Viewing profile — bsoles

I am sure there are afficionados of these things, but $349 for a keyboard is crazy. I am not sure what you get in return for such a price..

This comment cannot be overstated. Armchair "software engineers" like them do a lot of disservice to the community by promoting non-workable solutions in real production environmen…

It is going to be easy this year. I'll make up some bullshit story about how I used Claude to improve my productivity, and how learned and used AI tools to speed up the feature del…

With mild (self-diagnosed) OCD, I can't even read a book with a single dog ear on it, let alone markings and writing. This may not be you aim, but there is research out there indic…

Being silent about it when they fully know about it is not much different than promoting.

> Nobody attacks children. Ever heard of the Catholic Church? What does rape count as?

Are we talking about the same church where children were raped, "witches" were burned, non-believers were tortured, gays are demonized, women are treated as lower beings, ..? Yeah,…

> Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect? I would also argue that they use LLMs to learn "about" new things, but not really the thing it…

I thought it was a myth until the junior developer on my own team responded with "I don't know" to a question about why he made a certain computation during a design review. Becaus…

My employer literally put "effective use of AI" as a yearly performance review criteria this year. So there is that...

> 35 points for open source contributions > 30 for personal projects These are insane weights for scoring a software engineer's resume.

I can clearly identify this kind of developers at work by their mindless enthusiasm for AI. Development is just another job before they can move into "management" and make all-know…

It is why I feel dirty after AI generates a piece of clever code: I know I am stealing somebody's IP without attribution. And the AI companies benefit from this, not the real peopl…

As much as I like Terrence Tao, I think he is entering the crackpot phase of his career. Much like Roger Penrose and many mathematicians and physicists before him.

Tangentially related, but after the mindless push in my company for more AI use at any cost, every morning I drive to work thinking to myself if today should be my last day at my j…

My "strong" performance rating got me a raise less than the inflation rate this year in the US. I guess I am not using enough tokens to justify a bigger raise.

MATLAB

The theory of (basic) linear algebra is pretty easy. The practice of proper linear algebra is very difficult. People spend entire careers on things like error propagation in matrix…

I had fun times around 1985 with zx81, ZX spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amiga 500. Creating "games" with sprites and all... Even writing for loops with print statements were fun.

My employer's domain starts with "m". Bunch of people recently fell victim for a fishing email whose domain started with "rn". In Outlook 's font the two look almost identical.

It is called Gell-mann amnesia.

> Although MATLAB probably kind of outdated these days as anything can be accomplished in Julia and Py. Literally every major brand car runs code built with MATLAB and Simulink. Sa…

My company is one. They just made "AI use" a mandatory performance goal for next year's reviews. I am thinking about retiring at this point...

> Not sure if it helps, but if we get our first blind user I will gladly make some admends to make it more usable for them. I have heard "we don't have blind customers" argument ma…

The cheapest Hakko iron (888?) works just fine for me, even for surface mount components.