I was converting all the views in my Rails app from HAML to ERB. It was doing each one perfectly, so I told it to do the rest. It went through a few, then asked me if it could write a program, and run that. I thought, hey, cool, sure. I get it; it was trying to save tokens. Clever! However -- you know where this is going -- despite knowing all the rules, and demonstrating it could apply them, the program it wrote made a total dog's breakfast out of the rest of the files. Thankfully, I've learned to commit my working copy before big "AI" changes, and I just revert when it barfs. I forced Claude to do the rest "manually" at great token expense, but it did it correctly. I've asked it to write other scripts, which it has also mangled. So I haven't been impressed at Claude's "tool writing" capability yet, and I'm jealous of people who seem to have good luck.
Like it or not, mergers/acquisitions are matters of money, not whether you like the product or not. In fact, all corporations are beholden to make the most money, not the best products. Frequently the product that makes the most money is the one that constantly nags you to give it more money, which everyone hates.
Today I watched the WHY2025 talk about what happened to XS4ALL (a Dutch hacker-ethic ISP). Here's the summary: "we sold our profitable smallish independent startup with anti-corporate culture to a big corporation for lots of money, because we thought they'd continue it being awesomely anti-corporate, but all they did was squeeze our customers for more money, lay off all our staff and then move the customers to the corporation's own brand. We fought them in the courts, but the courts decisively ruled they were allowed to do all that because they own us, and it turns out they'd got expensive lawyers who did all the paperwork and pulled the right strings to make us look like the bad guys." Like, no shit? What were you expecting to happen? Does this story sound familiar to you?
Everyone needs to realize "the scorpion and the frog" is about corporations. Anyway, there's nothing illegal about selling your soul for money. It's almost mandatory in fact.
At some point, doesn't humankind rise up and demand that our governments stop... you know... actually fucking us like this? After all the trust-busting at the turn of the century, we're right back in another golden age of robber barons, almost as if we learned nothing about this as a civilization. Being paid in company scrip that can only be used in the company's store with products from their global monolith doesn't sound far-fetched at this point. We seem to be heading straight for the cyberpunk version of our inevitable dystopian future.
I had no idea, and I've been a "Rails guy" for 15 years, and keenly interested in high-profile successful Ruby projects for a long time. Even clicking through to their actual site from the source repo page, I had to surmise what it was.
Tron 2.0 was great, and another game that has been lost to time. I got the Steam version working with a hack many years ago, but I doubt it would still work. That's another one that could use the same treatment as this version of NOLF!
For years I've said that if you could take corporate purchases out of the Gartner numbers, you'd see that Apple was better than 50/50 when it came to personal use. I sure would like to see an updated version of that dataset.
The amount of effort apparently required to satisfy all the checkboxes around "a cheap PC and Microsoft 365" is astounding. My Fortune 250 laptop runs 3 different security "endpoint" products, and literally dozens of scripts fire each day/hour to make sure that things are "correct" according to every suggestion any consultant ever made towards our senior IT staff. And they replace the entire fleet every 3 years. I believe that starting with longer lived hardware with an inherently more secure environment that didn't need to be groomed like this would be a net savings, but I don't have the numbers to prove it.
I'm also squarely GenX. While studying mechanical engineering, one of my roommates was in psychology. He said "we" didn't need sleep. He said one of his professors told them that. I said, "But we ALL do it." He said it was just a convenience thing.
To his credit, he decided to test his theory. By not sleeping. During FINALS WEEK. He said, by the third day, he saw Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn walk across the pages of the book he was reading, and decided it was time to take a nap.
But, hey, I tried smoking banana peel, ala the Anarchist's Cookbook, so I don't have any room to talk.
Even before I went to college I knew that Race Across America winners would sleep only a couple hours a night, timed to wake at sunrise to trick their brains into thinking they’d gotten more sleep. They’d be hallucinating by the end, which did not sound like fun.
I think the longest I ever made it was 70 hours. Maybe 80. I had two finals on consecutive days so I stayed up to cram for the second. Fibbed to my parents about when I was available to come home for the holidays, so I went to the computer lab to binge games with a couple friends, never made it to sleep that night.
I went to bed when the blue background on the computer terminal started to swim. That’s enough internet for me today.
The older you get the more dangerous it is to do this. You can start dying sometime between 70 and 120 hours. And the quality of whatever you’re doing is declining rapidly after 30 or so. Go to bed.
