ExFed

No no no you see it’s all about MORE SUNSHINE. Can’t you read? Everybody loves more sunshine! Daylight Saving Time is all about SAVING DAYLIGHT! Permanent Daylight Saving Time means Permanent Daylight!

Okay I’m not a good satirist. You know how long I’ve been using the exact same argument? I’m done with Government-mandated clock manipulation. God put the Sun directly above our heads at noon. Permanent Standard Time is the only righteous policy.

It’s not that my brain is tired or even that I trust LLMs, I just don’t have time and either an LLM can create the thing I want or I do without. If the project fails, nothing of value is lost.

At home, that’s the summary of so many of my hobby projects lately. At work, however, there’s one phenomenon that I don’t know if we have a name for yet: loss of job satisfaction because a large part of the joy of creative problem solving comes from the process of wrestling with a hard problem, making a breakthrough, and genuinely learning something. LLMs make it too easy. I don’t feel like I’m learning anything of value. I’m just regurgitating some version of the LLM’s solution back to my coworkers during stand-ups. And so, if anyone really pressed me on the details, I would have a hard time coming up with anything. For this latest release on a project that I’ve worked on for most of a year and given demos for in the past, we unleashed AI. I’m genuinely nervous to give an upcoming customer demo for this release because I don’t really feel like I understand the changes were shipping.

At first, I thought it was just a problem I was experiencing alone. But then I started hearing others express very similar sentiments. At least one person mentioned that they chose to work on hobby projects without LLMs, precisely because they wanted to recapture that joy they lost from their career. Even though I’ve finally started knocking out quite a few ideas from the backlog that had accumulated over the years, it’s hard to really reach that same level of satisfaction.

Is there a balance point where I can stay on top of the backlog while feeling like my brain hasn’t fallen out of my head?

Make it $10k, bring back graduated corporate taxes (with global consolidated income to prevent ferreting away income in a plethora of international subsidiaries), and actually pledge to solving the debt and I’m sold.

This is probably going to be an unpopular comment… but these articles are all super misleading. The physical books are getting destroyed, but their content is getting digitized. Is that a loss? Absolutely. But is there a benefit? Also yes.

The biggest loss is probably the fact that destroying the physical books removes them from circulation, making them essentially permanent additions to these companies’ book collections.

The current economic regime is less like “capitalism” and more like “feudalism with corporations.”

I’m pretty sure they’re trying to say that, if you were to realistically simulate orbital mechanics, the framework generates terrain 9 times faster than the player could reveal new terrain via orbiting, making it possible to calculate at runtime.

I also thought it looked a bit sloppy. I couldn’t find it with a reverse image search, and AI detectors seem convinced it’s fake. Where’s it from?

The thing that gets me is when car designers make a car that’s trying to be something it’s not. It’s an EV, not an ICE vehicle. If anything, amplify the motor hum under load (accelerating). Don’t simulate engine sounds. We’re tired of living in a simulation.

Ugh. That old, awful meme. All these years, I never quite understood what about it makes me cringe and wrench my gut so much… But maybe now I have the words: anyone who knowingly exploits the suffering of others ultimately has evil intent.

Sure. But for once, just this once, can we celebrate a win?

False dichotomy. What next? All men are toxic because of their masculinity?

It takes strength to empower others. Men are strong when they empower others (including women). That’s literally all that Talarico is saying. How is that incompatible with feminism?

You’ve just repeated the kind of rhetoric that gives rise to _anti-feminism; your definition of “feminism” is less about empowering women than it is about suppressing men, and I don’t like it one bit.

Swamps and wetlands are very ecologically productive places.

They’ve drained the swamp an replaced it with a Superfund site.

I find it especially rich that Stephen Miller would call a scandal-ridden home-wrecker like Paxton as “God-fearing” when Talarico is a Presbyterian seminarian.

Christian Nationalists aren’t Christians. They worship a twisted and selfish god unable to sacrifice anything to save anyone from anything.

Agreed. The bubble has to pop eventually… Or not, and we really are marching towards our own obsolescence as a species.

LLMs are fundamentally limited, because ‘what’s the next word’ shouldn’t work.

Yes, you’re right. However, for fear of coming off as an AI sycophant (I’ve yet to sacrifice my brain at the altar of our future AI overlords), LLMs aren’t the whole picture. Plenty of research is dedicated to essentially combining the best of each class of AI algorithms into a composite model of intelligence. For instance, “Neuro-Symbolic AI” is really just the result of giving an LLM (good at translation, search, synthesis, bad at symbolic reasoning) a symbolic inference engine like Prolog (good at symbolic reasoning, no native ability for translation/search/synthesis). I’ve been coding for over 20 years, and I’m impressed at its results for software development.

This all is reminiscent of Moore’s Law; even though we keep running into the physical limits of CPU clock speeds, transistor size, etc. we keep finding clever ways to work around those limits.

Of course I’m not saying we should; these models are, after all, models of intelligence, not wisdom.

Edit: fix apostrophe splice

We’ve kinda somewhat seriously talked about this at my office … A lot of very boring report writing goes away if you feed an LLM a log of daily activities (chats, commits, issue tickets, etc) across the team.

As someone who started writing software over 20 years ago (yikes I feel old), I feel like a lot of the best practices I’ve come to appreciate are really just strategies for mitigating future pain or boring/uninspiring work. When you eliminate most of the cost of rewriting everything from scratch by a machine that feels nothing, then “best practices” kinda lose their meaning.

Edit: confusing sentence order.

Question is, how far behind is Russia with drone operations? Can Ukraine keep up innovation to maintain an edge?

Well they are kidnapping kids and forcing them to become soldiers, if not necessarily the front lines to starve … but we can’t rule that out, either.

https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/01/19/russia-trains-ukrainian-children-occupied-kherson-drone-warfare-cyber-operations/

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/how-russia-is-training-a-drone-generation-of-youth-for-future-wars-17341