The Fresh Prince of Donair

When I was growing up in (north) Florida it was famous for hosting Carl Hiaasen's articles, which were incredible.

I'm a dual citizen with Greece and spend 2 months a year there (I'm actually heading there on Monday!), and one of my good friends there owns a fish shop ;)

Funny enough, one of the few places I've had non-tough Octopus was a Greek restaurant here in Boston.

I came here to ask the same question

Shoutout to small- to mid-size cities with 1-3 unnecessary skyscrapers, gotta be one of my favorite genders

Like, your original posts make a lot of claims with surety about a field you are, by your own admission, largely ignorant of. It should be understandable that people who are accomplished in this field have a laugh about it, given the clueless condescension that flies around here daily.

And I'm giving you a lot more grace than I normally would, since you seem to be open to other people's experience, but you're talking about my friends who I know on a personal and professional level, whose expertise and experience eclipses that of everyone trying to dunk on them.

They could maybe close tickets someone gave them, but the important skills and curiosity largely were never there.

Good developers do what this person does by habit, whether they're writing code manually or with AI assistance. Those devs, pretty much to a person, have found these tools invaluable.

was 12 or 13, took a detour & studied neuroscience through grad school, became a self-taught software engineer and have been doing it professionally for 12 years now.

All that's to say I've seen some shit. The people I've known who are 'skeptics' were generally not great developers.

I can back this up. While I wasn't lucky or rich enough to have grown up around computers all my life like the skeptics you QP'ed above, my dad saved up to get one for my brother and I when we moved across the country with our mom after being priced out of our home state.

I've been coding since

Octopus is only tough if it’s cooked improperly.

Unfortunately only 3-4 people in the world can cook it properly.

An octopus tentacle in a top loader New England hot dog bun with roe, pickled mustard seeds, and apple slices

Can’t believe we had this in Boston before the west coast did. RIP Ivory Pearl Bar

(and a review for the curious: www.thefoodlens.com/boston/sides...)

Like, I lived in more dangerous areas than they ever did, was in my fair share of fights, one of my elementary schools was in the most dangerous part of my city. I managed just fine.

In my experience nearly everyone who used the phrase the op quoted were low on all those stats

Yes absolutely and it’s something I’ve been saying for years. All the people that said that to me weren’t even actually street smart, they may have grown up poor but hadn’t been in decades (if they even did) and were largely safe their whole lives.

"So don't do that then", Avery's 1-step guide to how to use new tools in a way that doesn't make everything worse

Yes, and that’s far removed from “machines can never learn from this.”

Note that the machine already knew not to do this and it was the insistence of the user that caused the issue.

Sankeys are ruined for me forever

“When I meet someone new and they tell me they use LLMs a bunch, I immediately lose interest in talking to them anymore. That's not for moral reasons, but because l know they will have no interests, no curiosity, dip into magical thinking, and every second sentence from them will be about ChatGPT.”

Siri, define “irony”

This was before I had the senior title, but I managed to wipe all the images on one of North America’s biggest real estate sites just before leaving work years back.

Obviously we had snapshots and an easy restore, so I mostly just got ribbed about it. Good times.

It’s a rite of passage

They’ve been able to (unevenly) ever since memgpt was published and are much more capable now with dedicated memory coding agents.

That was an excellent choice!

“The lesson is: before reaching for a specialized external tool, check whether you can compose the behaviour you need from what's already built in.”

I’ve only begun skimming this here and there, but it’s really good. I jumped to part 4 because I think the most illustrative thing is the failure modes people encounter. They’re varied and strange but more surmountable than ever.

Beads was fucked? Ok, build your own issue tracker! Love it.

“Invade Iran and a great empire will fall!”

“Cool, thanks, oraclio!”

In every Republican presidency of my lifetime there's been a recession and a new war in the Middle East.

Yeah but that’s the case on LinkedIn for every minor technology improvement.

Chart of the price of $USO over the past month with a suspicious spike

USO is doing ok (I have no idea what I’m doing)

Where’s the big thumb meme when you need it

Countercounterpoint

Nobody who uses these tools and uses them well gives an actual fuck whether you use them or not.

I see more of you claiming everyone is trying to tell you you’re going to be left behind than I’ve ever seen anyone actually say that.