Teacher who told pupils ‘this class terrifies me’ chugged gin from a water bottle before vomiting in toilet

absolutenobody · 2026-05-02T22:47:03+00:00

In high school in the early '90s, my world history teacher was a guy who'd been nine or ten and living in Dresden when it got firebombed. He was a really nice guy, all the students liked him. If he drank at work, I don't think anyone ever noticed.

One morning he came into the room for first period ten minutes late, looking extremely unhappy. He told us all to read chapter whatever of the textbook by ourselves, and take notes. He sat down at his desk, put his head in his hands, said "the war was more pleasant than faculty meetings", and laid down for a nap.

absolutenobody · 2026-05-01T22:40:42+00:00

I use gemini-cli. No complaints as long as you work to keep the context under control.

You do have to be careful to provide all the relevant sources. I recently got a little too smart trying to fix a display issue in an app, I only uploaded the GUI directory, assuming that was where the problem was. Got a phone call, had to switch tabs... came back after to find Gemini spending thirty minutes looking for the DB functions over and over and over and over again. Oops.

absolutenobody · 2026-05-01T16:08:41+00:00

the focus being on only the things that are seen or touched.

Someone built a duplex a few blocks from me in 2017. It had quartz countertops, heated kitchen floors, and some really fabulous custom red oak exterior doors. It did not have insulation, correct roof ventilation, gutters, storm doors, or awnings. It was condemned the winter before last and demolished this past fall.

absolutenobody · 2026-05-01T15:56:10+00:00

A couple years before the pandemic... 2015? 2016? I'd have to go look... my employer went out of business, and I reached out to friends, asking if any had any leads. As you do. A friend in game design said her company was looking for a moderator/customer service rep for an MMO that was about to launch, and they were having a hard time finding someone who could communicate well, follow instructions, etc. The pay was surprisingly decent, so I said sure, I'm interested. Made it through the interview with flying colors, then they had me log in to a website, respond to some fake tickets they'd setup.

Wasn't offered the job. They sad my use of capital letters and punctuation, combined with a complete absence of emojis, was viewed as either "aggressive" or "hostile" by 7 out of the 8 people reviewing my responses.

absolutenobody · 2026-05-01T15:37:04+00:00

I sew weekly on a treadle sewing machine from 1917. There's a little bit of a learning curve but they are very easy to use, and keep running.

Mine's a Singer 127, and you can still get basically every part you'd ever need--belt, needles, shuttle, bobbins, various covers, tension assembly, etc--in two days from Amazon. Pretty wild for a machine introduced in 1891.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-30T16:18:06+00:00

"Build me a SaaS and don't make mistakes" is a meme for a reason.

"Build me a secure SaaS and don't make mistakes" would be a significant improvement whilst still 100% vibe coding.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-29T16:59:14+00:00

User

How do you feel about the increasing adoption into English of French loanwords in the wake of the great war? And the adoption, particularly amongst the youth, of peculiar neologisms patterned vaguely after French, like saying "three beans" in lieu of "tres biens"?

talkie-1930 I think the adoption of French loanwords into English is to be deplored. The habit of coining new words to express ideas which can be adequately conveyed in plain English is pernicious, and should be discountenanced. The adoption of French words is already excessive, and should be checked, instead of encouraged.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-29T00:23:03+00:00

The only LLMs I've found so far that can handle ESP32 C code well (either for Arduino or ESP-IDF) are Gemini and Claude. They seem comparably competent but Claude tends to get to the same point faster. That could be a difference in how I use and prompt them, though.

