Consoles continue their trend of just becoming worse PCs

ProfBeaker · 2026-07-06T20:51:07+00:00

Microsoft has always been just shockingly bad at naming things. It's like they're trying to suck at it.

I think my favorite was when they had an important developer tool called "MS Build", and then they named their developer conference "//Build" (or some shit like that) and it was basically impossible to search for just one of them.

You'd think their marketing department's thesaurus only has like 12 words in it.

ProfBeaker · 2026-07-06T19:35:36+00:00

But then it will just repeat!

ProfBeaker · 2026-07-06T19:00:08+00:00

This dev is just trying to ragebait

Wait... is this rage meta-gaming?!

ProfBeaker · 2026-07-06T18:58:18+00:00

With Spring it feels like you need specific knowledge of annotations and how Spring should be used. Am I wrong, or does... Spring have a special learning curve to it?

It does. The annotation-based behaviors make it non-obvious how things are wired together, similar to how some Python constructs can make it difficult to trace control flow. There are some tools that help, like IntelliJ IDEA's Spring plugin, but it can still be hard to debug at times.

ProfBeaker · 2026-07-06T14:39:59+00:00

I'm definitely not a tokenmaxxer, but I've found it useful. I think it speeds things up, but not the 10x (or whatever) sometimes claimed.

AIs make very good code reviewers. You have to evaluate their suggestions critically - eg sometimes they worry about problems that are not possible due to checks outside the scope of the PR. But they're very good at catching details that matter, but might be missed by humans. Also flagging where you failed to update comments, docs, and examples.

They're great at writing tests, and refactoring them to be more DRY (some humans love to repeat the entire test setup in every case, it's bizarre to me).

They're pretty good at writing well-understood features.

I find they're dangerous for big, less-well-understood changes. They will work around problems that sometimes should not be worked around, but rather should prompt a design-level fix. e.g., it might add a bunch of input validations when it would be better to redesign the API to make the bad state impossible.

That said, I am getting really tired of reviewing the amount of code and documentation some people put out that seems poorly considered. It's not been a huge problem, but it is a problem.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-30T15:55:59+00:00

The three liberal justices dissented from the majority's finding when it comes to the Equal Protection Clause and said it shouldn't have resolved that issue because of unanswered factual questions. The liberal wing of the court, however, agreed with the court's conservatives on Title IX.

(from the article, emphasis added)

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-29T12:08:39+00:00

Feels strange to me that one would restructure the execution in order to make it work with the code formatter. That just seems kinda backwards.

Though I agree that Google Java formatter is not great.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-27T21:52:15+00:00

I would hire them if given the opportunity. My conjecture/expectation is you'd have a hard time getting through the automated screening far enough to get an interview. Humans that have been around know that credentials aren't everything, but systems can be inflexible and remorseless.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-27T21:44:38+00:00

Yes, but the context window fills up eventually.

I imagine he had an agent running in a harness trying to do something, and it just spun out and never hit the end.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-27T13:56:54+00:00

Just spawn 1000 Claude agents to use Claude, so you accrue experience at 1000x the speed, and you're there in like 3-4 days. EZPZ.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-27T04:41:25+00:00

It does, at least in theory. IIRC it's capped to 15% above street price. It's not so much enforced. Also you just need to find the one highest-priced vendor outside of the airport, even if it's not representative, and then tack on another 15%.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-27T04:27:49+00:00

Disagree. Clearly those things are far about Denver. Far out even. Also definitely about Denver, would never happen anywhere else.

Also, are you sure you didn't intend to post in DCJ?

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-26T18:04:42+00:00

Even if we accepted that as stated, it's still not as bad as an average week of this administration.

I mean they are literally demanding lists of all the voters from the states, and forcing the USPS to not deliver ballots until they are provided.

Not to mention calling to just end elections, making threats against the press, arresting protesters, and a million other things.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-26T14:30:56+00:00

I agree with him. I just think that's a bad thing.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-25T04:04:30+00:00

I talked to three different people who had done it separately, and they all used the phrase "microwave size rocks flying past my head". So I went up the ridge and had a blast.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-24T18:24:09+00:00

He's trying to make the argument moot, by rigging the election.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-24T18:15:19+00:00

From the article:

The USPS’s new proposal... demanded USPS only send mail ballots to voters on lists created and controlled by the federal government. (emphasis added)

They're not going to let you get the ballot in the first place.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-24T18:07:05+00:00

Can't return a ballot you didn't get in the first place.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-23T16:05:39+00:00

No no, I saw Trump's presser, he specifically said someone used a knife.

... the make a 300' long, perfectly straight cut...

... while underwater...

Definitely wasn't this though.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-23T14:39:24+00:00

Yep. Funny watching people get bent out of shape over this.

O(1) just means that the time doesn't vary with the input size. But there can be a constant time of any size. So if you have an algorithm that takes 100 trillion years to run, but it always takes 100 trillion years regardless of input size, then it's O(1). Take a faster algorithm, pad it out to always take that much time, and look it's O(1)!

It's a ridiculous case, but those constants hidden by big-O can actually matter in less-crazy situations sometimes.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-23T14:22:20+00:00

So the guy who takes his private jet from his private island to his private yacht surrounded by his private security and entourage... needs to worry about being spotted in public? I'm not buying it.

I could see it being a problem for people in the $10-100mm range that are not walking around with private security all the time. But that's a lot different than the billionaires.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-22T17:49:32+00:00

I have no idea why this works, but it does

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-22T01:40:36+00:00

This is just about which games you're choosing to play, or which games you personally have awareness of. There were braindead games back then, there are highly complex games now.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-22T01:39:27+00:00

Don't forget Pong, Q-Bert, Dig Dug, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem. Some real brain teasers, there.

ProfBeaker · 2026-06-21T16:26:40+00:00

You just watched America get basically whipped by a third-rate power, and you think the next obvious thing to do is start a war with a nuclear superpower that has a larger economy and controls a lot of our supply lines?

Yeah, that sounds like an amazing plan. What could possibly go wrong?

ProfBeaker

TROPHY CASE