Paul Vick

Real "please clap" energy.

I loved the original Dragon Age and even enjoyed Dragon Age II, limited as it was. I came late to Mass Effect but played straight through all three (Jennifer Hale is the GOAT). I even played through Neverwinter Nights for some reason. So a sad day.

Cancer kills its host and dies with it. A leveraged buyout makes the host finance its tumor, sells its organs and uses the proceeds to infect the next victim. The corpses go into the pitch deck under “successful exits.” www.theverge.com/games/101564...

The biggest issue is that they left off the "...for me." at the end.

This one took me the longest time to figure out.

Man, I just feel so hard for the poor bastards who had to deal with those PRs. It's going to be a new rite of passage for software engineers.

I feel like if I explained Hungarian notation to a new grad it would basically sound like we used to use leeches and bloodletting to cure diseases.

Often so much of an exec's job is cleaning up messes that they themselves created through ignoring the overwhelmingly likely consequences of their own actions.

This is exactly what I was concerned about when I read about this. If I have Claude proofread my original work and I accept enough of its suggestions (even though they may be no more than your Word-grade grammar suggestions you'd have gotten pre-AI), now suddenly my work is "generated by AI."

Man, where the f**k did "load bearing" come from? Someone had to say it a lot for it to show up in the weights the way it has. Can we track down that person and make them pay?

Couple weeks ago I had my buddy @ericlippert.com on the podcast to talk about his book Fantastic Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms, and now the book is out! Manning Publications Co. hubs.la/Q03Q9Q9y0 It's on sale right now in early access

Read it here if you haven't yet. Today is the very best day of all days to read it for the first time. short-stories.co/@raybradbury...

What if I go, “I’m not saying that I _want_ someone to hack this bank and transfer a million dollars into my account, and I’m not saying that someone _should_… but, boy, it would be really _nice_ if someone did.” Is that ok? Maybe with a “<wink> <wink>” at the end?

I've lived under the direct flight path of the Blue Angels in one way or another for about 25 years now (first Cap Hill, now Seward Park) and I have to say, the bloom is definitely off the rose.

One nice thing about the Cybertruck is that there’s never a question about who gets it in the divorce

I learned about all this the hard way...

Fond memories of college. Don’t think I ever made it into the “best of” compilations.

No, Pegasus.

There is a half-remembered quote I put in my high-school yearbook (!!!) because I liked it so much: "To be a god of something, you have to be able to DO it." If you claim expertise in something solely because you ask the AI, you are just a false god. It's a very real problem.

It’s also quite notable that given all the “fall of Western society” BS related to Lupita Nyong'o as Helen, not a bit of hand wringing about her as Clytemnestra. Hm. Why wouldn’t those boys care as much about that? (And I thought Nyong’o did an even more amazing job as her. She slayed. Literally.)

"I mean, I'm walking along there and I come to the corner and there's this 'DON'T WALK' sign flashing. How dare they? It's a free country. How does someone in the government have the temerity to tell me I can't walk into traffic if I want to? I can do whatever I want."

Steve Jobs killed the Xbox. I think all of the woes trace back to the disastrous launch of the Xbox One. And most of those bad decisions were driven by MSFTs obsession with defeating the iPhone. All the “three screens and a cloud” BS they were feeding themselves.

Something the flood of Microsoft retirement notices on LinkedIn has reinforced is just how *long* the tech boom has been. Yes, ups and downs. But Microsoft had 12k employees when I started there and it felt big. Now it has 228k. There is a *lot* of just... inertia in the industry.

In fairness, execs have made this mistake for longer than AI has existed. The previous iteration was "Mistakenly, we thought that by just hiring a lot of smart people and giving them the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product." Also usually ended in tears.

Yes, it’s like: Me, prototyping with AI: Yeah! F**k yeah! Me, trying to ship AI code: Well, this sucks.

Mostly they were accurate but one said that I was a former Microsoft executive. I wish?

In the words of the inimitable Gordon Gekko, "A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place."

This doesn't surprise me at all. I'm constantly wrestling with the fact that Claude is confused by the Java setup on my machine and will waste untold number of tokens figuring out over and over how to run a test. I noticed and tried to fix it but there's no reason I had to do that.

+1,000,000. If there is any constant that has held true over my career, it is that executives: a) never know when to stop, and b) always go way too far. Just as some companies doubled in size (looking at you, Meta) during the pandemic, this is so going to come back to bite them all in the a**.

The thing is, there's a whole crowd of frogs standing on the bank of the river and every time this f**king scorpion stings one of them, they fish the scorpion out of the river. Then he climbs right on the back of the next frog, who says "This time it's going to be different."

"One day you will come to a fork in the road and you’re going to have to make a decision [...] If you go that way you can be somebody. [...] Or you can go that way and you can do something [...] In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do?"

6-3

My anecdotal impression from talking to folks is that companies are definitely on the hire and looking for people but are also being incredibly conservative and bouncing folks for minor imperfections. Maybe because layoffs make them paranoid about needing perfection, maybe "many fish in the sea"?