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Cake day: June 28th, 2025

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  • Private property (as opposed to personal property) is property owned by individuals or entities that generate profits from others’ labor, and is abolished under communism. So, no, you can’t take someone’s personal PC (or any personal property). I’m not that deep into communist theory or thought, so not sure if “free markets” can exist under communism (I know money and states don’t exist), but I know there are theoretical socialist societies where free markets exist (market socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, etc).



  • I’m trying to get a job (and failing) after a layoff at the end of last year, and maybe 1/4 of the job postings I see mention you need to be familiar with “AI.” So, yeah, in interviews, when AI is brought up, I try to be pro-AI, but cautious. I even messed around with stuff like LangChain/LangGraph because I see so many job postings that require stuff like that, but the results are underwhelming. Now I’m seeing a lot of job postings that require experience in Azure’s cloud AI stuff, but I’m not paying to learn that. I have “real” ML experience, and it frustrates me that many of the responses I get back from applications just want me to glue shitty LLM tools together.




  • I keep hearing stuff like this, but I haven’t found a good use or workflow for AI (other than occasional chatbot sessions). Regular autocomplete is more accurate (no hallucinations) and faster than AI suggestions (especially accounting for needing to constantly review the suggestions for correctness). I guess stuff like Cursor is OK at making one-off tools on very small code-bases, but hits a brick-wall when the code base gets too big. Then you’re left with a bunch of unmaintainable code you’re not very familiar with and you would to spend a lot of time trying to fix yourself. Dunno if I’m doing something wrong or what.

    I guess what I’m saying is that using AI can speed you up to a point while the project accumulates massive amounts of technical debt, and when you take into account all the refactoring and debugging time, it results in taking longer to produce a buggier project. At least, in my experience.




  • I’ve tried Copilot for a while and played around with Cursor for a bit. I was better and faster without Copilot due to sometimes not paying enough attention of the lines it would generate. This would cause subtle bugs that took a long time to debug. Cursor just produced unmaintainable code-bases that I had no knowledge of, and to make major changes, would be faster for me to just rewrite it from scratch. The act of typing gives me time to think more about what I’m doing or am going to do, while Copilot generations are distracting and break my thought processes. I work best with good LSP tooling and sometimes AI chatbots (mostly just for customized example snippets for libraries or frameworks I’m unfamiliar with; though that has its own problems because the LLMs knowledge is out of date a lot) that don’t directly modify my code.


  • Yes. It affected the entire economy. I was young, but I remember people around me being worried about losing their jobs, some losing their jobs, and some unable to find jobs (everyone around me were factory workers). The data seems to reflect this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE. The system depends on the rich investing their money, and when they get scared to invest in “productive” enterprises, they just stash their money in “unproductive” stuff like government bonds (which should actually signal to the government that the government should borrow and spend on productive stuff to take advantage of low borrowing costs, but the government is stupid and usually does austerity instead).


  • I agree, but very large corporations (like WalMart and Amazon with high levels of vertical integration and revenue greater than the GDP of many countries) are kind of like a command-economies and “work” (for the shareholders). So, I think command-economies can work, but the question is for whom.





  • People have different levels of “nerves” as others, and it kind of sounds like you may filtering out applicants on an arbitrary metric (how nervous a person may be in an interview). Don’t have enough information about your process to say for sure (obviously), but it may be something to think about. Interviews can be very high-stakes for some people (such as “I may become homeless”), and not for others (“my parents are rich”). After hired, it’s not necessarily as high-staked, and toy problems aren’t what SEs work on day-to-day.


  • Not sure about the soap thing. It definitely strips more of the “seasoning” than just water in my experience. And it’s my understanding modern dish soap contains some synthetics, and cast iron is very porous (I use the cheap kind, I think the kind for camping, lol), so I avoid soap. I just use very warm water and sometimes mechanical means (stainless steel scrubbers) to clean my cast iron. Tbf, just cooking very fat/oil heavy stuff restores much of the seasoning whenever it’s lost.


  • As someone wholly uneducated on these kinds of things, I just choose to use the heuristic of defaulting to using/ingesting natural substances, as much as practical, because we evolved with them and it would seem more likely our bodies (and the ecosystem) know how to deal with them. I also don’t trust the government to be discerning/uncorruptible enough to not allow stuff to pass that shouldn’t, especially now. Peer review is more trustworthy though, and gets more trustworthy the longer something has been around and studied more.