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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • If the data is present but difficult to restore, it’s annoying. You might need to spend a few days fixing stuff.

    If the data is gone, it’s devastating and can bankrupt a company. On a personal level it’s the same as having all your photos destroyed in a fire. And backups not containing the right data are very common.




  • The main differentiator of fish over everything else is it prioritizes intuitive behavior over backwards compatibility.

    Zsh is to bash as c++ is to c. Most bash scripts and habits will work in zsh, but zsh is just more convenient and has more options. Fish is intentionally different.

    Do I wish fish had existed instead of bash so we had a nicer terminal experience? On the whole, yes. But I also couldn’t be bothered to learn another shell where most of the instructions online won’t be able to help you, and I ended up sticking with zsh.





  • so I confuse the number of ounces in a pound quite often, amongst other things

    When do you need to use either of these?

    I know the number of pounds in a kilo so I can understand the Americans when they talk about weightlifting and how much people weigh. I don’t think I’ve ever used an ounce in my life.




  • It’s interesting. There’s a lot of talk about how chatgpt makes people lazy, but honestly I think Google killed the “read the manual” ethos.

    Back in the day when you couldn’t just search for everything, you needed enough understanding of the manual to find anything in the index.

    So a key part of figuring anything out was reading at least the start of the manual.

    Now, fuck it, you just type into Google and try to guess enough context to understand what’s going on.



  • You absolutely can’t use LLMs for anything big unless you learn to code.

    Think of an LLM as a particularly shit builder. You give them a small job and maybe 70% of the time they’ll give you something that works. But it’s often not up to spec, so even if it kinda works you’ll have to tell them to correct it or fix it yourself.

    The bigger the job is and the more complex the more ways they have to fuck it up. This means in order to use them, you have to break the problem down into small sub tasks, and check that the code is good enough for each one.

    Can they be useful? Sometimes yes, it’s quicker to have an AI write code than for you to do it yourself, and if you want something very standard it will probably get it right or almost right.

    But you can’t just say ‘write me an app’ and expect it to be useable.