radicalbyte

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
7,796
Submissions
2,157
Member since
Jun 2
Freelance CTO | Software Architect | Tech Lead.

Things.

hn±seldonplan§com or ryan instead of hn.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 days ago
I'm surprised that we don't have the black banner. Sir Patrick Stewart played a formative part in the live of many of us in the industry.
Comment · 2 days ago
I watched TNG the first time around, every night, with my dad. It made me the man I am today in many ways.
Comment · 2 days ago
Every time I see the current VP of the US I keep thinking back to Riker. And how he's like the anti-universe version of Riker.
Comment · 3 days ago
Yeah this, I used to sit in the lab with my girlfriend (now wife) when she was doing wet work for her pharmacology doctorate. It was slooooow. Like slower than J2EE. I could smoke a pork shoulder faster.
Comment · 3 days ago
My wife is a doctorate in pharmacology, I made exactly this argument to her but she dismantled it pretty quickly.

a) We do test on terminally ill people, but after testing in other models. b) Thalidomide was all roses compared to the horrors you can inflict. c) Profit-driven industry makes extremely perverse incentives.

Still I do come down more on your side of the argument, and we have historically made massive leaps doing some horrific things.

I wonder if we can get better models based off of human cell-lines / tissues? Like CRISPR did?

Comment · 4 days ago
iTunes.

Skype.

Windows File Manager.

It has been a thing for a long time in consumers software from the big guys. The people working on it don't care about UX or performance.

Now a lot of the small-company software we used to use has been replaced by slow bloated and buggy apps usually running on Electron (Slack et al) so we're seeing it everywhere as opposed to in a couple of bad apps.

Comment · 4 days ago
I used to spend an hour throwing a PoC together with PHP (or sometimes in MS Access) because hey you can throw shit together real fast, and because I used either a shitty language or a toy tool they were treated as throwaway.

Now LLMs make that easier to do with a larger scope.

Comment · 7 days ago
Are you building them "fast enough"? I follow American politics and infrastructure build-out closer than I do my own local politics as I've been working for American companies in the AI space.

I'm hearing a whole lot of noise, frustration and anger from the construction side that it's getting really hard to build data centres in the US now that the public are coming out hard. Especially in DEEP "red" states.

Comment · 7 days ago
>edit: never mind, I just checked your comment history, this seems to be some thing that you are repeating over and over and getting the same kind of answers but you just keep doing it

I've noticed this with people in tech who spend too much time on Twitter. They have a very weird view of Europe. It used to be the Fox New boomers but it has spread to people who you'd assume were pretty smart.

To be honest it's part of the reason I left Twitter and only visit this site rarely. Sucks as I've had some awesome discussions here in the past.

My suspicion is that it's related to the drop in standards in tech since the big ramp up in the 2010s and the way Meta and the crypto folks don't want regulation so a lot of their employees have a vested interested in bashing the organisation capable of actually introducing some good regulation.

Comment · 7 days ago
We're building data centres, there are several massive ones in my tiny little country (NL). We're also quite capable of putting satellites into orbit. We have swarms of these small satellites just not quite at the scale of StarLink and they're doing science.

Your claim makes as much sense as saying that the US can't even build airliners. Sure they can't build good ones. That was a decision to replace the technically capable management at Boeing with an army of MBAs. Sure Airbus are a decade ahead but the US can still build them.

The thing which many people forget was that, up until the current POTUS decided to reverse course, we were best buddies. We've invested a huge amount of money in US-based companies and generally worked together to increase the size of the pie for everyone.

Comment · 13 days ago
There are a whooooole lot of people writing software who, despite spending years on the craft, never really get any further than McGuyver mode.

Self-trained people (like me) are particularly susceptible to it and we're heavily represented in the software world. A lot of us either recognise that (or are coached) and invest the time learning the benefits, and limitations of, software architecture. And, importantly, keep reflecting, learning and updating our practise.

I keep going back to the YOLO mode every other year and try out new languages to see if we still need the structure and abstractions. Then VMs came along and all I can say is they're both even more important and now we have an army of virtual "ADHD idiot juniors developers" at our finger tips it's even easier to tell the good and bad abstractions from each other.

Comment · 16 days ago
Basically once it has sucked all of your data dry you no longer have the ability to leave the Meta Network.
Comment · 26 days ago
> You can opt out of model training with a checkbox

Do you trust that a company who can't even do basic IT ops monitoring are capable of respecting a "no training checkbox"?

Comment · 27 days ago
I can't, I'm colourblind. That's why I had to drop electronics and go into software. It was a hard requirement in the UK in the mid-90s when I needed to make a choice.
Comment · 28 days ago
Given that the cloud providers just put a 0 or two on the cost to determine their prices then yes, you could try.

They'll ban you after a year because it will be against their TOS.

But sure, go for it.

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