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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Problem with the theory is that people believe in LLM strongly enough that whatever pressure there is within a market to be vaguely similar evaporates. SQL certainly has dialects, but at least the basics are vaguely similar, as an example.

    Working with a vendor that is oddly different from every other vendor in the space and we applied pressure to implement more typical interfaces. Their answer was “just have an LLM translate for you and use our different and frankly much weirder interface”. When we did cave and use it and demonstrated the biggest LLMs failed, they said at least they give you the idea. Zero interest in consistent API with LLM as an excuse.

    On the write your code for you, it has to be kept on a short leash and can be a nightmare if not overseen, though it can accelerate some chore work. But I just spent a lot of time last week trying to fix up someone’s vibe coded migration, because it looked right and it passed the test cases, but it was actually a gigantic failure. Another vibe coded thing took 3 minutes to run and it was supposed to be an interactive process. The vibe coded said that’s just how long it takes, if it could be faster, the AI would have done it and none of the AI suggestions are viable in the use case. So I spent a day reworking their code to do exactly the same thing, but do it in under a second.

    For the jira ticket scenario, I had already written a command line utility to take care of that for me. Same ease of use instead of using jira GUI and my works torturous workflows, but with a very predictable result.

    So LLM codegen a few lines at a time with competent human oversight, ok and useful, depending on context. But we have the similar downside as AI video/image/text creative content: People without something substantial to contribute flood the field with low quality slop, bugs and slow performance and the most painful stuff to try to fix since not even the person that had it generated understood it.


  • Just a small correction, 120v.

    But charging at home is a game changer compared to gas, cost and convenience both. If you can’t charge at home though, it’s rough as the commercial charging stations are pretty pricey, before Iran or was generally more expensive to fast charge than gas per mile. Home charging for me is like getting 1.25 a gallon gas. Except without the oil changes, the belts…



  • Don’t forget the obsession with having any way to open a door except a boring normal way.

    I’m really really hoping EVs get over the Tesla envy and just make sensible cars with EV drivetrains.

    It’s probably a wildly unpopular idea, but I personally would love a Miata with an H shaped battery pack to let the passengers ride low in the car at the expense of some range, with the traditional driveshaft tunnel becoming battery.

    But failing that, straightforward door opening, actual buttons and knobs for HVAC and volume, and a reasonable expectation of serviceable battery pack over time and I’m totally there for it.



  • I wonder how common this is for evs in general. My vehicle has only gone in once for a recall on the windshield wiper motors, nothing else gone wrong.

    The last car I had got off that brand needed quite a few repairs, so it’s remarkably refreshing to have a car that is just working along.

    EVs just seen to be an easier thing to make reliable. Temperatures run much lower, fewer fluids in play, not having to deal with thousands of little explosions every minute…

    The battery seems to draw all the headache, but even then reports suggest that conservative battery management systems have made those more reliable than people thought they would be. Probably thanks to the mandatory 100k warranty on batteries, the vendors took it seriously.


  • Fun fact, while shopping for a car in 2022, we looked at a used 2021 bmw x5. I wondered what they replaced it with and the salesman said “oh, he traded it in for a 2022 x5 of the exact same trim”. They know him well because every year he comes in and trades in to make sure he is never driving “last year’s model”.

    Particularly stupid because that was the year of shortages where they actually made the new model worse by removing features they couldn’t get supply for, other than removing features, the new car was unchanged from prior year.







  • Sadly I can’t tell if this is a joke or not because I have met so many people who seriously believe things like this work. They are the ones who eventually get the most pissed when LLM messes up on them because they got the LLM to “promise” not to do the specific thing it ends up doing.

    They generally evolve their superstitious ritual to something else that will eventually fail, like changing the wording, or making the LLM specifically include a phrase indicating a promise of quality. They also believe when the LLM “apologizes” and think that indicated self reflection and learning. Very few are prepared to accept that the LLM can go off the rails at unpredictable times and unpredictable circumstances, and their utility has to be monitored like a hawk unless the outcome really doesn’t matter.


  • I say it’s generally a problem of long narratives, but some genres like comedy can get a pass since they don’t have to rely on growth and progression.

    To the extent a story needs to develop, running a long time is likely to doom something.

    Running a few books or a handful of seasons can work, but if a story has to evolve over decades…


  • Haven’t gotten around to One Piece (that episode count is… daunting), but I think I really know it’s done as soon as they have a ‘tournament arc’. Give up all pretense and just have them fight for the sake of fighting.

    And then there’s bleach, where, oh look, he has a somewhat cool sword, oh it has a cooler form, oh there’s an even cooler form, oh now he has mask powers, but limited, oh wait, we were lying that wasn’t his real cool sword form… Ugh…



  • I think the real problem is trying to keep a story going too long, and the need to escalate everything constantly serves to ultimately undermine how that progress feels.

    The stories tend to be repetitive, end up where a villain gets a new MacGuffin and the hero has to get some new capability to overcome only for the next villan to have an even bigger MacGuffin, rinse and repeat with each time being portrayed as some impossibly large leap over the last. To keep characters going they time jump, they get cloned, they come back from the dead, they cross over from some alternate universe.

    Basically, most genres of fiction have a risk of overstaying their welcome if you try to make it go on a long time.


  • It’s not so much a problem plaguing fiction in general, but fiction that runs a long time.

    If it’s a contained story with defined end that comes relatively soon enough, the stakes can be relatively fixed, arcs can run through to a logical conclusion, etc.

    If you have unending, soap-opera like story, then you hit problems. Characters can never actually be fully realized, they have to have their development paused. Any romantic ‘will they/won’t they’ gets ludicrously drawn out. You usually get tougher plot armor because fans are really attached, or a revolving door of characters that you don’t get attached too, or people inevitably managing to be alive after having died. You have power creep where insurmountable challenges get overcome through progress and then something has to reset the new capabilities to table stakes.