@saraislet yep. Most of my disadvantages are hidden, and I pass for what I want to pass for—all the same, nobody likes to be told the downsides of their plan, no matter who it’s coming from.

I’d have hundreds of “teachable moments” if anyone wanted to be taught. I’d have half of them if anyone wanted to consider what I was saying as equally credible.

It’s a damn shame, really, because I strove for over a decade to create success for everyone and the end result was so much more limited than I was offering.

I’m on burnout break and have been since July. Breaks have only helped me so much: I tried shorter term things with significant help, and when the cycle began anew…

I really, really hope you’ll find success and happiness on this path. You deserve that.

@saraislet My empathy meter just *railed the needle.* In my own life, a decade of chanting "I told you so" every other day never got satisfying—it just compounded and compounded until burnout, physiological cortisol overload, dragged me under.

I wish for you a drastically different path.

@welshpixie Excuse me, dear feyden, but haf you any honse?

I use Debian btw

@rodneylives By the way, I want to thank you for taking this much time and care for curating a piece of our heritage. The work you're doing beyond mere product packaging is invaluable.

@welshpixie still working on it! The cropping on this one comes out wonky in some clients since the subject is landscape-shaped, so I’ll need to iterate.

I just realized that, although I own a fair number of baskets, I don't seem to have a single tisket or tasket.

@joshmillard you had me on board at “Fremen YA novel,” honestly.

@adrake @williampietri My point, and my apologies for having left this part unsaid: how one addresses someone who put in more effort than the result was worth — by intensive iterative prompting resulting in LLM slop all the same — is the same as any high-effort mediocrity.

There's no consideration for what folks in my own circle call "prompting harder" if the result is just as unusable. People work hard without LLMs all the time, with poor results, and get no "you tried" consolation prize. There's no reason to be any kinder than one would over any other bad result.

The burden of evaluation being shoved on the reader is awful. I just don't see a grey area around someone having put in too much effort with their LLM subscription. The level of effort someone put in is especially irrelevant when pushing evaluation labor on others.

Asking what to do about those folks has a simple answer: not caring how hard they tried in the process of making more work for you.

@adrake @williampietri in my own experience there are a great many people putting a great deal of effort into mediocre results in almost every endeavor in life. It’s regardless of the technology or lack thereof involved.

Technology has advanced to the point of partial automation of bad effort/result ratios, but it’s not a new thing in and of itself just because a couple of popular companies drastically overrepresented and obfuscated what their underdelivering LLM does.

@vingtroiseize

“yes we can grant you an exclusive license, but your team seems to know Commodore better than we do, we might like to sell you the whole company.” What company? It’s a drawer full of chicken lips badges they glue to rebadge random junk, a branding guide that hasn’t been opened in 35 years, and an empty bucket labeled “public goodwill.”

It’d be lovely to see the company rise from the ashes as a hardware manufacturer, or at least to get the plastic molds back into hands that know how to use them, but they’d made an attempt to be a generic PC manufacturer before.

What would this resurrected company do? Sell VampireV4s in cases? Badge that other weird under-qualified youtuber’s half-finished 8/16 bit homage machine? Make GCR capable floppy drives?

That last one would be nice.

@babe @JuliaRez is it just the bar cap you need or the hinge situation? I, uh, have a box of Model Ms.

@dirtyoldtown * … bought the bank __that invented internet banking__ (don’t thank me too much) and…

@dirtyoldtown when one kid was still a minor, we set up a sort of kids’ checking account thing, debit card and all. The card remained sealed away in a locked drawer since I did deposits for him online. Three times it was compromised. Three times a renumbered card was generated.

All was quiet for a while and then when we actually gave him the card number to use once, the transaction was caught in the Humble Bundle breach. A whole other spate of transactions came in.

The US retail finance system has been broken for *decades.* My early career was based around mitigating this. It didn’t work: a toxic company called Norwest bought the bank, changed its name to Wells Fargo, and blew up everything we’d done to make online transaction security as solid as we could. Then they started slamming people with unapproved account opening, because metrics-driven, to top it off.

We had our chance. We frittered it away in the name of quarterly calls.

@genehack excuse my interruption and ima let you finish but

FUCK YEAH, BROTHER

@mathowie as much as it’s a meme my understanding is that integrators have some kind of rule about more than 12 choices of anything in any given interaction.

I’d rather we just go up to J and then add >>Next>>

@nixCraft @saraislet “Engineers will spend less time writing code.” Loooool. Engineers spend almost no time writing code, proportionately—architecture, design, debugging, securing, making reliable, testing, and deployment are what takes up all the time. Oh, and operating at scale. That’s a big time sink. Ask me how I know.

Writing code? If you’re spending a lot of time writing code you’re not doing your actual job.

@mathowie what, you don’t like only being able to browse your tunes alphabetically up to “K”, at which point the alphabet abruptly comes to an end forever?

@mikemcquaid Thanks. Done.

@mikemcquaid @homebrew @genehack