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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • If you know exactly what you need, then specs are great. Proven solutions for known problems are awesome. Agile is pointless in that circumstance.

    But I can count on one hand the number of times stakeholders, or clients, actually know what they want ahead of time and accept what was built to spec with no amends.

    When there is any uncertainty, changing a spec under waterfall is significantly worse. Contract negotiation in fixed price is a fucking nightmare of the client insisting the sky is red when the signed off spec states it’s to be green.







  • AI is a tool that should be kept open to everyone

    I agree with this principle, however the reality is that given the massive computational power needed to run many (but not all) models, the control of AI is in the hands of the mega corps.

    Just look at what the FAANGs are doing right now, and compare to what the mill owners were doing in the 1800s.

    The best use of LLMs, right now, is for boilerplating initial drafts of documents. Those drafts then need to be reviewed, and tweaked, by skilled workers, ahead of publication. This can be a significant efficiency saving, but does not remove the need for the skilled worker if you want to maintain quality.

    But what we are already seeing is CEOs, etc, deciding to take “a decision based on risk” to gut entire departments and replace them with a chat bot, which then invents hallucinates the details of a particular company policy, leading to a lower quality service, but significantly increased profits, because you’re no longer paying for ensured quality.

    The issue is not the method of production, it is who controls it.


  • So, I didn’t downvote you because that’s not how I operate.

    The Luddites were not protesting against technology in and of itself, they were protesting against the capture of their livelihoods by proto-capitalists who purposefully produced inferior quality goods at massive volume to drive down the price and put the skilled workers out of business.

    They were protesting market capture, and the destruction of their livelihood by the rich.

    This sort of monopolistic practice is these days considered to be a classic example of monopolistic market failure.

    There is a massive overlap between the philosophy of the Luddites, and the cooperative movement.

    The modern usage of the term is to disparage the working class as stupid, feckless, and scared. This has never been true.






  • Martyrs (assuming you mean the original) I found fascinating. While it may not be particularly deep, at least there was a point to it, even if that point is all encompassing nihilism.

    For me, that is the point in horror as a genre, to confront you with philosophy. Zombie movies aren’t really about zombies, etc…

    IMHO, A Serbian Film and Human Centipede 2 have some of the most disturbing scenes I’ve ever seen. Realizing that they are made for shock value kind of make them laughable though.

    …which is why I agree with you completely here, they are just gore for the sake of gore. The best bit about HC2 is how HC exists as a film within it, which opens the possibility that it’s also a part of St Elsewhere.

    Fun story, Salo was required reading (I guess watching?) for a few friends of mine at uni on different courses. I guess the lecturers were having fun messing with freshers. I already had a copy (ahoy) and was known as “the guy that watches weird films” so I ended up being a watch buddy for various people who really, really, didn’t like gore. I ended up dating one of them for a bit, which was always a fun “how did you meet?” story.