TechTakes

Every person I talk to — well, every smart person I talk to — no, wait, every smart person in tech — okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybody…

Man, I didn't even know how to react to this nonsense. The obvious sneer is to point out that if the alternative is to interact with people like ER here we really shouldn't be surprised to see a declining birth rate. But I think the more important takeaway that this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious.

Like, there's plenty of surveys and research into why people are having fewer kids than they used to, and it's not because toddlers are little hellions more so than in the past. And "generational insolvency" is a pretty big fucking part of the explanation actually, as is empowering families to choose whether or not to have children rather than leaving it entirely up to the vicissitudes of biological processes and horniness. The latter part cuts both ways, in that people who want families are (theoretically; see above re: financial factors) able to take advantage of fertility treatments or IVF or whatever and have kids where they historically would have been unable to do so.

But no, rather than actually engage with any of that or otherwise treat the world like other people have agency they have identified what they believe to be the problem and have decided that the brute application of state power is the solution, so long as that power is being applied to other people. For all that we acknowledge the horrors of fascism, I think the stupidity of these people is also worth acknowledging, if for no other reason than to reinforce why this shit shouldn't be taken seriously.

aww, is the poor baby missing that maybe there's people who don't want to talk to them because of how much of a piece of shit they are? how sad

lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism

this dipshit continues to make the most astounding not-even-wrong posts. guess they're angling for a job as the next Noahpinion or Yglesias

I know a bit about qgis + wfs (and surroundings)? enough to be dangerous tho

that android project of some months was a venture into flutter (and haven’t touched it before)

I had similar impressions on some things, and mixed on other

dart’s a moderately good language with some nice primitive, tooling overall is pretty mature, broad strokes works well for variant targeting and shit

libraries though holy shit the current situation (then) was a mess. one minor flutter sdk upgrade and a whole bunch of things just exploded (serialisation things in nosql-type libraries I tried to use for the ostensible desired magic factor (just went back to sqlite stuff again after)). this can’t have been due to sdk drift alone, and felt like an iceberg problem

and then the documentation: fucking awful, for starting. excellent as technical documentation once you grok shit but before that all the examples and things are terrible. lots of extremely important details hidden in single mentions in offhand sentences in places that if you don’t happen to be looking at that exact page good luck finding it. this, too, felt like inadequate care and attention by el goog

I imagine if one is working with this every day you know the lay of the land and where to avoid stepping into holes, but wow was I surprised at how much it was possible to rapidly rakestep, given what the language pitches as

http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

The big difference is that Yud is unrigorous while Wolfram is a plagiarist. Or maybe putting it another way, Yud can't write proofs and Wolfram can't write bibliographies.

I mean yud is only really a guru on his own farts

we really shouldn’t have let Microsoft both fork an editor and buy GitHub, of course they were gonna turn one into a really shitty version of the other

anyway check this extremely valuable suggestion from Copilot in one of their screenshots:

The error message 'userld and score are required' is unclear. It should be more specific, such as 'Missing userld or score in the request body'.

aren’t you salivating for a Copilot subscription? it turns a lazy error message into… no that’s still lazy as shit actually, who is this for?

• a human reading this still needs to consult external documentation to know what userId and score are
• a machine can’t read this
• if you’re going for consistent error messages or you’re looking to match the docs (extremely likely in a project that’s in production), arbitrarily changing that error so it doesn’t match anything else in the project probably isn’t a great idea, and we know LLMs don’t do consistency

Thanks, Google. You know, I used to be pretty good at getting consistent, useful results from your search engine, but the improvements you've made to it since the make me feel like I really might need a fucking prompt engineering course to find things on the internet these days. By which I mean something that'll help you promptly engineer the internet back into a form where search engines work correctly.

Chat-GPT-TFSD-21guns can have a little anthropomorphism, as a treat.

• Sam Altman, probably

I thought the Raytheon ads for tanks and knife missiles in the Huntsville, AL airport were bad, but this takes the whole goddamn cake, and two scoops of ice cream with it.

mm I wonder what kind of content they'll want to use that for