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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I got some z wave thermostats for home.

    I got an Emersonl “homekit” thermostat for my in-law and managed to get it on wifi without “cloud”. Unfortunately you have to be careful because the follow on model requires their cloud service for online control.

    It’s a real shame that most every house is well equipped to do standalone hosting for remote access, but most of the investment has gone toward cloud connected to force the recurring revenue opportunity.









  • Tesla as a company is in a damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

    When you look at the business fundamentals versus the stock valuation, it’s clear something doesn’t add up, and at least formerly elons image was a big part of it.

    Then he went full mask off and tanked his image.

    So without the musk cult, is there enough to support their over inflated valuation? What does a post cult Tesla look like, when other companies have proven they can catch up or pass Tesla on various fronts people thought Tesla might be unassailably ahead. The various potential horizontal growth opportunities like solar and home batteries have fallen flat, their robot demonstration was significantly faked, and they are late to the self driving cab game, at best. A solid company, but not worth more than all their competition combined as their current valuation suggests.

    So I think the hope is that he gets preoccupied with “making Tesla great again” and away from screwing with government. Then hope that people kind of forget about his political machinations and things sort of go back to the way they were for the hopefully forgetful public.


  • Agriculture probably hurts a little. China could not care less about American digital services ( they largely banned them anyway) and if it comes down to it, they can totally ignore patent protection. They do have some issues with actual chip design and manufacturing, though that will likely see them improve if they have to.

    Don’t know that China is a better place to be for the citizenry or anything, but the government and business leaders are in a better supported position than American counterparts in an economic split.

    It might have been one thing if the US had continued to fixate on China and maybe isolate China, but he is simultaneously screwing with everyone in the world and tarnishing our image as comparatively “good guys” on human rights undermines our position. China may still be viewed as a bad actor, but our bad behavior might make them the lesser of the few evils.


  • I’m not sure.

    We are here mainly because the business leaders sold out the core of our economy to enrich themselves thanks to cheap labor of an at the time backwards China. They had the hubris to think the workers replaceable but the leadership somehow magic.

    Now they increasingly see China business leadership clearly emerging as an independent force that puts pressure on them.

    They spent decades helping China gain independent capabilities and it’s too late to claw that back

    About the only thing they are really hurt by are the export controls on chips and chip manufacturing technology, but they are getting there. Yes there’s a crunch in their export business that will hurt, but it’s easier to cope with that than just not having the facilities to build the stuff you want or the expansive labor force.





  • Unfortunately, the incompetence doesn’t matter when they act on it and no one is willing to hold them accountable.

    Like recently how they admittedly deported someone they weren’t allowed to and even the supreme court unanimously ruled against the administration, but the administration just shrugged and ignored it, claiming that the court has no authority over what they consider now to be a sovereign El Savador issue.

    So if they ship off an inconvenient citizen to El Salvador, they claim it’s not their problem because it already happened…


  • I had been planning to, but being lazy about trying to enable my IDE setup but was giving it the benefit of the doubt. Your feedback resonates with how much I end up fighting auto-complete/auto-correct in normal language and seeing it potentially ruin current code completion (which sometimes I have to fight, but on balance it helps more than it annoys). I suppose I’ll still give it a shot, but with even more skepticism. I suppose maybe it can at least provide an OK draft of API documentation… Maybe sometimes…

    On the ‘vibe coding’, on the cases I’ve seen detailed, it seems they do something that, to them, is a magical outcome from technologies that intimidated them. However, it’s generally pretty entry level stuff for those familiar with the tools of the trade, things you can find already done dozens of time on github almost verbatim, with very light bespoke customization. Of course there is a market for this, think of all the ‘no code’/‘low code’ things striving to make approachable very basic apps that just end up worse than learning to code. As a project manager struggles to make a dashboard out of that sort of sensibility, a dashboard that really has no business being custom but tooling has fostered the concept that everyone has a snowflake dashboard, it’s a pain. But maybe AI can help them generate their dashboard. Of course, to be a human subjected to the workflows those PMs dream up is a nightmare. Bad enough already at my work there are hundreds of custom issue fields, a dozen issue types, and 50 issue states with maddening project to project unique workflows to connect the meaning of all this, don’t like AI emboldening people to customize further.

    The thing about ‘vibe coding’ is when they get stuck and they get confused/frustrated about why the LLM stopped getting them what they want. One story was someone vibe coding up a racing game. He likely marveled as his vision materialized. From typing prose without understanding how to code he got some sort of 3D game with cars and tracks and controls. This struck him as incredibly difficult otherwise, but reachable through ‘vibe coding’. Then he wanted to add tire marks when the player did something, maybe on a hard turn) and it utterly couldn’t do it. After all the super hard stuff, why could the LLM not do this conceptually much simpler thing? Ultimately spitting out that the person needed to develop the logic himself (claiming it was refraining to do it because it would be better for him to learn, but I’m wagering that’s the generated text after repeated attempts to generate code that the LLM just could not do).




  • I occasionally check what various code generators will do if I don’t immediately know the answer is almost always wrong, but recently it might have been correct, but surprisingly convoluted. It had it broken down into about 6 functions iterating through many steps to walk it through various intermediate forms. It seemed odd to me that such a likely operation was quite so involved, so I did a quick Internet search, ignored the AI generated result and saw the core language built-in designed to handle my use case directly. There was one detail that was not clear in the documentation, so I went back to the LLM to ask that question and it gave the exact wrong answer.

    I am willing to buy that with IDE integration or can probably have much richer function completion for small easy stuff I know to do and save some time, but I just haven’t gotten used to the idea of asking for help on things I already know how to do.