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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • EnderMB@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlcarrot.py
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    3 days ago

    I got into cooking during lockdown, and have managed to get surprisingly good at it, to the point where if you asked me to make a meal of your choosing I could probably make it without looking up a recipe. It’s actually unbelievably simple to make even complex stuff, basically using all the same rules you apply at work:

    • Use the right tools for the job
    • Plan it out first, do your prep and the actual work is simple
    • A simple dish will take much longer than you think
    • RTFM. Many sauces and dishes from classic cooking are basically a mixture of a small handful of base ingredients/techniques, and they’ve been written down for decades.
    • Once you have the basics down, you can basically make it up as you go. You’ll make amazing meals, and you’ll never be able to replicate it again because you eyeballed it or cooked it in a way that made sense at the time. You say you’ll document it well, but deep down, you know you won’t.
    • Nothing is original, everything is stolen. Adapt recipes you see, look at ingredients of sauces and sachets you buy/use, etc.
    • You can be a solid hobbyist, but against a pro that does this shit all day every day, you don’t know a fucking thing. You’re also probably not going to replicate what they can do in a professional setting while at home unless you’ve got money.






  • Haha no.

    A lot of people don’t realise how shit a war can be, even when you’re hundreds of miles away from it. Your local economy fucking TANKS, jobs disappear, workers disappear on the next plane out, and you’re left with a population that’s struggling on all fronts, trying to make a brave face.

    America is full of crazy disparity, but war doesn’t care. The one benefit is that the billionaire class would get fucking rinsed by the locals for every shiny trinket they have when suddenly food costs a fortune because your last shipment got shot up.



  • I’m actually on the side of a republic, but the ownership of the royals in the UK is…interesting.

    If we were to decide to get rid tomorrow, they don’t suddenly not exist. They essentially move into a position where they are more tied to the outcome of Britain than many of our politicians, and the blocker on them holding political opinions is revoked - not that it ever fucking stopped them.

    Furthermore, they outright own a lot of land, businesses, and buildings. They would own this if we got rid, and would basically hold enough capital to be multi-billionaires for many generations, if not centuries.

    IMO the best thing that the UK can do is chip away at their power, while also reducing them to a point where they make income that is tied to the populace rather than making more money as crown estate custodians. If the people are poor, cut their income or push them towards more marketing of the royals to make money for the country.



  • One of the two bosses didn’t turn up for work one Friday. On the weekend, we all received a call that he had died.

    Monday was horrible. We had new starters that came into an office full of people crying, and people from our HQ joining to set people up with any counselling.

    The worst part? We had deadlines to meet, and clients didn’t give a fuck that the person responsible had died. One large client outright said to me on the phone on that first Monday “that’s sad and all, but I don’t really give a fuck, have it done by end of day”. To HQ’s credit, after I had told them they asked me to stop what I was doing (had already delivered the work) and our CEO called them and told them we were to terminate our contract with them. One woman I worked with, a Project Manager, was repeatedly brought to tears by clients checking on work or trying to sort out meetings with a guy that was in a morgue. I was able to power through, up until the day of his funeral when we all went to the pub after and saw his children playing without a care in the world.

    Initially, it brought us all closer together, but within three months people started to leave - and by the end of the year the HQ decided to just close the office entirely, firing everyone that was still there.

    I hate to say it, looking back, but this gave me without question one of the best answers for behavioural interviews in tech, since I ultimately ended up having to help deliver everything and onboard people in a stressful scenario. Knowing the guy, it’s what he would have wanted.






  • Oh for sure, it’s not perfect, and IMO this is where the current improvements and research are going. If you’re relying on a LLM to hit hundreds of endpoints with complex contracts it’s going to either hallucinate what it needs to do, or it’s going to call several and go down the wrong path. I would imagine that most systems do this in a very closed way anyway, and will only show you what they want to show you. Logically speaking, for questions like “should I wear a coat today” they’ll need a service to check the weather in your location, and a service to get information about the user and their location.


  • I had a chat with someone that is a Senior Staff Engineer at a huge company a while ago, on what I’d say is a pretty big service that millions use.

    They don’t write much code any more, but they debug a lot of issues. The way they described the workflow to mastery is:

    • If you know nothing, ask someone that knows something
    • If you know something, Google, and there will be answer from an expert
    • If you’re an expert and Google doesn’t work, read the docs and specs from the masters
    • If you’re a master, start writing the specs, and offer addendums for when the spec needs to change.

    IMO, Googling gets you 99% of the way there in many situations, but if you know nothing the answer might be in front of you and you wouldn’t know it.


  • I work on LLM’s for a big tech company. The misinformation on Lemmy is at best slightly disingenuous, and at worst people parroting falsehoods without knowing the facts. For that reason, take everything (even what I say) with a huge pinch of salt.

    LLM’s do NOT just parrot back falsehoods, otherwise the “best” model would just be the “best” data in the best fit. The best way to think about a LLM is as a huge conductor of data AND guiding expert services. The content is derived from trained data, but it will also hit hundreds of different services to get context, find real-time info, disambiguate, etc. A huge part of LLM work is getting your models to basically say “this feels right, but I need to find out more to be correct”.

    With that said, I think you’re 100% right. Sadly, and I think I can speak for many companies here, knowing that you’re right is hard to get right, and LLM’s are probably right a lot in instances where the confidence in an answer is low. I would rather a LLM say “I can’t verify this, but here is my best guess” or “here’s a possible answer, let me go away and check”.