People will assume you work on Cybersecurity.

Edit: Also, people will use this method to verify an email is from you.

stopped talking to me once I said I didn’t have instagram, because it meant I was “hiding something”.

That’s awful.

Also, I guess they would think I’m hiding so much, considering the number of bloated awful services I’ve rejected.

Yep. I was confused for awhile about conservatives being against UBI, since it enables a lot of libertarian ideal outcomes.

I do think it’s because education would get better, and certain powerful people don’t want that.

This is sad, and poignant illustration of why we all need to implement some kind of universal basic income.

UbI is cheaper to administrate, it makes more pro-community roles like artist, scholar and teacher more likely to be filled by more people, it makes the work force who can work more agile in finding their best jobs, it creates leverage for collective action against the worst employers (forcing all employers to behave better!) and it discourages people from hiding dead family members in a freezer.

If your software can save lives, I guarantee the people whos lives you saved didn’t forget you.

I appreciate that thought. I don’t believe it. But I appreciate it.

A lot (if not all) of the lives my work saved don’t know anything about the part I played, or even that my software had anything to do with it.

I’m okay with that. I know that there’s families out there that are more whole today, thanks to my work. That’s more valuable to me than any footnote in a history book.

Someday those families will be just as dead as if I had done nothing. But I did do something. Millions of extra moments happened with family members who could have died.

Beautiful things that are eventually forgetten are still beautiful things. To me, that’s enough.

I’ve been on the other side of this, too.

I have no way to thank all the people whose medical engineering work extended my grandfather’s life by decades. I don’t know any of their names.

But, I hope they know that people like me revere their efforts as sacred. (I’ve made some effort on that front, but I know I’ll never thank everyone who deserves my thanks.)

I was going to build some kind of long lasting software that improves everyone’s lives.

I’ve built some genuinely impactful stuff. Some of my work has saved lives.

But that long term worthwhile project hasn’t materialized. Everything I’ve built is now either tossed out and forgotten, or has long overstayed it’s welcome.

I take it as a zen lesson about the ephemeral nature of all things. All we are is dust in the wind - including the stuff we make.

Now I mostly make whatever someone is willing to pay for, and just however well they’re willing to pay for. (Edit: Lately I have the privilege to select employers that I think do some genuine good. That helps how I feel about it. I did a lot of ‘meh’ work on my way to where I am.)

I do make a few handy little things on the side, but I’m no longer burdened with my past delusions of grandeur.

10/10. Would give up the dream again.

Isn’t this still engineering a solution?

If we drop the word “engineering”, we can focus on the point - geometry is another case where rote learning of repetition can do a pretty good job. Clever engineers can teach computers to do all kinds of things that look like novel engineering, but aren’t.

LLMs can make computers look like they’re good at something they’re bad at.

And they offer hope that computers might someday not suck at what they suck at.

But history teaches us probably not. And current evidence in favor of a breakthrough in general artificial intelligence isn’t actually compelling, at all.

Sometimes even researchers reach new results by having a machine verify many cases

Yes. Computers are good at that.

So far, they’re no good at understanding the four color theorum, or at proposing novel approaches to solving it.

They might never be any good at that.

Stated more formally, P may equal NP, but probably not.

Edit: To be clear, I actually share a good bit of the same optimism. But I believe it’ll be hard won work done by human engineers that gets us anywhere near there.

Ostensibly God created the universe in Lisp. But actually he knocked most of it together with hard-coded Perl hacks.

There’s lots of exciting breakthroughs coming in computer science. But no one knows how long and what their impact will be. History teaches us it’ll be less exciting than Popular Science promised us.

Edit 2: Sorry for the rambling response. Hopefully you find some of it useful.

I don’t at all disagree that there’s exciting stuff afoot. I also thing it is being massively oversold.

Great question.

is there any legit reason anyone should learn advanced coding techniques?

Don’t buy the hype. LLMs can produce all kinds of useful things but they don’t know anything at all.

No LLM has ever engineered anything. And there’s no sparse (concession to a good point made in response) current evidence that any AI ever will.

Current learning models are like trained animals in a circus. They can learn to do any impressive thing you an imagine, by sheer rote repetition.

That means they can engineer a solution to any problem that has already been solved millions of times already. As long as the work has very little value and requires no innovation whatsoever, learning models do great work.

Horses and LLMs that solve advanced algebra don’t understand algebra at all. It’s a clever trick.

Understanding the problem and understanding how to politely ask the computer to do the right thing has always been the core job of a computer programmer.

The bit about “politely asking the computer to do the right thing” makes massive strides in convenience every decade or so. Learning models are another such massive stride. This is great. Hooray!

The bit about “understanding the problem” isn’t within the capabilities of any current learning model or AI, and there’s no current evidence that it ever will be.

