tombert

13 ms·

271.
by tombert 4mo ago
Yeah almost certainly, especially the ones who made a career out of "copypaste from StackOverflow", which is most engineers. But even the good engineers should likely be a little worried.
272.
by tombert 4mo ago
I have no doubt that the writer is better at translating than AI, but I have to say that AI translation has gotten so good that I'm not sure how much longer translation work will be there, or rather it might end up being more about aud
273.
by tombert 4mo ago
I always export my Typst with PDF/A. It basically guarantees maximal compatibility and none of the annoying dynamic bullshit. I wish everyone would do this, at least for documents that don't need the fancy dynamic PDF features
274.
by tombert 4mo ago
It always annoyed me that I'm paying thousands of dollars for tuition, only to be forced to pay additional thousands for the university-specific version of a textbook. I took a summer course on differential equations at Valencia Commun
275.
by tombert 4mo ago
I did something similar about a year ago, when I was unemployed. I made an Icecast-compatible streaming server in Erlang, and an Icecast-compatible stream in Rust. Between songs, I would phone out to the cheapest GPT model and a local TTS
276.
by tombert 4mo ago
But even going with your examples, effort isn't "meaningless", it's insufficient.
277.
by tombert 4mo ago
Even if I agree with that characterization, I don’t see how that changes anything from what I said before. I am sorry if you got “my success is purely because I am a hyper-talented genius” from my anecdote there, because that certainly wasn
278.
by tombert 4mo ago
Absolutely luck as well. No argument there.
279.
by tombert 4mo ago
I learned this lesson kind of by accident. I've told this story before but I think it's relevant. When I dropped out of college the first time around in January 2012, I assumed that my career options were extremely limited. I kne
280.
by tombert 4mo ago
One of my favorite teachers that I ever had was my Calc 2 teacher in high school. He always made a very special point to explain the "why" of everything. Not just "how is this used?", but he would also derive a lot of t
281.
by tombert 4mo ago
> was a sense that "more advanced" meant that it's what the older kids could do. That's honestly a mentality that I never completely got over. When I was first learning to program when I was ~13-15, Python was already
282.
by tombert 4mo ago
I think for at least a couple of the students, they really did learn the subject well. A couple students took me up on my offer to do private tutoring [1], and I do think that they benefited from it. A couple of them would even ask interes
283.
by tombert 4mo ago
I go back and forth; part of what bothers me is how I'm paying for these GE courses. Like, for example, I took a multicultural film course in college the first time around. I love movies, I love analyzing everything about movies, I
284.
by tombert 4mo ago
Yeah, honestly if I were to do the lecturing again, I would probably get some training first. I, like a lot of people, thought it would be relatively easy for me because I've always been relatively good at explaining things to people o
285.
by tombert 4mo ago
I thought I might be able to reach them, because I was never an A student. I was always kind of the underachiever who teachers knew was smart but would get mediocre grades because I wouldn't do the homework. I passed high school beca
286.
by tombert 4mo ago
I said "forced" because there's a grading framework that I had to follow and there was no amount of flexibility within that framework that made it so I could pass them... Especially since they didn't leave the class real
287.
by tombert 4mo ago
I'd argue honestly until graduate school too. Undergrad still has a lot of required courses that aren't directly related to your major, and it can be draining. I'm not saying this is a "bad" thing, having a well ro
288.
by tombert 4mo ago
I was too. That's why it was so frustrating to me. Teachers would like me, I don't think that any of them thought I was an idiot, but I wouldn't do my homework and they'd be stuck giving me middling-to-bad grades. I eve
289.
by tombert 4mo ago
It's just the same old "blame everyone but the idiots that voted for Trump" excuse that was stupid in 2024, 2025, and 2026. I didn't downvote your comment (and couldn't even if I wanted to because it's a direct
290.
by tombert 4mo ago
There's an art to making learning fun. I thought I had that skill, but I do not, at least not intrinsically. Maybe I could learn it, but since I was only a lecturer for about a year, I never really developed it. I am not going to pre
291.
by tombert 4mo ago
I'm not the first person to state this, but it bears repeating: nearly everyone thinks that they know the right way to teach, and most people don't. I'm not exempting myself from this. I was an adjunct lecturer for two semest
292.
by tombert 4mo ago
No one has ever accused me of being "average", I'm definitely a weird dude. I don't think I'm that smart though.
293.
by tombert 4mo ago
I mean, I guess? I don't really feel like I needed to be taught that tariffs would raise prices. I'm not some hypergenius, it really seems pretty obvious to me.
294.
by tombert 4mo ago
Yeah, no, it actually is mature enough. I hate divisive language like this, but Trump's only major concrete "policy" (if you can call it that) during his 2024 campaign was that he was going to somehow lower grocery prices by
295.
by tombert 4mo ago
Not sure. I think the candidate took another offer. I don't dispute that they probably had a beef with me; my manager's manager wasn't completely wrong to say I had an attitude problem at the time. I'm going to blame u
296.
by tombert 4mo ago
I think it was supposed to be an "off the record" thing from the hiring manager to other engineers, and I happened to be part of that group. I don't remember the exact circumstances.
297.
by tombert 4mo ago
That's completely fine. I have no issue with people working hard on a product they are proud of at a big for-profit company. It's good to like your job, it's good to like your coworkers, it's good to be happy that your
298.
by tombert 4mo ago
I find it kind of sadly amusing how many conspiracy theories exist about rich elites exist and then they go off about Jews or lizard people or something else ridiculous. Because there is a conspiracy of rich elites who are trying keep y
299.
by tombert 4mo ago
This would have been 2019. Even then, I feel like anyone who had been in the industry long enough should have developed some level of cynicism.
300.
by tombert 4mo ago
I've told this story before, but it's relevant. When I worked at BigCo [1], we were interviewing a candidate for a position. He was pretty good, and we were in the process of making him an offer, but he was asking for more money a

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