ruby’s had this problem for ~2 decades now. like, the “rockstar dev” archetype literally became big directly because of ruby’s popularity and perception at the time

I had to look it up, the ~~~Rails Conf~~~ Golden Gate Ruby Conf code like a porn star thing was 2009, I didn't hallucinate it. DHH has deleted those tweets.

I feel old now.

I got paid $2700 for teaching a semester. Adjuncting sucks. It doesn't get better.

Even if you finished, all the postdocs I know had their NSF starter kit yanked.

For those of you in the (West) LA area, there's a panel with Brian Merchant happening tomorrow. Probably no food this school year but still looks good.

https://law.ucla.edu/events/democracy-technology-salon

If anyone does turn up, codeword is banana bread, otherwise I'll assume you're a lawyer (not derogatory).

When Prophecy Fails is worth the read just for the narrative, he literally had his grad students join a UFO / Dianetics cult and take notes in the bathroom and kept it going for months. Really impressive amount of shoe leather compared to most modern psych research.

In a similar train of thought:

A.I. as normal technology (derogatory) | Max Read

But speaking descriptively, as a matter of long precedent, what could be more normal, in Silicon Valley, than people weeping on a message board because a UX change has transformed the valence of their addiction?

I like the DNF / vaporware analogy, but did we ever have a GPT Doom or Duke3d killer app in the first place? Did I miss it?

It’ll probably earn a lot of users if and when Github goes down the shitter.

I'd argue GH is well on it's way, probably jumped around the time Hacktoberfest morphed into a DDoS on maintainers. Or maybe more recently, when they handed peoples repos (and API keys lol) over to Copilot. Or maybe earlier, when they started calling their users "maintainers" instead of "developers". Sometime in the last 6 years though.

There have been a number of contenders over the years - gitlab, gitea but none of them have been able to brand/market well enough to really to really impact GH or to compete with the subsidized free storage and Actions credits plus switching costs. Even Atlassian / BB is largely irrelevant.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-astral-codex-ten lol but good for lore:

The most toxic the comments section has ever got (beyond the very early days) was on the post Gupta on Enlightenment. I feel like the comments section on this post should be part of the ACX main canon because it is so cosmically hilarious. It concerns a man name Vinay Gupta (founder of a blockchain-based dating website) and his claims to have reached enlightenment. Some people in the comments are sceptical that Vinay Gupta is indeed an enlightened being, citing that enlightened people don’t typically found blockchain-based dating websites. A new forum poster with the handle ‘Vinay Gupta’, claiming to be Vinay Gupta and writing in a very similar style to the actual Vinay Gupta, turns up and starts arguing with everyone in an extremely toxic way (in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system), which provokes more merriment that a self-described enlightened being would deploy such classic internet tough-guy approaches as ‘I don’t think much of a four-on-one face off against untrained opponents’ (link) and ‘this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room’

I try to talk to ChatGPT for 2 straight hours but go crazy and have to stop | Daniel Hentschel

I'm here to help in whatever way I can. Just let me know what you'd like to do next.

What I'd like to do next is fucking hang myself. Oh shit I shouldn't have said that. No, I'm joking. That was a joke. I was joking about that. Joking.

Not sure if this was already posted here but saw it on LI this morning - AI for Good [Appearance?] - sometimes we focus on the big companies and miss how awful the sycophantic ecosystem gets.

Nikhil's guest post at Zitron just went up - https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-remarkable-incompetence-at-the-heart-of-tech/

EDIT: the intro was strong enough I threw in $7. Second half is just as good.

In the spirit of "worse is better", here is a ublock filter I just threw together to highlight all the comments less than a day old:

! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems
awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text("hours ago"):style(background-color:#7700AA)

EDIT: fix bug with 1 hour and 20 minutes ago. regex is even worse is better.

! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems
awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text(/(hour|minute)s? ago/):style(background-color:#7700AA)

https://less.online/ - they couldn't be bothered to write the 5 lines of js to do their karma discount automatically