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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • No, this is a general practice-- I see it a lot with third-party vendors who want you to integrate with their services. They’ll expire the documentation portal password after 90 days, but the actual user facing service still accepts the same “password123” that’s been set since 2004.

    I suspect the pattern is to protect the vendors from developer scrutiny: by the time you’ve jumped through enough hoops to read the docs and realize it’s trash, the execs have signed the contracts and the sunk costs are too high to bail out.

    Also add another 6 months to actually get the credentials for the test environment.



  • They’ve got a guy at work whose job title is basically AI Evangelist. This is terrifying in that it’s a financial tech firm handling twelve figures a year of business-- the last place where people will put up with “plausible bullshit” in their products.

    I grudgingly installed the Copilot plugin, but I’m not sure what it can do for me better than a snippet library.

    I asked it to generate a test suite for a function, as a rudimentary exercise, so it was able to identify “yes, there are n return values, so write n test cases” and “You’re going to actually have to CALL the function under test”, but was unable to figure out how to build the object being fed in to trigger any of those cases; to do so would require grokking much of the code base. I didn’t need to burn half a barrel of oil for that.

    I’d be hesitant to trust it with “summarize this obtuse spec document” when half the time said documents are self-contradictory or downright wrong. Again, plausible bullshit isn’t suitable.

    Maybe the problem is that I’m too close to the specific problem. AI tooling might be better for open-ended or free-association “why not try glue on pizza” type discussions, but when you already know “send exactly 4-7-Q-unicorn emoji in this field or the transaction is converted from USD to KPW” having to coax the machine to come to that conclusion 100% of the time is harder than just doing it yourself.

    I can see the marketing and sales people love it, maybe customer service too, click one button and take one coherent “here’s why it’s broken” sentence and turn it into 500 words of flowery says-nothing prose, but I demand better from my machine overlords.

    Tell me when Stable Diffusion figures out that “Carrying battleaxe” doesn’t mean “katana randomly jutting out from forearms”, maybe at that point AI will be good enough for code.





  • TBH, I sort of wonder the history of why they push the LGBT repression so hard in Russia.

    In a place like the US, where you have culture war manifested through elections, it’s an easy way to score points with a specific and identified demographic/donor group. Demonize the gays and then you don’t have to lean on other voters who will ask about why the schools are failing and the economy is spiraling.

    Does the Russian political system have such pressure groups?

    I could sort of see it as part of a larger suite of “traditional values/restore past glory” messaging, but even there, it seems low on the checklist, and again, is there even meaningful campaigning where it pays dividends?


  • The immigration angle is bait and switch politicking. Has been for decades.

    People feel economically stagnant and culturally disconnected.

    Couldn’t be the capitalist machine grinding you to dust while gnawing away any sort of social institutions or greater visions than “line goes up”. It’s clearly Juan or Abdul who are scrabbling to send a few dollars or Euros to their family. Excluding them is gonna roll back the clock to when a single worker could get a no-degree factory job straight out of high school and raise a sitcom-style family of four, you know!