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With a bunch of new faces around I’m going to plug the shit I’m most proud of. Just one post I promise. It’s an animation, made in Blender, that tells a story within the universe.

youtube.com/watch?v=BphzHA_L__

blender absolutely does not like what i did with objects in linked instanced collections using drivers referring to its collection instance (“Failed to add relation “ID Property -> Done”) but it fucking works screw you blender

my favorite part about health insurance is actually pinning down how little they really cover. it’s kind of hilarious. it’s like asking a grocery store clerk for, like, fruit, or vegetables, just the most common and benign food imaginable, and them saying “we don’t sell that” every time

English may be awful but “OK” is a truly inspired invention. Simply universal in its applicability, brutally minimal, easily ported to every other language

“crazy weather we’re having” is probably the funniest fucking thing you could say to someone in the zone

And this is being done with such reckless, breathless abandon, and with so much money, with so little concern about actual human beings that even the contrarians in Hacker News are in bootlicking mode, comparing human intelligence to Markov chains and lamenting that engineers at tech companies are too greedy to be interested in building businesses which is why they need to be sacked and replaced with a text remixer.

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And this was accomplished by taking the shared collective output of the world, all of the visual art and imagery, all of the photography, all of the prose, poetry, all of the source code and open source repositories available to them, with no regard to license, copyright, intellectual property, or consent of the countless people who created all of the content and material available on the modern internet, and selling it back to everyone for 50 dollars every 1,000 API tokens or whatever the fuck.

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...while an algorithm only slightly more convincing than a Markov chain generator is crowned the heir apparent, galvanizing the push to lower engineering salaries, “coincidentally” alongside a significant uptick in discussion among programmers of unionizing and ethical software engineering.

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Then, the microsecond it seemed even remotely plausible that programmers could be replaced by the systems they built, the largest software companies on the planet shedded tens of thousands of engineers—people who, as per these companies, were the best of the best of the programming world, highly esteemed coders ostensibly privileged to work at the most uncompromising tech companies possible...

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So let me get this straight.

For about two decades software engineers were an invaluable resource, worth paying six digit salaries, touting unheard of employee benefits and amenities in order to reinforce that the work of engineers was worth every penny and to advertise that tech companies only deigned to hire the best of the best.

went to the CVS at columbus circle and someone must have gotten so frustrated waiting on an employee to unlock a shelf for them they just fucking broke the acrylic shield and grabbed the toothpaste they wanted

It’s weird and honestly a little cultish how quickly 90% of hacker news has decided that people and LLMs are equivalent

Every single thread is filled with people responding to criticisms of AI with “you could say the same thing about PEOPLE” and “what is intelligence REALLY”

I’m not exactly a huge fan of the species but this kind of language really grosses me out and I hope we can get to the root of what is motivating them to act like this

i have a problem with prosciutto and my problem is that i ran out of it

AI is exciting to Hacker News, conference circuit Twitter, and the half dozen or so people in the back room at the start of it all who stand to make infinite money

The rest of us knows how this goes.

Only in a broken society does the promise of obviating manual labor—a nominally good thing!—fill people with dread, cause them to worry about healthcare or paying their mortgage or raising a family

Only here is “we’re going to automate your job away” a threat

If you’re an American and could expatriate anywhere where would it be?

I spent three years in Munich and I love Germany and have a special soft spot for Bavaria but I dunno how I’d feel about going back

shout out to devonthink for being the place i should be putting all my PDFs for the past like 13 years

i should play day of the tentacle again soon

god that game is so good

Timing my food delivery orders so the same doorman doesn’t see me being lazy for both breakfast and lunch

organizing my bookmarks because i don’t want to do any fucking real work today

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