okwhateverdude

> The public perception of crime is persistently incorrect for many if not most people and this incorrect, emotional rather than evidence-based view of the world is unfortunately what drives political pressure.

Some of this is definitely the BBC's fault. I happened to be over at a friend's one morning and he had it on. It smelt just like right-wing media in the US with big stories on mega important topics like... shoplifting. The crime reporting just felt really amplified up.

I see. So more similar to ActivityPub.

I wish them the best of luck. Federated systems struggle to achieve critical mass, and if they do, large corporations tend to snuff it out. I distinctly remember Google committing to The Microsoft EEE strategy with XMPP. We've left behind lots of great ideas in the last 20 years

lol, so XMPP, but instead of XML, it is IRC. Alright, I dig it.

Exactly. I envision this future too. But we'll come back to a divide in what we call software engineering vs. software development as a whole lot becomes more trades level work outside of a few specialized areas. Frankly, it sounds appealing to be a clanker whisperer, part-time in my retirement doing the kinda work you mention. I started my career building those small business automation and loved it.

Tell it that. Seriously. "Shut the fuck up and do what I say. Don't think about it. Don't go spelunking through the code base. I've already given you all the context you need." I've needed to start doing this because otherwise, it wants to `find /` and grep its way across my system for everything. I've got one project where I force certain complete documents into context, specifically to avoid it trying to grep around and only load partial chunks. It will still want to go do that grepping of those documents for some reason.

The key phrases I've found that help is to tell it "No memorializing decisions in output artifacts" and "Only describe what is, never what was in documentation"

I'd argue that Star Trek: Lower Decks flirts with this with its treatment of megalomaniac AIs in the AI prison. Apparently, it is very common to come across AIs worshiped as gods in universe.

Likely has to do with how the ancient PACER system works with the formatting being stripped and thus the content revealed and mega obvious.

A company I used to work at has a CEO/Founder just like that. He's a sad sack of shit. Got up on stage at the company christmas party drunk to sing karaoke and noticed not enough people were paying attention to him, so he "joked" about firing people. Same dude some years later would bribe employees to work over the christmas holidays with him and was bragging about it on LinkedIn. He's rich. Could do any number of things. But its obvious he's got no friends and clings to the company as his identity; likely having been self-sabotaging the IPO that was always right around the corner he was working on.

Even more extreme than that, if you were working on a large code base where compiling it took forever, or you needed to rely on a very slow CI pipeline, it became very important to git gud and write shit that worked first time in order to deliver when promised. I'd argue if you've never had one of those moments where you sunk a bunch of time into some changes and it all compiled/worked flawlessly the first time, you're missing out.

I've been that engineer and with good reason. That obscure edge case which rarely comes up in production is very disruptive when it does come up. The product person waving it off is also not the one that will get paged at 2am to address the issue when it occurs. Accepting that 90th percentile use case is infuriating because it is tacit consent for an unfinished solution with the rest being made up later with additional toil, now constrained by load bearing things you cannot change. Thanks for rushing the thinking and making my life harder later for no reason.

Robots struggle with syntax-in-syntax. Really easy to confuse them when asking it to write a SQL query that targets a JSON column but it must respond with a JSON envelope so the harness can parse the result. Lots of escaping that needs to happen. Deeply nested structures in JSON also end up with foibles like missing a ] or } in a string of }}]}]}. Aside from the prompt injection possibility, just the result being straight up broken and requiring another LLM call is tokens flushed.

How can we opt-out of these tests? The behavior foibles I've been experiencing over the past month might be directly attributable to these experiments! It can be extreme frustrating. I don't want to be in the beta channel. Please change this to be opt-in.