Mastodawn

"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."

https://www.stvn.sh/writing/programming-still-sucks-fqffhyp

Programming Still Sucks. — Writing

Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.

Wil Macaulay 3d ago

Neil Brown 3d ago

Waiting for the government announcement that shops can only sell false moustaches and make-up pencils to people 18 or over.

Wil Macaulay 3d ago

Vagina Museum 3d ago

Happy International Day of the Midwife! The word "midwife" is gender neutral. It says nothing about the gender of the midwife. It comes from the Middle English "mid", meaning "with" and "wif" meaning woman - so the word "midwife" describes the person being *with* the "wife".

Wil Macaulay 3d ago

GinevraCat 3d ago

Edit: Thank-you for all the boosts, beautiful fedizens. You can stop now. I'll ask again if need be. Your willingness to help strangers always restores my soul a smidge. 💛💛💛💛

Any Icelanders or linguists willing to make a recording of a this old Norse poem for a friend to get pronunciation correct?

Deyr fé,
deyja frændur,
deyr sjálfur ið sama.
En orðstír
deyr aldregi
hveim er sér góðan getur.

Boosting for reach is appreciated.

Wil Macaulay 3d ago

mhoye 4d ago

ok so while I was looking up this story about R2-D2 wandering onto the wrong movie set, IMDB gave me this pop-up and I was not in any theological sense prepared

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075520/trivia/

Wil Macaulay 3d ago

Pepijn 3d ago

How many national parliaments (the buildings) have you visited?

My hypothesis is that a significant mid-double-digit percentage of people have at least visited the one in their home country (often as part of a school trip) and the other options will all be single digit percentages.

I'm not gonne do the "boost for scientific accuracy" thing here.. but, uhm.. if you can boost this it'll be more accurate, in a scientistic way.

Mainly: tell us about your experiences!

#politics #tourism #europe

	0
	1
	2-4
	5 or more

Poll ends at May 12 at 12:11pm.

Wil Macaulay 3d ago

Iris 4d ago

Well, I tried Claude Code. It's less bad than GLM, but alas, I didn't get the "Hallelujah! I see the light" moment that would let me become an AI grifter. Pity, really.

I did notice an interesting thing though: the people who get the best results from coding agents tend to be the people who think they're awful, which says some interesting things about engineering judgement. Read the article here:

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/engineering-judgement-claude-paradox

Engineering judgement and the Claude Code paradox | deadSimpleTech

Looking at my peers, this seems like a consistent pattern: the people who get the best engineering results out of coding agents are not only *not* the boosters, they're the people who think the whole enterprise is dubious and that basically everyone who manufactures these tools is deeply morally compromised. This is a downright *weird* phenomenon: while a similar thing has happened with other technologies before, it's surpassingly uncommon, and for most technologies, the people most excited about them are also the most adept at using them effectively. What the hell is going on?

deadSimpleTech

Wil Macaulay 4d ago

Robin Hawkes ⚡️4d ago

This is my grandad, he built the original R2-D2 for the first Star Wars film…

Jack was a master sheet metal worker, and was roped into using his skills on an obscure project to turn the sketches for the droid into something that could be constructed out of aluminium sheets.

I always knew he'd helped make part of R2-D2. However…

#MayThe4th #MayTheFouthBeWithYou #StarWars

Wil Macaulay 4d ago

mhoye 4d ago

I kind of love that somebody ran the numbers and decided it would be more profitable to grindfarm managing imaginary soccer teams than cryptocurrencies.

Wil Macaulay 5d ago

David Gerard 5d ago

here is an analyst note from Pitchbook saying OpenAI should wait to IPO until late 2027

by which time they'll be dead

https://pitchbook.brightspotcdn.com/ca/14/061592ef4dc29560d4a762c47eea/q2-2026-pitchbook-analyst-note-openai-the-ipo-that-cannot-afford-to-wait.pdf

nothing radical, all obvious, but now it's these guys saying it