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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • There’s a 5 hour interview with John Carmack on YouTube where he talks about transitioning from really caring deeply about algorithms and the like to deeply caring about how to make a sustainable and maintainable codebase you can have an entire team work on.

    Often, a solution that is completely correct if all you’re doing is solving that problem is completely incorrect in the greater context of the codebase you’re working within, like if you wanted to add a dog to the Mona Lisa, you can’t just draw a detailed line art dog or a cartoon dog and expect it to work – you’d need to find someone who can paint a dog similar to the art style of the piece and properly get it to mesh with the painting.


  • BIIIIG problem: The last 5%.

    Did ChatGPT just hallucinate it? Does it exist but it isn’t used like ChatGPT says? Does it exist but it doesn’t do what ChatGPT thinks it does?

    I use ChatGPT sometimes to help out with stuff at home (I’ve tried it for work stuff but the stuff I work on is niche enough that it purely hallucinates), and I’ve ended up running in circles for hours because the answer I got ended up in this uncanny valley: Correct enough that it isn’t immediately obviously wrong, but incorrect enough that it won’t work, it can’t work, and you’re going to really have to put a lot of work in to figure that out.







  • One thing that’s really interesting is that general technological aptitude seems to have peaked with the millennials. A lot of employers are now complaining that gen z lack technology skills of all things.

    I can absolutely believe that because personal computing went from being something where you basically have fully powered computer hardware with all the positives and negatives of that and the learning curve to being carefully sculpted and focus tested black boxes.kids aren’t good with computers, they’re good with facebook and YouTube.








  • Dirty secret is that FOSS is a product of capitalism and nothing else.

    A bunch of nerds being allowed to own and control the means of production created personal computers while the central planners in both communist countries and big companies both thought it was a dumb idea. A bunch of nerds being allowed to own and control the means of production meant that someone could decide to release their product free with source code. Private ownership of intellectual property such as source code allowed people to release their privately owned code under a license specifying that changes must be made public.

    From there, the proof in the pudding is in the eating. How many FOSS projects do you use, and who made them?