Glad you got fired. Vaccines should always be mandatory save for legitimate, doctor-validated medical exemptions.

Anti-vaxxers are fucking stupid and should either be educated properly or, if they still refuse to do their civic duty after being de-programmed of misinformation, punished. You are only allowed to participate in society if you take the necessary steps that you are morally and ethically obligated to do in order to protect it from preventable, transmissible disease. We had eradicated polio until stupid motherfuckers like yourself decided that it would be a good idea to forgo the standard polio vaccine schedule that we’ve had for decades. Now, we saw the first case in 30 years in 2022 because someone selfishly thought that their personal beliefs were more important than the health and livelihood of everyone else.

Yep. Postgres is fantastic and there’s no justification to use proprietary bullshit like that.

The issues are primarily with Azure, I believe.

From what I recall, particularly the younger generations that exclusively use mobile devices (though of course this is not limited to them) actually have terrible tech literacy across the board, primarily related to spending all of their time in apps that basically spoon-feed functionality in a closed ecosystem. In particular, these groups are particularly vulnerable to very basic scams and phishing attacks.

VMware workstation supports using a GPU. You can even use it in “pass-through” mode to give the VM full, exclusive access to the GPU.

Yeah that’s what I was referring to by “archaic”. Pretty much anything using the LAMP stack falls in that category. I don’t generally see new things using it.

Databases aren’t related to VMs or containers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database does a good job of describing what a database is. That page also has a lot of examples of uses of databases.

To answer your question about MySQL: in my experience it’s rarely used outside of classrooms or archaic systems. Postgres is a much better general-purpose option for SQL. Sqlite is also nice for different use cases (such as a database on a mobile device).

I used to work for a company that made software built on VMware. The biggest customer was using hundreds of thousands of VMs. Pretty sure they’re working on moving off VMware now because of all this bullshit.

But yeah, it’s gonna take a long time to move off.

It sounds funny but it’s not an uncommon phrase.

I know it’s a joke, but just wanted to say that Uranium used for fuel is not something you can actually use for weaponry directly. It requires enrichment to increase the concentration of U-235 to weapons-grade levels.

Sure yeah, but like, I work remote and will always work remote (I live in a city with a pretty mediocre tech scene). On top of that, I work in a non-mainstream programming language (Haskell). So it’s hard to envision what I could actually do.

I’m very pro-union btw, it just seems like there are certain things that can sometimes make it more difficult to make happen

Generally agree with your points, even though I"m honestly not sure what a union would look like like in practice.

But I just wanted to say that this job is definitely harder than plumbing. I usually do my own plumbing and it’s not really that bad. It’s not my favorite thing to do and can sometimes be a pain in the ass, but it’s way less taxing imo.

Teaching kids is hard as fuck though and good teachers are priceless. Honestly quality caregiving of any sort is massively underrated.

You do not understand how these things actually work. I mean, fair enough, most people don’t. But it’s a bit foolhardy to propose changes to how something works without understanding how it works now.

There is no “database”. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology. It is entirely impossible to query a model to determine if something is “present” or not (the question doesn’t even make sense in that context).

A model is, to greatly simplify things, a function (like in math) that will compute a response based on the input given. What this computation does is entirely opaque (including to the creators). It’s what we we call a “black box”. In order to create said function, we start from a completely random mapping of inputs to outputs (we’ll call them weights from now on) as well as training data, iteratively feed training data to this function and measure how close its output is to what we expect, adjusting the weights (which are just numbers) based on how close it is. This is a gross simplification of the complexity involved (and doesn’t even touch on the structure of the model’s network itself), but it should give you a good idea.

It’s applied statistics: we’re effectively creating a probability distribution over natural language itself, where we predict the next word based on how frequently we’ve seen words in a particular arrangement. This is old technology (dates back to the 90s) that has hit the mainstream due to increases in computing power (training models is very computationally expensive) and massive increases in the size of dataset used in training.

Source: senior software engineer with a computer science degree and multiple graduate-level courses on natural language processing and deep learning

Btw, I have serious issues with both capitalism itself and machine learning as it is applied by corporations, so don’t take what I’m saying to mean that I’m in any way an apologist for them. But it’s important to direct our criticisms of the system as precisely as possible.

It’s got nothing to do with capitalism. It’s fundamentally a matter of people using it for things it’s not actually good at, because ultimately it’s just statistics. The words generated are based on a probability distribution derived from its (huge) training dataset. It has no understanding or knowledge. It’s mimicry.

It’s why it’s incredibly stupid to try using it for the things people are trying to use it for, like as a source of information. It’s a model of language, yet people act like it has actual insight or understanding.

1 Is pretty standard in the industry for people with experience. I haven’t actually applied to any jobs myself in a while. Job hunting for me is sifting through the recruiter messages that hit my inbox.

In my experience, your average software developer has absolutely terrible security hygiene. It’s why you see countless instances of private keys copy/pasted into public GitHub repos or the seemingly daily occurrences of massive data breaches.

My undergrad in CS (which I should point out, is still by far the most common major for software engineers) did not require a security course, and I’m fairly confident that this is pretty typical. To be honest, I wouldn’t have trusted any of my CS professors to know the first thing about security. It’s a completely different field and something that generally requires a lot of practical experience. The closest we ever got was an explanation of asymmetric vs. symmetric encryption. There was certainly no discussion of even basic things like how to properly manage secrets or authn best practices.

Everything I know now as a senior software engineer about software security has come from experience on the job. I’ve been very fortunate to work at some places that take it very seriously (including a government contractor writing cybersecurity software for the Department of Defense) and learned a lot there. But a lot of shops don’t have a culture that promotes good security hygiene, and it shows in the litany of insecure software out in the wild today.

I’d say it’s definitely worth it. I don’t actually use nixos itself, but I do use nix a lot. I have everything I need for work in a home manager configuration, so I can literally just install nix and load up my config and have all programs and configuration of said programs installed and ready to go (on any UNIX system). I started doing this since changing jobs means a new machine, and I got really tired of all of the inconsistencies between machines when bringing over my dotfiles, and having to install a bunch of packages I use every time I changed jobs.

I do want to make the switch from Arch to nixos on my personal machine eventually too, but I hardly spend any time on computers outside of work these days, unfortunately. But the great thing is that my home manager configuration can pretty easily slide right into a nixos configuration, which is what many people do.

It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. I remember losing hundreds of hours of progress on games due to memory card corruption. Or game cartridges/CDs no longer working, requiring you to buy a new copy. Or consoles getting straight-up bricked.

Hell, a ton of people have memories of blowing into N64/SNES cartridges to get them to work since they had notoriously unreliable connectors. But even though it was something that didn’t work great, everybody has fond memories of doing it since there wasn’t this amalgamation of voices from every direction telling you to be upset about it and clamoring for retribution. If something was broken, you got frustrated about it, complained to your friends, and then moved on with your life since there wasn’t anything else you could do.

Yeah it’s pretty great, especially when so many people are so quick to assume that OOP is essential for managing complexity.

OOP is the poster child for solving the problems that it creates itself.

In case you’re not familiar, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok.

It’s somewhat common slang in hacker culture, which of course Elon is shitting all over as usual. It’s especially ironic since the meaning of the word roughly means “deep or profound understanding”, which their AI has anything but.