• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • My PhD was in neural networks in the 1990s and I’ve been in development since then.

    Remember when digital cameras came out? They were pretty crappy compared to film—if you had a decent film camera and knew what you were doing. I fell like that’s where we’re at with LLMs right now.

    Digital cameras are now pretty much on par with film, perhaps better in some circumstances and worse in others.

    Shifting gear from writing code to reviewing someone else’s is inefficient. With a good editor setup and plenty of screen real estate, I’m more productive just writing than constantly worrying about what the copilot just inserted. And yes, I’ve tested that.



  • Partially. The summary isn’t quite in line with the detail:

    Android is the only operating system that fully immunizes VPN apps from the attack because it doesn’t implement option 121. For all other OSes, there are no complete fixes. When apps run on Linux there’s a setting that minimizes the effects, but even then TunnelVision can be used to exploit a side channel that can be used to de-anonymize destination traffic and perform targeted denial-of-service attacks.



  • The thing with football is that there is a specific goal (pun very much intended). It’s ok to have a mindset that you’re going to play in a way that makes it unlikely (in the beginning) you’ll achieve that goal (eg play left footed), but if that player never improved, would you still think it’s ‘working’)?

    I worked in an industry for many years that was obsessed with goal-setting, and that mindset never appealed to me. I eventually found a book called Goal Free Living by Stephen M. Shapiro. It was a bit of an eye-opener for me, and the phrase “Carry a compass not a map” stayed with me until today. I’ve done several different things since then but I’ll never be famous for any of them as I still keep changing direction.











  • Seeing your kids on stage is magic—my son has been in various professional and amateur roles since he was 10. He can act and sing, which opened up musicals too. Having several aspects to performance has definitely helped him. Actor musicians can be in great demand, but since there are few (compared to actor / singer / dancer), I don’t think there are as many opportunities as there might be.

    If your kids are ok with the acting side, definitely encourage them.

    On a related note, I was also involved in the building of a new theatre at my kids school, and I tried to convince them to not restrict it to the music and drama departments. No matter what field you’re going to go into, being confident in front of an audience (even just presenting on your own subject) is a valuable skill that theatre can teach. I’m now grey enough to not worry about speaking to an audience. I wish I’d had that confidence earlier in my career.