Absolutely right! And to be fair, sometimes you can get that tangible satisfaction in tech hobbies. You know, I’ve hacked some consoles, installed custom router firmware, built a crypto miner. Stuff like that can absolutely be personally satisfying.

But I think you hit the nail on the head, however you get it, I think we really do need some kind of tangible product of our efforts sometimes. You need to be able to say “yeah, I did that”.

I worked in IT for years, I’m good at it, I like problem solving, I like fixing things, I like building things.

But as time went by, I found myself in a more managerial role and truth be told, that’s not really my jam. And when I wasn’t doing that I was the specialist who could support some of our organizations’ worst and most troublesome systems. I was also put in charge of training people to use the company’s new web app (which was supposed to make people’s jobs easier, but really didn’t). Let me tell you, I do not like supporting shitty software or hardware, and I really do not like encouraging users to embrace useless web apps that don’t work well and serve no real purpose. I hated my job and it was time for a change.

So at that point I decided to completely shift my career and learn to code. I figured, if I hate supporting shitty software, why not just build good software. So I took some free classes through MIT’s open course ware, and learned to code. I spent a couple of years coding, picking up skills, learning languages, working with different compilers, taking additional math classes. And by the end of it all, one of my major takeaways was that I do like building things. But… as a professional software developer, I probably wasn’t going to be doing a lot of that. At the end of the day I might be able to say, “I squashed some bugs in some code that I didn’t write and don’t really know the greater purpose of”. Or if I’m lucky, “I wrote some functions that took in some inputs and produced some outputs”. But that doesn’t really feel like building something, that just feels like being a cog in a machine.

Over that same period when I was learning to code I was also picking up a second set of skills. We inherited the home my wife grew up in (which to be sure, is a pretty great deal). But it’s a fixer upper, it needed a bunch of attention. And since I was basically home schooling myself I thought I’d earn my keep by doing a lot of that maintenance myself rather than hiring a pro. I collected power tools, I learned to use hand tools, I made a lot of trips to Home Depot. I went through the basement full of rusty tools and restored many of them, replaced handles, sharpened blades, greased gears. I learned how to replace drywall, how to install an electrical outlet, how to repair a dryer. I replaced thermal fuses in kitchen appliances to bring them back to life, I mixed cement and rebuilt a crumbling retaining wall in the backyard.

Over time I got good enough at this that I started helping some of our friends with their homes. I could strengthen a rickety front step, or repaint a room, or replace a toilet. I had skills that people needed and actually, I generally liked doing it.

TLDR: In the time it took me to discover that being a programmer might somehow still not allow me to build things, I also learned that being a handyman would allow me to build things.

So yeah, career changes are scary, and it rarely looks like a good choice, but it is an option. And honestly, I’ve been a computer guy my whole life, but seriously, working with wood and screws and PVC has been super rewarding. So yeah, I guess I’m saying keep an open mind, and consider trying something different, you never know what might work for you.

Have they tried painting a fire hydrant a truck and and a bicycle on the back? Let’s test if these cameras are a robot or not.

To me, this looks a lot like taking one dose of a prescribed antibiotic. All it really succeeds in doing is training dazzle resistant strains of cameras.

Trying to trick the cameras is playing into an expensive game of cat and mouse. And sure, fine, that may work for a little while, but it’s not a solution.

Not really. We don’t have materials that absorb or reflect infrared light. It’s one of the reasons it’s hard to beat inferred-guided (heat seeking) missiles, the only real solution is to drop something hotter than your plane, aka a flare.

So… get ready for a new era of commercial automotive flares I guess?

but at least they had some cool heads there that on more than one occasion avoided WWIII

It’s worth noting here that those cool heads existed mostly in the military, not in the leadership. Officers who received orders to fire, and then delayed because they suspected a mistake had been made. Had they followed their orders as written, we would have had a different outcome.

And after preventing WWIII, they were generally censured for disobeying orders.

I believe they’re included in the aegis systems.

It’s not first person, but company of heroes is definitely a delight! Nothing will make you feel more like you’re actually winning the war against Hitler than that game. It feels like being a colonel on the set of Band of Brothers.

I never get tired of hearing the squad chatter.

“We need a fuckin’ bazooka for this shit!”

“Come on engineers, we’re holding up the whole god damn war!”

”Jesus Conrad… TIE YOUR FUCKIN LACES!”

Yeah, I recommend this one, it’s pretty fun.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Hear hear. Fuck off take two.

Incidentally, it works the same way with the bible.

No way! I totally would of noticed if the Bible had a freaky old cannibal lady who lived in the forest!

Now I’m trying to remember if the Bible even has any forests…

Well, I think you cracked it. Nice!

Wtf is strava?

There are things to be outraged about and this ain’t one of em.

That’s the thing right there. I don’t understand how it could seem worthwhile to get upset about this.

Seriously. Who needs to see a trailer that badly? And honestly, when I already intend to buy a game, I do everything I can to avoid seeing the trailer. Why spoil things for yourself?

Decimen Lets You Send Files Through Light, Not a Network

I mean, that’s a new interface type, but it is a network.

If two machines are exchanging data, that’s the definition of a network.

Just wanted to point out, I believe the word “roost” means “to nest”. So it’s not like a sound they make.

I don’t think AI generated images can ever beat the trove of ridiculousness that is stock photos.

The current examples of AI could never be described as a general intelligence let alone Superintelligence. These LLMs are definitely just a typing monkey (that was eloquently put).

They are literally generating text word by word with a next-word-prediction methodology.

With some tweaking they can be made to produce mostly coherent code and apparently also equations that balance. This does not make these algorithms geniuses. A calculator can also balance an equation, so that alone is not impressive.

The techniques LLM designers use to leverage statistical models in order to generate coherent sentences are actually rather impressive. It is legitimately quite a feat to make LLMs work as well as they do. But that does not mean that these outputs are anything like “thinking”, they’re just outputs. Data goes in, the machine churns, does some mystery math, and different data comes out.

These systems are not worth anthropomorphizing.