"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague"
In physics, when you try to measure certain properties of an object with increasing accuracy, other properties of the object must neccesarily become less well known. Wikipedia tells it the way it is: The uncertainty principle is a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics . It states that there is a limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and…
Technology has gone absurd. I deepfaked my dead cat, and later realized I put myself into my own personal Black Mirror episode. One of our cats died suddenly, at a relatively young age. Now, I keep mistaking errant socks for a cat tail, and whenever I walk past the places where she'd often sleep I unthinkingly glance over to see if she's there. But it is after all the year 2024, so 15 photographs,…
Well, I wasn't actively looking to piss myself off tonight, but I couldn't not pause to look at this absolute gem of a cookie banner. ... and so on and so on. Is this satire, did I make this up, or is this the actual state of the internet in the year 2024? Somewhere, there's some adtech leech highfiving themselves in front of their mirror, toothbrush dangling from greedy, quivering lips. "Today's…
Imagine, if you will, an organization that has to do some computing. Some data is gathered, it is processed by """machine learning models""", and some actions are taken based on the results of said processing. Those pesky machine learning models are a pain to develop, train and most importantly run. Who has the time and energy to deal with that? Enter some glossy tarpit with a GUI like Azure ML…
praise be upon the great pattern finder behind closed eyelids our hands touching glass attention, attention, hear me and map me the sound of my footsteps a point, a cloud praise be upon you redeem us remember us the light touches the countertop will it remain, somewhere in memory? can anyone? are you our hubris our fear of death?
I took a photo with a 1 year exposure time. The pattern the sun makes is really cool. Besides the obvious seasonal changes in the path of the sun though the sky, you can make out the hours with and without sunshine within each day-line. If only I had thought of a better subject than the rooftop balcony tiles and some bits of the neighbors' roof...
Hot on the heels of yesterday's post, here's a short, bittersweet interaction I had during a hackathon. "Learn LLM prompting, build a chatbot, some coding skills required". There was an introductory lab where people could get the hang of calling OpenAI with the python library. Someone in one of the teams was visibly agitated during preparations. "You doing okay, did you clone the repo yet? "…
Big onboarding events are notoriously cringe. The median experience is to take a bunch of semi-anxious, introverted people who will probably never actually work together, and force them to go through a bunch of energising and fun activities. Where "fun" and "energising" are or course highly subjective concepts when the activities are designed by HR extroverts. At least you can hope to pick up a…
I need to vent about the impolite piece of yet-to-become e-waste on wheels that is my rude-ass car . You've heard versions of this story before, nothing is particularly novel in the shock department, enshittification is everywhere, etcetera... but I need the catharsis. TL;DR I knew car software was bad, but I only realized how bad it truly was once I got some first-hand experience. What I want in…