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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • If, hypothetically, the code had the same efficacy and quality as human code, then it would be much cheaper and faster. Even if it was actually a little bit worse, it still would be amazingly useful.

    My dishwasher sometimes doesn’t fully clean everything, it’s not as strong as a guarantee as doing it myself. I still use it because despite the lower quality wash that requires some spot washing, I still come out ahead.

    Now this was hypothetical, LLM generated code is damn near useless for my usage, despite assumptions it would do a bit more. But if it did generate code that matched the request with comparable risk of bugs compared to doing it myself, I’d absolutely be using it. I suppose with the caveat that I have to consider the code within my ability to actual diagnose problems too…


  • Based on my experience, I’m skeptical someone that seemingly delegates their reasoning to an LLM were really good engineers in the first place.

    Whenever I’ve tried, it’s been so useless that I can’t really develop a reflex, since it would have to actually help for me to get used to just letting it do it’s thing.

    Meanwhile the people who are very bullish who are ostensibly the good engineers that I’ve worked with are the people who became pet engineers of executives and basically have long succeeded by sounding smart to those executives rather than doing anything or even providing concrete technical leadership. They are more like having something akin to Gartner on staff, except without even the data that at least Gartner actually gathers, even as Gartner is a useless entity with respect to actual guidance.





  • Feel like I’m being gaslit, the more I try to use them the less confident I become in their utility.

    I will confess it did help me cut through some particularly obtuse documentation to provide a rough example of what I wanted to do. It still totally screwed up the actual suggestion, but it at least helped me figure out some good keywords to dig into.

    It occasionally saves me some tedium when I have to do something mindlessly tedious, but doing that usually also inflicts constant misguesses about what next.

    But even when doing easy stuff they are falling over constantly, and that hasn’t been significantly improving.





  • I get the viewpoint, but it did hit a bit differently when people that actively promote offensively hateful viewpoints and widespread gun availability incur the exact sort of expected outcome you’d expect from going down that path.

    If you callously say murders are worth it to have guns everywhere, then this can be expected.

    If he goes out of his way to stir up a hornets nest to try to hurt others in the area, then I’m not going to be too surprised that he gets stung.

    Even as this should be a sign to tone down the rhetoric, a lot of them are doubling down with confrontational perspectives (well out of reach of the public mind you).


  • Heard this play out on NPR with them giving a right wing person a lot of platform to talk about how horrible it was for Charlie Kirk to be killed and what a good guy he was and the good things he did.

    Despite getting a more than fair opportunity to present this viewpoint, they didn’t really inject anything vaguely tricky until he went off on political violence from the left. The interviewer then said something like “and of course you would condemn such violence regardless of political leaning”. He said sure, but only the left is really such a concern. Then she brought up the killings of those democrats and the hit list and he just lost it at how just terrible she was being. Dude you got every bit of an opportunity to be sympathetic and all you had to do was refrain from blindly accusing all left leaning folks…





  • From what I see on EV conversion kits, basically the regenerative braking is just a feature of the accelerator pedal that just makes “engine braking” a normal usage model. Blended braking from the brake pedal is not viable.

    EV conversion is a thing complete with regen braking, but it’s highly impractical and expensive compared to just doing a new car.

    Of course the original question was about a hybrid upgrade kit, which I’ve never heard of. I could imagine a modest battery with an electric motor/generator replacing a torque converter to convert engine braking to regen braking…


  • It’s not only unprofitable, it’s just flat out more expensive, and with the compromise of smaller batteries. Expect to pay as much as a full EV would cost just for the hardware kit to convert a car and get only the drivetrain modernized before considering labor cost. Expect a compromised end product because they have to settle for components that fit meaning a tiny battery.

    It’s really only a market for iconic classic cars that are irreplaceable, not a practical upgrade for a boring random car. While in theory it seems nice to reuse the car, in practice is probably better to just leave the car alone, let it be used for spare parts out of a junkyard, or recycling the materials.