CodexArcanum

Damn, I hadn’t visited the site (according to my profile page) in just over 5 years. I’ve had an account for little over 17 years, which puts me in the early adopters.

Anyway, yeah, I’m one of those top-end commenters that left the site during Covid because everything went to shit: too many new low quality questions, too many assholes whining about it and overreacting making the problem worse, and the owners had basically already abandoned the site for years after Stack Exchange failed to become the dominant framework for the entire internet.

It’s a real shame, there’s never been a resource so good for programming and probably never will be again. Now that AI is out there stealing every bit of knowledge, all the experts I know are hoarding up and looking to sell their expertise at premium since it’s knowledge and experience that AI can’t get or replicate.

I get a lot more writing done when I sign up to publicly read my work at various regular events around town. Having a deadline makes me get something done and usually a topic or theme gives some direction. It really helps with letting go of the preciousness of ideas.

Reading for an audience with a tight time limit forces you to think about why every sentence is on the page and why you structure certain genre stories in certain ways. Writing for horror has improved my love stories and comedic work because like with genres of music there’s an expected pace to these things. When you slot into the audience’s expectations there’s an ease to the process but you also start to see when to twist and veer, how to break expectations to create fear or heartbreak or laughter.

Just like with software development, the iterative feedback loop between writing a piece, performing it, and then incorporating audience response into the process is stronger the tighter you can make the loop. If you try to write one epic novel you get limited feedback. If you start writing a series of connected short stories, each one is a new experiment in what works and what doesn’t. Rewrite the same piece for new audiences and shows in the same way a stand up comic refines an act.

There’s always a next mountain to climb. After that it’ll be trying to get away from fame, reconnect with the family you started after the last bout of “creative block” you went through. Then it’ll be documenting the impossible landscape of infinite darkness within the walls of your new House. Then it’ll be achieving academic notoriety for your astounding analysis of a documentary film nobody has seen. Then it’ll be writing a best selling post modern masterpiece of a novel. Next you’ll be chasing the dragon of getting meaningless upvotes in obscure corners of the internet. When does it all end?!

So Gaben is also the Good Submarine Billionaire too, I guess? I mean, good on him for loaning his super-yacht and Leviathan submarine (IRL subnautica indeed) out to do some science.

Haha wow, I can’t believe I made the list for calling him an asshole that time. I was wondering why there was so much less crap on my feed lately.

Good IDEs have multiple ways of showing you this info, and many languages have named parameters that fix this. Also, just putting a comment on them is not a crime, it just won’t update when you change the function but then your IDE can often only do so much at call sites, so you often need to update the calls (and the comments) manually. I’m sure LLM agents can change both as well.

Or, in JavaScript like these examples were, yeah, just pass in an object. Passing in an object should be standard in JS when you have more than like 2 params anyway because it solves several issues with parameter identification, optional parsms, method overloading, and so on. And JS passes everything by reference so you aren’t losing performance.

The green part should be a gradient. As a New Orleanian, I consider all my fellow citizens north of about 30.1° latitude to be yankees unless they’re as far or further west than Texas.

I used to work for one of the nation’s largest survey marketplaces. Y’all have no idea how deep this hole goes.

Surveys\polls are largely requested by political polling groups, research teams, and ad agencies. They put those up on an auction block just like ads, and then we would route traffic into it from various places. Mostly the survey takers come from mobile games (take this 3 question survey for 20 Blorp Points kind of stuff) or survey taker apps that give you points for gift cards and such.

So even before bots, most polls are taken by “professional” survey takers who use banks of phones to maximize their point earnings. We spent a lot of energy on “proving” to the survey provider side that real humans were answering, and not using scripts or bots to just rapid finish them (answer B to everything kind of stuff). Using sophisticated bots to randomly answer was super common.

They were super ready for AI. We talked about it everyday, game planned how it would work, designed systems around it. “Synthetic survey” was the buzz word. Why ask humans for answers if the statistics machine can convincingly predict the answer for you? We proposed ideas like generating the prediction fast and early, then using actual polls to adjust the result towards reality over time. We had tools to track people and connect their spending to poll questions so we could ask follow up questions on purchases, to provide “lift” metrics to agencies on if their ads were working. We were working on the “verification can” tech, only it would have been “Answer this 10 question survey to continue watching your movie.”

