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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 18th, 2023

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  • Beyond any issues with the owner of the company, these cars have multiple dangerous issues.

    You cannot treat a company that makes physical stuff that can endanger lives the same way you treat a software company that makes a leisure activity platform.

    Iterative design for a purely software environment is way more forgiving than iterative design for physical hardware or even software that interacts with physical hardware. You can profoundly fuck up the backend for a website and take the whole thing down until you could roll back to last known good production, you won’t kill anyone, but you’ll make the line go down temporarily.

    If you profoundly fuck up an iteration on an embedded vehicle system and don’t catch it because you don’t respect safety regulation or existing engineering norms you can and will kill people.



  • I work in an esop. It’s pretty cool in that we own the company in shares based on tenure, it’s not like a union though.

    We don’t vote on the CEO or the board, we have third party trustees that manage the esop account.

    We aren’t beholden to external shareholders, which is the absolute best part. Line doesn’t go up, it really just affects our retirement accounts, but even then our valuation takes into account stuff like cash on hand and contract stability. So… We have pretty fiscally conservative management, which is a great thing for us.


  • Generally speaking I do things myself because it’s cheaper, in that it lets me allocate cash in higher quality versions of things than I would otherwise be able to afford. I grew up pretty poor and that was how my family did things. Car breaks, that’s why you buy a Chilton’s. Appliance isn’t working? You can always order the part for a tenth of what it costs to have the appliance guy tell you what’s wrong. AC quit working? Those capacitors are super easy to replace and only cost $7.

    Now I could pay people to do more things for me, but it’s only under certain circumstances.

    Sometimes it just boils down to something my Dad told me underneath a car (or a house maybe) like 30 years ago: “Nobody is gonna care about your shit more than you do.”






  • These should be USB sticks, but otherwise this is preferable to something like wifi.

    You do not want to stop requiring physical access to avionics for updates and reprogramming.

    The fewer surfaces for entry into the avionics systems the better and if that means an engineer schlepping a database update on a thumb drive to the cockpit that’s what you want.

    I spent the better part of a decade on avionics, and while this as a headline sounds bad it’s one of the few things Boeing shouldn’t be mocked for right now.



  • It’s a surprisingly good comparison especially when you look at the reactions: frame breaking vs data poisoning.

    The problem isn’t progress, the problem is that some of us disagree with the Idea that what’s being touted is actual progress. The things llms are actually good at they’ve being doing for years (language translations) the rest of it is so inexact it can’t be trusted.

    I can’t trust any llm generated code because it lies about what it’s doing, so I need to verify everything it generates anyway in which case it’s easier to write it myself. I keep trying it and it looks impressive until it ends up at a way worse version of something I could have already written.

    I assume that it’s the same way with everything I’m not an expert in. In which case it’s worse than useless to me, I can’t trust anything it says.

    The only thing I can use it for is to tell me things I already know and that basically makes it a toy or a game.

    That’s not even getting into the security implications of giving shitty software access to all your sensitive data etc.