there would be nothing to prevent the 99% from rightfully rising up against the 1%

Except for the other 1% who are trained and equipped to violently suppress the 98%. And if for whatever reason they fail to do the job, the killer robots will do it instead.

I’m a school bus driver, and one of my weirder experiences is listening to a middle-school boy ripping on some middle-school girl for having “only” ten thousand followers.

The year they both came out (1995) I was coding in Visual Basic 3. Ack.

My main experience using C++ was because I got stuck modifying an app written with Qt Creator, an utterly insane cross-platform framework that used (still uses? I dunno, only people in Finland ever used it in the first place) C++ for the under-the-hood processing and Javascript for the UI. For good measure, the application developers had modified all the C++ stuff with macros to the point where it was barely even recognizable as C++. Fortunately, it mattered not at all because the app’s customers were ISPs who just wanted a Skype clone so they could say they had one even though none of their customers ever used the damn thing.

The one thing that stands out to me the most is that programmatic “neurons” are basically passive units that weigh inputs and decide to fire or not. The whole net is exposed to the input, the firing decisions are worked through the net, and then whatever output is triggered. In biological neural nets, most neurons are always firing at some rate and the inputs from pre-synaptic neurons affect that rate, so in a sense the passed information is coded as a change in rate rather than as an all-or-nothing decision to fire or not fire as is the case with (most) programmatic neurons. Implementing something like this in code would be more complicated, but it could produce something much more like a living organism which is always doing something rather than passively waiting for an input to produce some output.

And TBF there probably are a lot of people doing this kind of thing, but if so they don’t get much press.

Wait, chatgpt was convicted of multiple felonies?

there’s nothing left to do research.

There’s still military robots, unfortunately.

Neural networks are based on an oversimplified model of neuron cells.

As a programmer who has studied neuroanatomy and the structure/function of neurons themselves, I remain astonished at how not like real biological nervous systems computer neural networks still are. It’s like the whole field is based on one person’s poor understanding of the state of biological knowledge in the late 1970s. That doesn’t mean it’s not effective in some ways as it is, but you’d think there’d be more experimentation in neural networks based on current biological knowledge.

I feed my local crows peanuts every day. I really like crows, but I still find it incredibly amusing when the local bluejays - who are like 1/3 the size of the crows - chase them around and beat the shit out of them. It’s not even a numbers thing, I’ve watched a single bluejay chase off the whole family of five crows.

The crows do the same thing to red-tailed hawks whenever they show up, but it’s always five-on-one in those situations. Bluejays way more badass.

6 cans of Coke (Sam’s cola ftw) a day

Damn, that is 960 calories a day of soda. If you’re an average-sized man, that represents 40% of your daily diet (around 2500 cal per day).

For a while in the programming world “why are manhole covers round?” was a common question to be asked in interviews. I had no fucking clue the first time I was asked, but subsequently I would put on my deep pondering face and reason through it out loud and arrive at the correct answer, which never failed to impress the interviewer. After a few years I started owning up to the fact that I (and everyone else) had already heard that question.

The majority of puppy-coders I’ve encountered (including myself) actually want to refactor rather than just add onto. They are fundamentally correct in this, but they don’t grasp that 1) few companies want to acknowledge that the code base which is their greatest tangible “asset” is actually complete shit, and 2) that due to their inexperience, their refactored replacement is probably going to end up as bad as or worse than the original.

Yeah, same thing.

Not a bug exactly, but about ten years ago I was working as an iOS developer and to get around a major problem introduced by the app designer, I made use of a “private method”, which is something an app supposedly gets rejected for by Apple. I came up with a way of hiding it and had to sweat out the approval period before it went live. Ten years later that shit is still there; I’m sure the developers currently responsible for the app don’t even know it’s there. I normally comment my code with an eye to helping future programmers understand what’s going on and why, but this hack was one where I even obscured the comments.

I used to work for Cisco (the huge router etc. company) but my mom thought I was working for Sysco (the food services supply company). She was very surprised to learn that I had anything at all to do with computers.

Maybe “software producer”? (a term I’ve never seen used anywhere but that sort of makes sense when you think about what a movie producer does, for example)

I’ve been a programmer my whole career, but some years ago my then-employer gave me the actual title of “visionary”. This caused me to immediately lose the respect of my coworkers, and after a few months it was obvious my employer was just preparing to get rid of me and replace me with H-1Bs.

When I’m in a particularly jaunty mood, I go with “software artist”.

What kind of designer would make mobile buttons small?

Have you ever used a mobile app? Every commercial mobile app I’ve ever used has tons of tiny fucking buttons.

I spent years as a mobile developer and the thing that always drove me the most nuts was being handed a software design with lots of tiny buttons that were nearly impossible to tap with a finger. I generally implemented the UI by increasing the size of the tappable regions (without increasing the apparent size of the buttons) making it actually usable, but one time the designer discovered that I was doing this and went apeshit and convinced the project manager to order me to undo all this and make the tappable regions the same size as the buttons. The grounds for this was that implementing the larger tappable regions would take too much extra time - despite the fact that this had already been done and it took additional time to undo it.