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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Review historical train delay timings in a given region, and extrapolate the reasons for them against future train delays. Do so for a variety of regions and cities, to become aware of natural disasters as well as likely geopolitical actions, buildibg up a predictive model that relies on and exceeds the capabilities of this superpower. Bet on or against rideshare services active in the region as appropriate, as well as local business. Determine the likelihood of events like olympics, world cup, etc ocurring in any given city in the near and distant future based on increased service runs. Bet on or against those events ocurring in those cities, on the boom to construction and local businesses in the short term, and on the subsequent economic contraction (that likely leads a reduction in train service by some number of months–also data that can be added to the predictive model). Determine when/where train timings accelerate or appear where they hadn’t before, suggesting a technological improvement and/or an expansion in service, suggesting city growth, and bet on the economic expansion in that region.

    I hate this, thanks.



  • I put pop!_os on my surface pro 8 in an hour a week ago, having used only windows or macos for the past decade. No issues. They’ve upstreamed enough stuff to the linux kernel that everything except camera worked even without the surface_linux kernel. Steam runs just fine on it, as do all the games I’ve tried so far (obviously hardware is trash for gaming, but hey, if it was playable on windows, it’ll probably be smoother on linux at this point). If linux works on a microsoft surface, there’s no way that it won’t work on whatever machine you happen to have.

    Back up your files, pick a distro, unlock your bootloader, and just go for it. Only requirement is to know how to… Run commands in a terminal.

    No regrets.


  • You’re resorting to personal attacks without knowing who I am, what I do, what I do or don’t have on the wall behind me. You apply a blanket label on all people who you class a certain way, and when I disagree with your label and its implications, and recommend nuance, you class me further.

    It sounds like you think very highly of yourself, or lowly of everyone else, or both.

    What makes your opinions here worthwhile?




  • In his show Taskmaster he is well known for both writing tasks and making jokes through intentionally obtuse language and uncommon phrasing. Frequently the “obvious” interpretation of a task turns out to be non-obvious, or the answer to a riddle is this kind of nondeterministic situation that trips up the contestants and makes for better funny.

    Which is to say, the author of the headline is a troll, and did it internationally to bait this very kind of conversation. You won’t know which way they sliced the giraffe unless you read the entire thing! Of course, after you do, you still won’t know.




  • Preface: I have a lot of AI skepticism.

    My company is using Cursor and Windsurf, focusing on agent mode (and whatever Windsurf’s equivalent is). It hallucinates real hard with any open ended task, but when you have ALL of:

    • an app with good preexisting test coverage
    • the ability to run relevant tests quickly (who has time to run an 18 hour CI suite locally for a 1 line change?)
    • a well thought out product use case with edge cases

    Then you can tell the agent to write test cases before writing code, and run all relevant tests when making any code changes. What it produces is often fine, but rarely great. If you get clever with setting up rules (that tell it to do all of the above), you can sometimes just drop in a product requirement and have it implement, making only minor recommendations. It’s as if you are pair programming with an idiot savant, emphasis on idiot.

    But whose app is well covered with tests? (Admittedly, AI can help speed up the boilerplating necessary to backfill test cases, so long as someone knows how the app is supposed to work). Whose app is well-modularized such that it’s easy to select only downstream affected tests for any given code change? (If you know what the modules should be, AI can help… But it’s pretty bad at figuring that out itself). And who writes well thought out product use cases nowadays?

    If we were still in the olde waterfall era, with requirements written by business analysts, then maybe this could unlock the fabled 100x gains per developer. Or 10x gains. Or 1.1x gains, most likely.

    But nowadays it’s more common for AI to write the use cases, hallucinate edge cases that aren’t real, and when coupled with the above, patchwork together an app that no one fully understands, and that only sometimes works.

    Edit: if all of that sounds like TDD, which on its own gives devs a speed boost when they actually use it consistently, and you wonder if CEOs will claim that the boosts are attributable to AI when their devs finally start to TDD like they have been told to for decades now, well, I wonder the same thing.