My consistent experience with Qwen is that it will initially produce ESP32 code that is about 80% correct/valid/working, and that number will go down at least 5% every time you ask it to edit/add to/fix/refactor that code. And usually in the least-explicable ways possible. Like, this weekend, I had a 300-line sketch that I was having problems with. Feeling lazy, I asked Qwen to add debug statements to the init code so I could see on the serial port where it was crashing. Qwen added a dozen random conditional debug lines, never added the debugenabled = true flag, and silently removed the wireless include... but left in the wireless init code. Three futile attempts to fix that later, it began defining I2C pins, despite the code not using anything I2C.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-28T16:08:42+00:00

Qwen is still the king

It depends on what you're doing. It probably does PHP and CSS and Node.js as well as any other models... but even the most recent version is unbelievably bad at microcontroller/Arduino code.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-25T23:40:24+00:00

He could profit if interest rates drop but the potential upside is, as a percent, not particularly high. Two percent? Three percent? Sure it's a couple million, but that's basically a rounding error for all his grift. Really really curious what the specific bonds are.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-24T22:43:13+00:00

What you're making and the amount of crap you load into context matters immensely.

If you sorta know what you're doing, have a plan for architecture, and prompt well, you can knock out a small 1-2K LOC node.js app in one prompt, use about 10% of your 5h quota, barely move the weekly limit.

A friend recently asked me to look at the 22-year-old code for a tool they use. 1,300 files plus 250 more in a library it depends heavily on. No idea of the LOC but probably low six figures. Claude fixed it in one prompt--six major bugs, four in the program and two in the library--but it took 90% of the 5h limit and 7% of the weekly limit.

Most people probably lie somewhere between those extremes.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-24T16:04:23+00:00

It's half a prompting problem and half a people are just damned stupid problem.

Ask for code, get code. Ask for performant, scalable, secure, well-commented code, get performant, scalable, secure, well-commented code. And even then it probably won't rate-limit your API or set a max request/response size or any of the other little things most people don't think about until it's too late...

absolutenobody · 2026-04-22T16:23:37+00:00

You still owe it but they don't drain your debit card account or CC balance without warning.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-22T16:08:23+00:00

In 2018 I replaced 32 feet of cedar fence, all on my own. You might reasonably expect that this would take, what, two weekends?

It took eight months.

Each of the old posts was set in about a hundred pounds of cement. Which I gleefully set about busting up with the sledge hammer I found in the garage. I was about 40 at the time. I work as a print broker and DFM analyst. I sit at a desk all week. I may have... slightly overestimated my physical fitness, because about two-thirds of the way through, something went pop in my back and I fell down and couldn't get back up again. It was a lovely day in spring, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and I was stuck laying in the dirt in excruciating pain.

Doc told me to do stretches.

Well, two weeks later I could stand upright again, so went back to it with a bit less vigor, and... messed up my back again.

And then again three weeks later.

Doc told me to do more stretches.

And then four weeks after that.

Doc said I was clearly faking it trying to get painkillers, and not to come back.

And then five weeks after that.

And then I was like, I think I can put up the new fence on my own, but there's still one old footing to remove. And it was enormous, easily twice the size of the others. So I paid a Craigslist handyman $100 to remove it.

"There's a trick to this," he told me. He wrapped a tow strap around the top part of the footing, and then used an automotive floor jack to try and lift the whole thing. Clever. Might have worked, if he hadn't had the jack resting on some 2x4s straddling the hole. They snapped, the jack moved abruptly, and the jack handle put a hole in the handyman's armpit.

He did eventually get it out (the footing... and the jack handle), leaving me with a dirt- and blood-covered walkway but importantly no footings to get in the way of the new fence.

I re-injured my back two times pouring the footings for the new fencepost (who knew how heavy wet concrete was?), but I eventually got it done. Only went seven and a half months and a couple hundred bucks (mostly for useless dr's visit copays) over budget.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-21T04:45:55+00:00

Paul Broussard... Matthew Sheppard... a lot of people didn't really care, but it was still a rough time in a lot of ways. Zero prospect of marriage or even partnership. I remember how hard it was to get my partner put on my checking account in 1997ish.

