birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
13hr ago
29% German and 69% autistic.
That's... about right.
When I got diagnosed a few years back, the practitioner said that I had "a lot of well developed coping strategies".
birb_cromble
14hr ago
It's been a while since I took a history class, but didn't Macarthur get benched because he wanted to nuke the whole peninsula?
birb_cromble
14hr ago
and congress won't use its clear authority to adjust this (which, I can't expect they will)
This seems like the most likely answer here; Roberts will kick the responsibility for unraveling this back on Congress, who will, predictably, do fuck-all in either direction.
Generally speaking, the most accurate heuristic I've found for predicting supreme court cases is "what decision will allow Roberts to keep attending beltway dinner parties". So far only the recent abortion ruling has failed that one.
birb_cromble
21hr ago
But that feels like something you do in the off-season, not right before a playoff game.
More charitably, it's a pretty common trend through history that generals from peacetime and colonial/peacekeeping periods tend to fall on their face when conditions change. To make things worse, you can't tell ahead of time how or why they will fail. This isn't unique to the US either. Russia and Ukraine have seen the same thing. It seems like the only way to mitigate the risk is to have a deep bench of officers and a willingness to shitcan anyone who isn't getting the job done.
I don't know whether or not this is why Hegseth is doing what he is doing, but it's a possibility. People in general want to make this conflict a referendum on Trump so badly that it's difficult to find objective information.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Huh.
Maybe it's a rural/urban divide. How many of them own cars and drive regularly?
I finally got some good news.
Last Monday, my father asked for me to come with him to an appointment about some scan results. He's halfway through his chemotherapy treatment, and we've all been hoping that it would be effective.
The oncologist started the appointment by making it very clear that the results won't be official until the radiologist looks over the results, but as soon as he finished his disclaimer, he started going through each slice of the CT scan and giving my father the good news. Compared to the scan from last December, almost all the tumors are gone. The one that is still visible is less than half the size that it was (maybe a quarter). The hope is that with six more weeks of chemo, that remaining tumor will shrink even more.
He's not out of the woods yet - he still has stage four cancer. The tumor could start rapidly growing again after the doctors discontinue the chemo. There are a thousand other things that could go wrong. But for now, we're taking the win.
To all of you who have offered prayers and other messages of hope, I genuinely thank you. It's not my place to judge matters of faith, but I like to think we live in a world where the hopes of good people matter in some small way. Once again, thank you.
birb_cromble
2d ago
The dental work has erased all of my progress so far. Spending is now $531.14 higher than it was at the same time last year. Time to get back on the horse and resume the effort, I guess.
birb_cromble
3d ago
That's not quite what I'm looking for. Ideally, I'd like something that watches my typing in both my IDE and a chat window and provides feedback and commentary as I work.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Amusingly, Gemini 3 fast writes and executed a python script to be sure.
birb_cromble
3d ago
The car wash riddle is something most intelligent people should catch if told to look out for it, but many of them still, let alone people of average or below average intelligence, will stumble over and fail because they skim the question or don’t actually catch the ‘trick'
Are you asserting that realizing that washing a car at the car wash requires a car is a trick? I asked half a dozen people that I know from a few different venues, from a bright high schooler, to a college professor, to a water heater installer, and they all looked at me like I was retarded for even asking the question.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Their star performer hasn't actually generated a deliverable yet. He spent over $7,000 in API usage in one month doing something something training agents for HR something something. He doesn't even have a document outlining the plan.
birb_cromble
3d ago
One thing I've found them remarkably useful for is "rubber ducking". It's nice to put my thoughts down in a single place and get quasi-related responses that might help me think about things.
I'd really love it if Claude code or Codex had a "rubber duck" mode that reasoned about the code and my own thoughts together, without an implicit expectation that it would be modifying the code. I'm surprised none of the harnesses have something like that yet.
I don't know if I would call myself an AI sceptic, but I haven't seen a huge win from agentic coding in my professional life.
I work in Java - LLMs seem to do better with python or typescript.
I work on a legacy codebase - LLMs tend to do better with greenfield.
I work on a large codebase that is architected as a monolith - it's been my experience that the odds of an LLM shitting the bed begin to rise after about 15,000 lines and approaches 100% after about a million lines.
I work on a codebase that has a surprising amount of non-CRUD code. LLMs get confused by that - especially when it's similar to stuff on GitHub, but not identical.
Quite a few of our customers operate in a regulated industry, and LLMs absolutely make shit up about regulatory compliance right now.
Overall, I don't think that my job is at risk, but I do have some concerns that somebody might vibe up a competitor that can eat enough of our customer base to knock us out of profitability. After the Delve fiasco, they might just straight up lie about compliance and temporarily capture some of the regulated customers as well.
