bpev

"Trains don't float, IDIOT"

• Greg, probably

Torterra is a tortoise. Totally different thing.

You can always use your own code however you want. However, if your project starts to get contributions from other people, that's where it can start to become more muddy.

Oh layoffs are definitely happening. I'm just not sure if it's caused by AI productivity gains, or if it's just the latest excuse (the pandemic, then soft layoffs of "back to office" enforcement, and now AI). Esp since the companies most talking about AI productivity gains are the same companies that benefit from AI adoption...

What I wanted to explain is just that the skills to program actually translate pretty well. At my old company, we used to say "you know someone's a staff engineer, because they only make PowerPoint presentations and diagrams, and don't actually write any code". And those skills directly translate to directing an AI to build the thing you need. The abstracted architect role will probably increase in value, as the typing value decreases.

My biggest concern is probably that AI is currently eating junior dev jobs, since what it excels at is typically the kind of work you'd give to a junior engineer. And I think that more gruntwork kinda tasks are the way that someone develops the higher level skills that are important later; you start to see the kinds of edge cases first hand, so it makes them memorable. But I feel like that might just be a transition thing; many developers these days don't know bare code down to the 1s and 0s. The abstraction might just move up another level, and people will build more things. At least, this is the optimistic view. 🤷 But I'm an optimistic guy.

mmm so I've only used the online models for agent coding, since I'm on a laptop and lack the hardware, but my understanding is that local models like devstral and llama are relatively competitive and can be used on like... a gaming rig? I don't think they'd be able to push the price that much.

But I don't disagree that big companies will try their darnedest to.

I think the biggest difference between this and blue-collars workers losing their jobs, though, is that the same people losing their jobs are also placed very to benefit from the technology. Blue collared workers losing manufacturing jobs couldn't, because they were priced out of obtaining that mafacturing hardware themselves, but programmers can use AI on an individual basis to augment their production. Not sure what the industry will look like in 10 years, but I feel like there will be plenty of opportunities for people who build digital things.

That being said, people who were looking to be junior developers exactly right now.... uhhh.... that's some extrememly unlucky timing. I wish you luck.

So this is *mathematically correct, but practically not really. Let me give you a longer (but still simplified) answer. There's essentially two things here that are different:

1. Does a longer password make your password more difficult to guess? (always yes)
2. Does a longer password make accessing the content it protects more difficult (yes, to a certain point).

The reason for #2 in digital systems is because of hashing, which is used to protect your password in the case of a data breach. Essentially, you can think of a hashing algorithm as a one-way algorithm that takes an input, and then always returns the same output for that input. One-way here means that you can't use the hashed output to reverse-engineer the originally inputted password (you can't unhash a hashbrown into the original potato 🥔). This is why if someone hacks Facebook, they don't necessarily have your Facebook password; Facebook never saves your actual password anywhere. To login, the website hashes your password input, and compares it against the hash that they saved from your original password creation.

Usually, the result of these algorithms is saved as a fixed-length string of characters. And so your data is mathematically not more safe if you exceed this length, since a random password combination can theoretically resolve to the same value as your super-long-password. This would depend on the algorithm being used / data being stored, but for example, bcrypt outputs a 184-bit hash (often represented as a 60-character string). So mathematically, your password is not more secure beyond 60 characters.

However in practice, this is a non-issue, because I think that basically the only way that collisions like this are useful are for brute-forcing a password? And the chance of a password collision in this way is something like 10^27-or-28^ (being hit by lightning every day for 10,000 years)? The much easier solution for gaining access is to get your actual password. So if your password being longer makes it harder for people to guess, I'd say that adding security by way of #1 is still extremely valid.

tbf, I don't know how feasible it is to remove asbestos without employing 4 year olds.

I would say deep thinking work, I average around 3-4 hours, but range between 0-8 hours. Like if I really feel in zone, it's easy to go hard, but if I didn't sleep well, or had too much caffeine, or didn't eat enough, it's just joever. I think months of grinding is possible with the right motivation, but I find that trying to force that motivation is pretty hard; I think that's often more environment-based, rather than solely individual effort (ala being in a class of very motivated individuals)

The important part for me is trying to start every day (or whatever your schedule is), because it can be hard to know how well I'll concentrate until I try for 30 minutes or so. And consistency over a long period of time is key.

edit: oh, fwiw, specifically for Chinese, I have been building this recently... although it's not done yet. https://hanzi.bpev.me/

Or Majora’s Mask but with wave dashing

I don't know what I expected when I started scrolling through comments, but I certainly didn't expect "how long humanity has survived depends on how you define 'people' "

Yeah if there's no anti-venom, this does seem like the kind of fight where just everybody dies.