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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • It’s a tool, our job is to collect tools in our toolbox and use them appropriately

    TDD is great for when you want a really, really tight interface - whether it’s your exposed surface to customers or you’ve got a lot of people working on something, it makes sense to write the standard and code to it, instead of documenting after the fact

    Otherwise… Well, in practice it’s an idiot proof methodology. That’s useful, but it is a lot of work









  • Yes, electronics are very cheap… But remember the part where they also have a mechanical mechanism? They have two systems, where most cars have this very simple lock that connects to a tiny motor assembly. It’s literally a piece of plastic and a few wires

    The tablet thing is true, they’ve changed cars to computerize everything, and once you’ve done that you can connect everything over a network. Every button needs to do back to a chip to become a digital signal, so before you had these complex one-off wiring harnesses for everything

    But the tablet thing is again, common. It makes sense, it’s just worse

    But Elon is a unique case. Elon likes to actually make decisions, because he thinks he’s Tony Stark. He actually goes down into teams and hangs out, and they have to just work around whatever decisions he makes. It’s present in all of his companies, but you can see it most in Twitter, because they didn’t have time to build a team to strategically distract him when he comes to visit

    This absolute idiot has spent the last month trying to get grok to be a literal Nazi. First, he added a bunch of white genocide to the prompt, making it change the topic to that from any question for a few days.

    Now it’s responding all confused, and saying things like “I never gave Jeffrey Epstein tours of spaceX or Tesla” when asked it Elon did it. Seems to me they fed Elon’s tweets in the RAG system in a amateur way

    He micromanages and meddles constantly… That’s what he does at his companies

    For a counterexample, Jeff Bezos. He was heavily involved in the fire phone, and had some genuinely cool ideas… But the priorities were all wrong, so it flopped. He learned his lesson


  • No, the problem is they engineered something they didn’t need to, because Musk thinks everything should be electric because it’s cool. They had to then engineer a mechanical release, because it was required by law (for good reason)

    Mechanical door locks would have been cheaper. The fly by wire in the cyber truck is far more expensive, heavier, and far more dangerous than the very well polished power steering systems every other car uses

    Maybe it’s something like they wanted to make more money on repairs or something… But even that they could’ve done better by starting from very common, cheap technology

    Let’s be clear… The real problem here is that Elon Musk, opinion having idiot that he is, made decisions from on high with very little understanding of engineering








  • Nah, they’re actually fantastic at brain numbing tasks. I like to feed it sql tables and have it act like an ORM, but without the tradeoffs of an ORM. I’d never do it manually, but it’s far more readable and easy to work with

    I also love using it for api’s. You can feed it a response, say “hey, I just want the id, status, and amount” (or whatever) and it’ll restructure the data for you

    These are not hard problems… They are tedious ones though. They solve a problem by brute force, a problem we “solve” over and over because at the end of the day: programmers are lazy.

    You can over engineer complex bindings until the cows come home, but a simple pattern with each field explicitly mapped is the best solution. It’s just really, really annoying to actually do it


  • I feel bad because I’ve made the world worse, or that I’ve disappointed myself. But when circumstances force me to act in ways I find immoral, I just feel disgust

    I want good things for everyone in general, but I’m not some endlessly patient Buddha.

    I just try to understand people through their own eyes… And I try to understand myself too. I feel what they feel, but I can also just walk away

    But it’s not about them, not really.

    It’s about me - who am I? Do I make things better or worse? Do I make people better or worse? If you brought me into a perfect world, would I make that world worse?

    If there were 5 billion of me, what kind of world would it be?