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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • I taught myself programming in the 80s, then worked myself from waitress and line cook to programmer, UXD, and design lead to the point of being in the running for an Apple design award in the 2010s.

    But I cared more than anything about making things FOR people. Making like easier. Making people happy. Making software that was a joy to use.

    Then I got sick with something that’s neither curable nor easily manageable.

    Now I’m destitute and have to choose between medicine and food, and I’m staring down homelessness. (eta I was homeless from age 16-18, and I won’t do that again now, with autoimmune dysautonomia and in my mid-50s, even if the alternative is final.)

    Fuck these idiots who bought their way into nerd status (like Musk) or had one hot idea that took off and didn’t have to do anything after (this fucking guy). Hundreds or thousands of designers and programmers made these companies, and were tossed out like trash so a couple of people can be rock stars, making more per hour than most of us will see in a lifetime.

    Slay the dragons.










  • Upper management deserves everything it gets. Middle management is often underpaid and expected to do all the jobs of their own plus their superiors.

    Some *organisational tasks will always be needed. Middle management does that plus fielding some amount of customer service, plus a lot of what upper management takes credit for.

    The system is fucked, but we shouldn’t let the people doing barely anything to earn their yachts turn us against those grinding their own bones to glue the grind-house together.

    (No, I’m not a middle-manager.)


  • Have you tried doing this? I have, for *nearly a year, on the more ‘advanced’ pro versions. Yes, it will apologise and try again – and it gets progressively worse over time. There’s been a marked degradation as it progresses, and all the models are worse now at maintaining context and not hallucinating than they were several months ago.

    LLMs aren’t the kind of AI that can evaluate themselves and improve like you’re suggesting. Their logic just doesn’t work like that. A true AI will come from an entirely different type of model, not from LLMs.

    e: time. Wow, where did this year go?





  • I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).

    The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.

    What the fuck was going on?

    In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.

    This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.