vijucat · HackerTrans

I love such stories. Right now, a lot of folks I know are struggling to find jobs, so I read the part about how he got a job the first day he was out of jail with some astonishment and nostalgia for the simpler days, when showing interest was often enough to land the job! Now, hoop number 1, the AI resume filter, is a strange obstacle that one has to jump through first.

vijucat

3 ay öncediscuss

Well, I'm on Windows (+ Cygwin) and wrote a Dockerfile. It wasn't that hard. git branch + worktree + a docker container per project and I can work with copilot in --yolo mode (or claude --dangerously-skip-permissions, whichever). vscode is pretty smooth at installing the VS Code Server on first connection to a docker container, too, and I just open up the workspace in a minute.

vijucat

4 ay öncediscuss

I've always been struck by how long sentences are in writing from a century or more ago. To my mind whose attention-span has been poisoned by YouTube Shorts (even if they are mostly about trigonometry) and Tweets (even if I tell myself that's the new newspaper), they are most difficult to read. I often have to restart from the beginning.

Albeit an extreme example, here's a sentence from Henry James' "The Ambassadors", 1909:

The principle I have just mentioned as operating had been, with the most newly disembarked of the two men, wholly instinctive - the fruit of a sharp sense that, delightful as it would be to find himself looking, after so much separation, into his comrade's face, his business would be a trifle bungled should he simply arrange for this countenance to present itself to the nearing steamer as the first "note," of Europe.

vijucat

7 ay öncediscuss

I disagree with "the golden age of software quality". For example, right now, on the front page of HN, is this article, "After Windows Update, Password icon invisible, click where it used to be", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46116567. I could be wrong, but it feels as if this egregious error is AI workslop?!

vijucat

7 ay öncediscuss

I have this one https://www.sordum.org/9470/windows-update-blocker-v1-8/

I will check out the Chris Titus link someone else posted below, too, but that seems more risky.

vijucat

7 ay öncediscuss

It's become a universal truth that you should probably not upgrade to the latest and non-greatest version of ANYTHING these days. Not Android, not Windows, not iOS, not macOS. It's just embarrassing how companies with market caps sometimes above $1T produce workslop.

I use Windows Update Blocker on Windows 10 to keep it "protected" from upgrades (!). I can see that critical security updates are occurring despite this, so it's a good compromise. For now. When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.

vijucat

8 ay öncediscuss

I took care of IT for a startup hedge fund once. I was the quant's right-hand man, data engineer, visualization dashboard guy, everything. The quant needed to run a monolithic C++ program daily to chew through stock data and we decided a dual-Xeon server with 512 GB RAM would be great. OVH MG-512, for those curious.

Quant happy, boss happy, all good. Then the boss goes for lunch with someone and comes back slightly disturbed. We were not buzzword compliant. Apparently the other guy made him feel that he was using outdated tech by not being on AWS, using auto-scaling etc;

Here I am, from a background where my first language was 8086 assembly, and compactness was important to me. I remember thinking, "This whole thing could run on a powerful calculator, except for the RAM requirement".

It was a good lesson for me. Most CTOs know this bias and have unnecessarily huge and wasteful budgets but make sure they keep the business heads happy in the comfort that the firm is buzzword compliant. Efficiency and compactness are a marketing liability for IT heads!

vijucat

9 ay öncediscuss

They're great at creating test cases out of code and/or log file excerpts. They're good at run-of-the-mill tasks whose answer one can reasonably expect to find on StackOverflow. I'm using GPT-4.1 and Clause Sonnet Thinking 3.7 with vscode + GitHub Copilot

vijucat

10 ay öncediscuss

Wish I was taught things these in school. Psychology, CBT techniques, etc; I have always had a low EQ and learned a lot from basically messing things up, and from having a wife with super high EQ. Perception is reality for all practical purposes, despite the more mathematical wanting it to be not so, simply because the objective can literally not be perceived: each perceiver is subjective. Fixing this input layer would have saved me a lot of CPU churn, so to speak.

vijucat

10 ay öncediscuss

Somewhat related: sentence completions / fill-in-the-blank templates are shockingly effective at eliciting your inner thoughts which even you didn't know you were feeling. The idea is from Nathaniel Branden's work.

"What I regret right now is ____"

"What I should now is ____"

"I am become aware that ____"

You don't need to journal these on paper. Don't do these in public. You might find yourself overwhelmed by what comes out.

vijucat

10 ay öncediscuss

Yes! Once I've figured out that this problem is best solved using parser combinators, and that I have a good idea of how to model the transformation, I'm so glad I can delegate work to the LLM code gen and focus on the specification, test cases, corner cases, etc;

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