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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I have a coworker who is essentially building a custom program in Sheets using AppScript, and has been using CGPT/Gemini the whole way.

    While this person has a basic grasp of the fundamentals, there’s a lot of missing information that gets filled in by the bots. Ultimately after enough fiddling, it will spit out usable code that works how it’s supposed to, but honestly it ends up taking significantly longer to guide the bot into making just the right solution for a given problem. Not to mention the code is just a mess - even though it works there’s no real consistency since it’s built across prompts.

    I’m confident that in this case and likely in plenty of other cases like it, the amount of time it takes to learn how to ask the bot the right questions in totality would be better spent just reading the documentation for whatever language is being used. At that point it might be worth it to spit out simple code that can be easily debugged.

    Ultimately, it just feels like you’re offloading complexity from one layer to the next, and in so doing quickly acquiring tech debt.


  • Sandboxes are literally grounds for infinite creativity. Just look at The Lego Movie. No, if there’s an issue with this movie it’s that they aren’t using the sandbox to its full potential, at least as far as our initial impressions can tell us. We have all seen every single one of the story beats shown in the trailer before in other movies.













  • I have never strongly identified as any particular religion, so if that is where you’re coming from this answer might not be helpful.

    My parents both came from religious backgrounds, but they decided not to force me into any particular faith. When I was about 8, I started attending a Unitarian Universalist church, which certainly has religious tones but is very specific about accepting all kinds of faiths, choosing instead to focus on community.

    As a result, I’ve been exposed to many different kinds of faith. I don’t tend to believe any creation myths or creators myself, at best I am agnostic. But I do believe that faith is an integral part of the human experience. Faith and hope are inextricably tied together, even if they don’t both show up to every family dinner, to strain a metaphor.

    I may not have faith in a god or gods, but I find that sometimes I have faith in my fellow man. I hope the goodness of humanity will prevail. In much smaller terms, I have faith in my friends; I know that they will have my back when I need it. Every time I take a risk, I have at least a little faith that I’ll be okay at the end, or at least that I can pick myself back up.

    Humans rely on faith for a lot of things, and in my opinion, that doesn’t have to look like God.





  • I feel like he addresses this quite well in the conclusion. In regards to cars, “this is not a new phenomenon” and admits to his reliance on salesmen and mechanics.

    Ultimately, he’s asking that the people who make decisions about how our world is shaped have some knowledge about the things that are going to shape the world. And that essential issue is still unaddressed. Remind me, how many years ago was it that US Congress was asking Google why the bad articles show up when you search their name?

    Oh, and our car-centric society in the US largely sucks. That may or may not have anything to do with our general understanding of a motor, but maybe it’s worth considering how much thought has really gone into the implications of these massively affecting technologies.



  • I don’t have any interesting secrets or facts from my current ex-jobs, so I’ll share an interesting fact from a buddy’s. It’s one of those companies that offers automated phone systems (and chats, nowadays) that listen to your options rather than taking number inputs.

    This may no longer be the case, but these systems were not actually automated. There are entire call centers dedicated to these phone systems, whereby an operator listens to your call snippet and manually selects the next option in the phone tree, or transcribes your input.

    I wouldn’t be surprised at all if advances in AI have made this whole song and dance less in need of human intervention, but once upon a time, your call wasn’t truly automated - it was federated.