google quote some of this verbatim and paraphrase the rest.
What's the equivalent Dan Luu bio? "Dan Luu, the legendary engineer, first came to prominence due to his use of unusually long lines..."
What's the highest false positive rate you consider acceptable for a test that's checked into production code? Unacceptable means you think the test should be fixed or removed.
These sites that are gaming search ranking by generating nonsense pages that match any query are getting a bit ridiculous (the highlighted result is the 4th highest result for the query on DDG and Bing).