Someday they will call the job “prompt engineering” and on that day it will still be the same exact job it is today, just with different bullshit to wade through to get it done.

Funny as this is, it may also be an extreme case of selective enforcement.

Yeah. I dunno about LG, but I often reflect on the fabulous drag queen show that would kick off an age of prosperity if a bunch of closeted conservatives could relax and stop bullshitting themselves.

Heck yes! It’s well worth the price and time. Takes a good hour to walk the whole park and really marvel at how bad some of the statues are.

10/10. No notes.

It’s telling that there’s a chance for big healthcare to come over to her side. It’s the worst kind of good news, since they need to die, and must be aware that any kind of functioning democracy will eventually kill their business model.

But apparently their other current option doesn’t stay bought…?

It’s not a rut to choose a reliable well paid union job over the slim chance of success in a niche art field. That’s common sense. That’s the dream, for many folks.

You’re allowed to feel good about choosing stability and comfort over a high risk plan. You’re also allowed to feel angry that circumstances aren’t letting you follow your dreams more fully. Those are both reasonable feelings.

I feel both of those ways, most days. If things were a little different, I could be living a very different life. Whatever. I choose to meditate on thankfulness for where I am.

I wouldn’t throw away a solid balanced union job life to pursue a career that isn’t going to leave me much time for anything else in life. I explicitly chose not to.

And yeah, I’ve had to make peace with not doing some of the things I would have done in that life. I’ve also done a brunch of things I couldn’t have done it I had pursued that life.

As Dave Ramsey says, “pull that boat closer to the dock before you step off, or you’re going to get dunked in the water”.

By which he means, you can pursue both, and let the better career win. Right now, playing the piano is losing. That’s not a huge shock in the age of digital recordings and abusive record company monopolies.

You can get great at piano in your free time. I know many people who have done so.

I am someone does do their passion as a day job - it made my passion substantially less fun. And I’m still not doing my passion exactly the way my heart wants to, because I have no remaining energy for that after I finish my day job. At the end of the day, any job is still just a job.

Hang in there. If you feel like you’re not playing piano enough, by all means, play more.

But please don’t fall for the trap of believing your passion has to become your day job.

We all need some way to make a living, and we should all pursue our passions. And on the best days we do both on as close to our own terms as possible.

I hope you dont let guilt (or even me!) tell you how often to play your piano, or who for.

Well said!

I want to highlight this, in case someone read fast and skipped it:

It’s ok not to be over stuff that happened in childhood.

It’s so important to give ourselves permission to not be okay.

My respect for curling was greatly increased when I walked into a room where it was showing on TV, and they were smoking (don’t smoke, kids) and someone was having a sandwich.

I asked if they had won and were allowed to celebrate right there on the ice?

My mate said, “Nah. They’re still competing right now.”

I don’t know if my mate was messing with me, or what.

But I want to believe. An Olympian who doesn’t let competing interfere with a good sandwich… Is one who has my eternal respect.

how can people in the US live with something like that?

We’ve had a number of deeply corrupt individuals in charge of our federal department meant to police this sort of thing.

And how does this not massively hurt her chances?!

Even odds are that it’s meant to.

Oh, I missed that in the gutter of the message.

This is a common attack tactic, then, called MFA Fatigue. It also means they probably have Ops password already. Or Ops service provider is doing something dumb. (MFA requests shouldn’t be sent out without the other factor being known.)

Edit: There’s no approve link there. Just ignore these. If you got a lot of these, do setup MFA.

If it keeps happening, prefers middle of the night (to where you live) hours, and you often get a really big batch in a row, then yes, it’s probably an attempted hack.

In any case, I would making sure your password is strong and isn’t reused anywhere else, and set up multi factor authentication…

Edit: It was pointed out to me that this has an approve/deny on it. Looks an awful lot like an MFA Fatigue attack. The attacker plans to keep doing it until you slip up and approve it accidentally while fumbling to unlock your phone at midnight sometime.

You should change your password immediately, if you haven’t already.

Weird. Sure looks like MS may be sending these without requiring your password. That’s…not great. Because of the fatigue attack aspect. See what you can configure. I would disable this function on my account, if I could.

Again, that’s if you’ve gotten dozens of these. If you got 3, it’s someone who mistyped their email as yours.

I would feel bad for Zayden, except that in an alternate timeline where his father was named Brad, Zayden would have been banned named Hunter. So it could be worse. I would rather be Zayden than Hunter.

boot into safe mode, navigate to the affected file, and delete it.

Yeah. That’s the easiest, unless the drive is encrypted.

I imagine the folks going for the 15 reboots approach are doing so because it’s easier than waiting in line for their IT help desk to deliver them their boot encryption key.