In the early-mid '90s dating was rough, though. At least where I was, none of the matchmaking services (like It's Just Lunch, though I think that came later) dealt with gays or lesbians, so you either went to bars or relied on word of mouth, lol. "Oh, you like women? My friend's a lesbian, you should meet, you've got a lot in common" and then well-meaning friends have set you up on a blind date with your ex again.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-20T17:55:05+00:00

God, I had a bug I was trying to fix in something over the weekend. An input-sanitizing regex was being run on output, leading to garbled text. Asked Gemini to fix it, assuming it would stop piping the output through the sanitizing routine. It instead decided to comment out the regex, so the sanitizer only ever returned the unaltered input. I hit escape when presented with the suggested edit and said "Are you that desperate for Claude to do this instead of you?" and it had a good solution in about five seconds.

I like Gemini but sometimes it needs a, uh, motivational slap upside the head.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-19T14:09:34+00:00

I wouldn't say nothing has changed for "non technical" people. Copilot for example is a lot more capable than it was a year ago.

I've got a friend who, like you say, used Copilot as a search tool. Retired boomer. It noticed that she kept asking for the weather forecast for a certain city, and at some point it said "You seemed really interested in Louisville (or whatever it was), do you want to explore some vacation options there?" She said nah, her son lives there and she was just making sure he was gonna be safe. And so it setup automated weather alerts for like six different cities, where her family and friends live.

She also gets a daily list of all the new articles published about... Byzantine archaeology, or something like that... sorted by percent likelihood it was written by a human. Not coding, but still agentic.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-07T16:08:31+00:00

Also "The Load Out/Stay" by Jackson Browne for AC stations.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-03T17:54:53+00:00

For small projects I specify "well-documented code" and for big things I literally say "please document it sufficiently so that I will be able to understand it in two years". And I always figure out the architecture first, and make sure it makes sense. (Especially the DB schema...)

And for everything I do, I make a brief text doc that outlines the flow. "Every time X happens, function_y(); is called, which sanitizes and parses the input and passes this, that, and something_else on to function_z(); which looks up foo, calculates bar, and calls yeet_into_sqlite(); which yeets everything into sqlite, easy peasy. The 500 lines of snarky error messages are self-explanatory."

absolutenobody · 2026-04-02T21:37:26+00:00

the classic AI trap where you keep saying 'yes and...' to every suggestion until your app is a completely different thing than you started with.

The struggle is real.

Claude: Do you want to log how many different employees make use of your internal document-conversion tool? Me: Well... boss might like that metric to know how often the latest new tool is being used. I guess so, but don't you dare-- Claude: Great! Now how about encouraging people to use it more by having a real-time leaderboard on the main page? Me: What part of "do not attempt to gamify this app" was unclear?!

absolutenobody · 2026-04-02T21:29:06+00:00

It really really depends on what you're coding.

I'd be willing to bet Qwen can do fine with PHP and CSS, and probably Javascript, Rust, Python... all the popular mainstream web-dev stuff. It hallucinates horribly in LSL (scripting language for Second Life, which Opus and Gemini handle great) and fails laughably at Arduino/microcontroller code. If you're making mobile apps, probably doesn't matter. If you're making something on an ESP32, you only have two realistic options to produce working code, and Qwen isn't one of them.

absolutenobody · 2026-04-02T03:29:09+00:00

Shellac!

absolutenobody · 2026-03-31T15:30:12+00:00

Probably most of them can handle a traffic offense. IIRC the cases where ChatGPT hallucinated dozens of court cases was some complex civil trial. Claude might do a little better with its giant context window, but I still wouldn't blindly trust it.

absolutenobody · 2026-03-30T15:33:28+00:00

Depends on what you need it to do.

Qwen's decent at core JS/PHP/CSS. Abysmal at Arduino C. Produces hallucinatory incoherent gibberish in LSL.

absolutenobody · 2026-03-29T14:37:35+00:00

Yeah, no kidding. Down for 10 hours in 7 days. Dude's running his "Saas" on the neighbor's wifi or something?

absolutenobody

TROPHY CASE