smithkl42

6 ms·

31.
by smithkl42 9mo ago
That would make sense, except that one of the universal rules of childhood is, "Adults get to do things you don't get to do, usually for damn good reasons, so get used to it." Every child knows this in their bones, even when
32.
by smithkl42 10mo ago
Perl failed because it's a write-only language. The only time you really understand a Perl program is when you're writing it. Check back in six months and good luck. It's like trying to read someone else's regular expres
33.
by smithkl42 11mo ago
Plausible article, but it reads like a preschooler frustrated that his new toy is broken. "Fix it! Make it work!" - without ever specifying how. Granted, this is an exceedingly hard problem, and I suppose there's some value i
34.
by smithkl42 11mo ago
We've been using Aspose.PDF for the last 10 years or so in our C# platform, and paying for the license. It's expensive and buggy and has shite support, so a year or so back I decided to see if there was some other library or combi
35.
by smithkl42 11mo ago
The post does a good job of describing a phenomenological difference between being broke and being poor, and its account seems plausible to me. But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two. I've known work
36.
by smithkl42 11mo ago
If your attacker controls the data you're exporting to a CSV file, they can take advantage of a memory safety issue in your CSV exporter to execute arbitrary code on your machine. https://georgemauer.net/2017/10&#x
37.
by smithkl42 11mo ago
Bear is (or at least can be) delicious. You can get a lot of tasty meals out of a fat berry-fed bear. I've never had the chance to eat cougar, but I've talked to folks who have, and they say it's their favorite meat - like a
38.
by smithkl42 11mo ago
Insurance companies vote with their feet. The practical reality is that if insurance companies are able to make money in a given state, they'll stay in that state. Insurance companies fleeing states like CA or FL in droves is a really
39.
by smithkl42 11mo ago
I think the issue he's pointing at is that LLVM is itself written in C++ - so the entire "trusted" Rust toolchain depends on trusting a huge C++ app.
40.
by smithkl42 11mo ago
The iron law of uptime: "The mandatory single point of failure in every possible system is configuration."
41.
by smithkl42 1y ago
I'm not sure we're looking at the same industry. Overall, insurance company profit margins are in the single digits, usually low single digits - and in many segments, they're frequently not profitable at all. To take one exam
42.
by smithkl42 1y ago
Copilot is getting better - I'm getting fewer of those than I used to - but it's still significantly more stupid than other agents, even when in theory it's using the same model.
43.
by smithkl42 1y ago
If you think that insurance companies have "light regulation", I shudder to think of what "heavy regulation" would look like. (Source: I'm the CTO at an insurance company.)
44.
by smithkl42 1y ago
Nah, if I manufactured my own silicon, I'd be infinitely more hackable than I am right now - just like if I wrote my own crypto code. 99.9999% of people are going to be more secure if they just rely on publicly accessible cryptography
45.
by smithkl42 1y ago
It depends mostly on the denomination, sometimes on the individual church. I'm a man, so maybe I wouldn't notice it, but I've never attended a church where I got the impression that women were second-class citizens. Every chu
46.
by smithkl42 1y ago
Among other things, the attack space for npm is just so much larger. We run a large C# codebase (1M+ LOC) and a somewhat smaller TypeScript codebase (~200K LOC). I did a check the other day, and we have one potentially vulnerable nuget depe
47.
by smithkl42 1y ago
I agree with Doctorow about the de-humanizing nature of this sort of work - but to your specific point about fact checking, it'd honestly be fastest to outsource that to a different LLM, maybe ChatGPT in "deep research" mode
48.
by smithkl42 1y ago
This is a classic example of Poe's Law. If it's satire, it's brilliant. If it's serious, well ...
49.
by smithkl42 1y ago
I'm the CTO at my company, and I had to convince my own IT guys that they needed to remove our firewall's weapons-related filters.
50.
by smithkl42 1y ago
More-or-less agreed about the waterfall model, but you can't blame horrific US government website performance on "corporations" or "corporate management". This is precisely the sort of thing that would get you fired
51.
by smithkl42 1y ago
The id.me process is absolutely horrific.
52.
by smithkl42 1y ago
This is roughly my experience with LLMs. I've had a lot of friends that have had good experience vibe coding very small new apps. And occasionally I've had AI speed things up for me when adding a specific feature to our main app.
53.
by smithkl42 1y ago
Undoubtedly that's the reason for the under-representation of women as Fortune 500 CEO's. They're just not applying.
54.
by smithkl42 1y ago
Insurance is a pretty common one. Lots of insurance companies have offices there - and if you're a top-notch dev, you can make a crap-ton of money as well.
55.
by smithkl42 1y ago
What I said about NPR might apply to some of their listeners as well: "What makes it most annoying is their utter blindness to their own bias."
56.
by smithkl42 1y ago
> Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country,” Harrison said. If that was true
57.
by smithkl42 1y ago
Am I the only one who was surprised and kind of mystified by this sentence? "You’d assume the lessening of antibiotics might be associated with improved health outcomes, especially since antibiotics are so overused." It sounds mor
58.
by smithkl42 1y ago
My understanding (bowing to ChatGPT) is that you can get 1 pound of iron from <2 pounds of iron ore. But to get 1 pound of lithium, you need around 500 pounds of lithium ore. So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 poun
59.
by smithkl42 1y ago
This is not military, but it's widely advocated in the concealed carry community that you should carry with one in the chamber. The argument is that with modern pistol designs and the right precautions, it's generally safe; and th
60.
by smithkl42 1y ago
Where did you get those details? I've read a couple stories on this incident and haven't seen that mentioned.

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