Moving on from my personal experience, I have two acquaintances who are deep in agentic mania right now.
The first is not a professional programmer, but he has always wanted to use programming to achieve specific goals in his personal hobbies. Claude code has been an absolute god send for him. He's writing things that don't need to scale, don't really need to perform, and have no real consequences for incorrectness. From his perspective, the God-Machine is here electro-immanentize the cyber-eschaton and the techno-rapture is nigh. The number of "ha ha you're gonna be out of a job and die in a gutter ha ha"-coded jibes I've gotten from him has been starting to wear on me. It's a perfect example of "the agent is only bad at things where I have personal expertise" playing out right in front of my eyes.
The second is a professional programmer, and his employer is going all in on agentic coding. They're actively tracking how many tokens each person is burning and actually using AI detectors in reverse to make sure that PRs are sufficiently crammed full of AI code. They're having huge problems because the agents are getting stuck in endless loops because they can't figure out how to write code that passes their pre-existing automated test suites. In the end, they're actually considerably less productive, but line go up. He's stuck with it, so he's desperately trying to make things not suck. He's convinced that there must be some secret sauce that makes the agents write quality code and not descend into iterative schizophrenia every time it encounters a ticket that's more complex than "change the color of this CSS class". He's spent dozens of hours of his own time trying to figure it out, and he had, until recently, been absolutely convinced he could make it work. Just one more bit of prompting - just a few more custom skills and it would do what all the boosters promised. He finally broke down recently and had a full blown crisis because he looked at Steve Yegge's gas town build pipeline. The damned thing basically never passes. Steve Yegge, the guy who is both highly technical and absolutely sold on the future of agentic coding, can't consistently get this shit to work. At this point my acquaintance called it all nonsense and gave up. He's doing the absolute bare minimum at work that he needs to do in order not get fired and he's waiting for the tool chain to stabilize.
I'm not really sure where I'm going with it, but the three different experiences are interesting.
birb_cromble
3d ago
From a personal budgeting standpoint, is an insurance reimbursement considered income or negative spending? I'm assuming the latter, but if anyone has arguments in the other direction I'd like to hear them.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I'll warn you that the author has largely stalled on the series. At this point I'm not sure if he'll actually finish it.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I've been re-reading Larry Correia's collected works. The man is a modern day Robert E Howard, except less classy. I love it.
birb_cromble
5d ago
It looks like they're not removing denuvo, but putting in a single shim that lies to Denuvo about what's happening in the rest of the environment. A hack like that should work on many games.
birb_cromble
7d ago
294 points, or 99th anglophone percentile.
My weakest category was aesthetic, at the 71st percentile.
Apparently I know stuff about things?
birb_cromble
7d ago
If you think my designs are stupid, why haven't you drawn any better ones
birb_cromble
9d ago
Mental health: have been very anxious for some reason waking up. Would like to get to the bottom of this.
Are you in any medications? I had amoxicillin clavulanate give me raging anxiety attacks for a few weeks every morning at around 5:30 am.
birb_cromble
9d ago
There was no tractor bubble, there is no AI bubble.
There actually was a tractor bubble in the US in the 1920s. From 1920 to 1921, the industry imploded and production dropped by more than half. The reason for this was twofold. The first was that speculators looked at sales numbers and treated tractors like they were consumables instead of durable goods. The second is that increased efficiencies through improved tractor designs reduced the demand for tractors.
Economic bubbles deflating don't necessarily kill technologies. Despite the tractor bubble popping, the technology stayed around and continued to develop at a reasonable pace. I think that's what's going to happen with AI. It'll be a useful technology, but today's players won't necessarily be tomorrow's winners.
birb_cromble
9d ago
Spending is $2,272.27 less than the same time last year. I had a pipe develop a pinhole leak, so an unexpected plumbing bill slowed my progress down a bit. Tomorrow is the expensive dental appointment.
Even if they aren't running out of money, they are trying to shape up for an IPO this year. Having a boat-anchor like Sora on the books probably wouldn't look good in an S-1.
birb_cromble
10d ago
I've been spending most of my spare time sitting in hospital waiting rooms for the last couple of weeks. Geopolitics has not been on the top of my priority list, outside what's showing on the TV that's bolted to the wall
I ran into a bug once in a unique ID generation scheme because the system clock ran monotonically backwards for thirty seconds, then started marching forward again.
Writing a mitigation was actually surprisingly fun. It's not often you have to explain to a reviewer why the "didTimeTravelHappen" variable is in there.
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