I was so glad to leave that place. They got bought and consolidated into the world’s largest survey company a year later and they fired everyone else that had been left. All they wanted was the tech and the customers.

Hell yeah brother! Some of the old EU novels and games were pretty fun too!

My dude. Coolness is always subjective, every person is the arbiter of their own definition of coolness. If you don’t like mine, it would be very cool of you to stick to your own and not worry about what I think.

Are you worried I’m not respecting Star Wars fans enough or something?

You keep moving those goalposts and I’ll keep kicking through them lil buddy.

I never said people can’t enjoy what they like. I said they can’t like it and be cool. Coolness is a specific quality and often a high bar. I like doing crosswords but crosswords are a coolness-neutral activity, neither cool nor uncool, just a fun thing to do.

Caring really hard about main stream media, making it your personality? Uncool. Liking what you like regardless of some jackass on the Internet’s opinion: very cool.

I dunno, I’m pretty tired of star wars and find it rather uncool as well. Sorry nerds, but Star Wars, Marvel comics, and Harry Potter are all mainstream, they’re all problematic, and none of them are cool anymore. Go read indie comics, watch PeerTube, and play open source games. It was never cool to be mainstream.

This is most likely the case. Although, it could also be an interesting move if it was provocative. The “correct” response is nothing, or to step up ICE activity in that bishop’s parishes. The bad move would be to directly target the bishop with ICE, which trump could be dumb enough to do if he saw this as a provocation. That kind of open attack would put the church and state more directly at odds, which the Pope could use to argue more conservative Catholics into supporting direct progressive action in opposition.

I dunno, it’s just fun to speculate. It’s very strange to me that the Catholic church isn’t aligned with the great evil this time around, an unexpected twist for this season of the Earth Show.

This is the new manufacturing of consent. “AI” (actually CEO) “suggested” (forced) searches for extremely lame and “hello fellow kids” stuff like:

• why is celibacy so hot right now?
• what are the trending mines and factories to work in today?
• best ways to marinate my own body for eventual consumption by the CHUD overlords?

Fridgza

I feel like that’s such a personal choice as to what you’d like your final thoughts to be. I, “funny” enough, was just talking to a friend with terminal cancer about what they’re reading yesterday. It was “The Once and Future King,” a childhood favorite. Nostolgia aside, they love the sweet tragedy of the story, the silly and earnest warmth of it.

For me, maybe something like the Doadejing or Siddhartha, something reassuring that life had been good and that a peaceful end is the best outcome to a well-lived life.

I would like to tell you that the skills you develop in any language or framework will help you with every other one. A joke I’ve been making my entire career is that every 5 years or so, someone reinvents the database or schemas or the spreadsheet or document rendering (or buses or trains) or some other fundamental tech. When you step back from the specifics and the proprietary bullshit tacked on to “add value”, most software is just a database.

If anything, working in many kinds of environments is very good for teaching one to see problems abstractly and find general solutions. From .NET (a jit compiled, memory-managed system), you might branch out into functional programming (F# is .NET and a good intro to ML-style functional languages) or into more dynamic environments (python, Ruby, typescript) or lower-level systems where you need to manage memory (c\c++\rust).

Anyway, I say “I would like to tell you” because as my initial comment laments, I kind of think this industry is dying. The push to replace development teams with one dev and some AI (or even one cheap non-technical “manager” and some AI) is breaking the ersatz system of mentorship that sustains actual knowledge transfers in this field.

I’m starting to feel like a dinosaur, not sure the kind of tech world I learned to survive in is going to exist much longer.

As a writer, yes.

Most of my career is built on MS’s stack (I fell into .NET development and got good at it. Now I’m in the same boat as COBOL, Java, and Ruby-on-Rails devs: I’m basically a software doula.)

Every job I go into now I’m reccomending they get a migration plan for self-hosting and self-owning. The American tech system is collapsing. AI is causing massive ruptures in knowledge: it obscures searches, it deskills devs, it’s castrated the junior-senior-principle ladder such that we’re not training enough developers to even pass along all of the knowledge of how current systems work. SaaS is reaching the enshittification threshold and all those businesses that moved everything into the cloud are about to discover that they’re hostages and the sinking empire will drag down a lot of collateral damage with it.