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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • I’ve seen the comparison to pair programming with a junior programmer before, and it’s wild to me that such a comparison would be a point in favor of using AI for improving productivity.

    I have never experienced a productivity boost by pairing with a junior. Which isn’t to say it’s not worth doing, but the productivity gains go entirely to the junior. The benefits I receive are mainly improving my communication and mentoring skills in the short term, and improving the team’s productivity in the long term by boosting the junior’s knowledge.

    And it’s not like the AI works on the mundane stuff in parallel while I work on the more interesting, higher level stuff. I have to hold its hand through the process.

    I feel like the efficiency gains of AI programming is almost entirely in improving your speed at wrestling a chatbot into producing something useful. Which may not be entirely useless going forward - knowing how to search well is an important skill, this may become something similar, but it just doesn’t seem worth the hassle to me.



  • “In October 2021, Governor Greg Abbott hosted the lobbying group Texas Blockchain Council at the governor’s mansion. The group insisted that their industry would help the state’s overtaxed energy grid; that during energy crises, miners would be one of the few energy customers able to shut off upon request, provided that they were paid in exchange.”

    Incredible. Driving up energy needs to make their fake currency will help the state’s energy grid, because we can then hold the grid hostage until we’re paid.



  • I see two possible reasons for your situation. One is that the company is turning to contractors to fill in gaps in their knowledge/experience, which is why everyone else has no clue how to tackle these tasks and why they get assigned the easy ones.

    The other possibility is that the senior devs are gaming the metrics, letting the employees knock out easy tasks while the contractor is stuck with untangling the knots of the more intractable tasks.






  • GPL can be used for commercial purposes, but it requires all software derived from it to also be open source and GPL compatible. So no one whose commercial business relies on selling software will use GPL because their customers can copy and distribute the code.

    Neither Safari nor Chrome’s rendering engine is GPL. Safari’s engine is LGPL, which means the binary library can be linked into a closed source program, but modifications to the library’s code must remain open.

    Chromium is BSD, which doesn’t even require modifications to remain open. So I can take chromium’s source, change it however I want for my own browser, and never distribute that code.

    If Safari’s and Chrome’s engines were GPL, Safari and Chrome would be forced to be open source, and they very much are not.







  • You can generally rely on a header file doing its own check to prevent being included twice. If a header doesn’t do that, it’s either wrong or doing something fucky. It is merely a convention, but it’s so widespread that you really don’t need to worry about it.

    You are mixing up some terms, so I want to help clarify. When you #include a header file, you aren’t importing a library. You are telling the compiler to insert the contents of that header file into your source where the #include line is. A library is something different. It is an already-compiled binary file. A library should also come with a header file to tell you what functions and classes are present in the library, but that header isn’t itself the library.

    It may seem annoying to have to repeat yourself between headers and source, but it’s honestly something you get used to.



  • (transcribed from a series of tweets) - iamragesparkle

    I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.” And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

    Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

    And i was like, ohok and he continues. "you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too. And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

    And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

    And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.