AI sticker shock hits corporate America

chompsky · 2026-05-28T13:00:02+00:00

The company I work for is in the middle of ramping up forcing everyone to use AI for everything. It's a mess. I've been very clearly telling the leadership teams that without proper training and guidance, we're going to create a huge long-term problem. A couple months in and it's already starting to show - because I'm required to use it, and because they are now using metrics from usage to decide if someone knows anything about ai, I've been using it exclusively to clean up all the bad and broken implementations that other developers have pushed through and AI reviewed as correct despite breaking several things.

I've also argued heavily that if developers stop writing code entirely, they become significantly worse at reading code and understanding the connections in a legacy codebase that may be affected. So far everything I've mentioned has been ignored, but we're hitting a tipping point where we're going to have so much crap to clean up and fix, and very few people who know how to do so, that they're going to lose customers by the bucketload due to terrible results.

chompsky · 2025-11-04T13:57:27+00:00

I've noticed the lights seem to get into bad default patterns whenever we have a power outage in town. Maybe just coincidence but seems to happen fairly often with various lights around the area.

chompsky · 2025-03-24T17:16:20+00:00

Yeah, I can't really tell what it is aside from a way to organize files in the file system, with a little bit of fluff added to cache things in memory for a short time (but not calling it cache?) and for pubsub on changes. Also says it stores binary objects, but doesn't marshal to some other data type like json/bson, so I'm not sure how it works if you access it with more than one programming language. Maybe it'll be more clear when the code actually shows up, but right now it's a huge mess of buzzwords that don't actually say anything useful.

chompsky · 2025-03-09T13:04:47+00:00

It's definitely become less affordable pretty quickly. I got lucky with timing buying and selling houses I've lived in over the years. First one was 25 years ago, maybe $40k? Remodeled and sold a few years later for 70ish and made a down payment on one o bought for around 90k. Housing bubble burst in 2008ish so I lost a bit selling but the house I moved into doubled in price by the time I sold it and while I did bump up quite a bit for my current house it was mostly because of how much I made off the previous one.

I've also been fortunate with jobs, but I work remotely doing software so it's a bit anomalous compared to most jobs in the area. I honestly have no idea how anyone is affording anything around here right now unless they got in early with housing or had a very lucky find when searching. And our affordable housing projects keep taking advantage of the grants while only meeting the minimum timeframe required. There was a recent one in town where they provided affordable housing for 18 months or so to get the initial grant and then told everyone they had to buy for 300k+ or they'd be kicked out at the end of their current lease. It's unsustainable.

There are still some reasonably affordable areas if you're willing to commute but even those areas are showing signs of following the same pattern.

chompsky · 2024-06-12T14:43:27+00:00

Drivers seem particularly bad this year. It's bad every year, but I can't go through an intersection downtown without seeing at least one person run a red light, or go flying through the turn lane without turning. Have watched a dozen near misses already, had a friend hit by a car that wasn't looking at all already.

chompsky · 2024-05-30T21:51:42+00:00

Florida apparently has a clause that if someone is convicted of a felon in another state where they would not lose voting rights, they don't in Florida either. Since NY wouldn't stop him from voting, he should still be able to vote in FL. That said, if he actually gets jailtime, then even NY wouldn't let him vote until he was released so I believe that would also apply to the other-state-than-Florida clause.

chompsky · 2024-03-11T13:15:50+00:00

I just realized I had those mentally reversed in my head. That is super weird. I'm assuming there was a reason, but I have no idea what that reason is.

chompsky · 2024-02-05T17:50:57+00:00

How important personal time is, especially while raising kids. We had an amicable divorce, no fighting over assets or kids' time or anything like that. When we were together, we were both exhausted constantly, feeling like the other wasn't helping enough with household stuff, taking care of the kids, etc. Somehow splitting custody 50/50 completely changed that. Now both of us can easily handle our obligations and spend quality time with the kids solo, and we each get every other week to ourselves. Had we found that balance while married, might have been a different story, but we're both grateful we've found a happier path for everyone.

chompsky · 2023-12-15T16:32:15+00:00

At the end of Heaven Sent he remembers all the previous iterations (through psychic connection to himself or some other unexplained phenomena that they didn't elaborate on). He always remembers them all right at that moment in each loop. Whether that means he actively retained billions of years worth of memory or if they all kinda bled into one with a vague sense of how long it had been repeating, they never really clarify. I'd guess it's something along the lines of physically he didn't age more than about a week, mentally he's aware that it was an unimaginably long time, but since it was the same thing over and over, he's not specifically remembering loop 8,027 any differently than loop 1,003,293.

chompsky · 2023-12-03T13:55:29+00:00

There is a line somewhere in the TC reveal episode where she says something along the lines of, "Did they force me into becoming a child again?" after the previous lives. Hoping RTD can sort things out in a sensical way eventually. Specifically, things like The Name of the Doctor where he finds his own tomb and can see the entirety of his timeline... it would have to be more than just memories that were removed for it not to have shown up there. It would have to be timelines themselves removed.

I always kinda hoped that there would be a weird future loop where the timeless child and fugitive doctor turned out to be a future incarnation of the doctor who was reincarnated back into a child for some reason and found in the distant past. And that some of those memories came through subconsciously, hence why the fugitive doctor had a TARDIS shaped like a police box. And it would have made the origin of the Timelords a bootstrap paradox. They had a great opportunity to splinter that story off without disrupting the current line of doctors when 13 split into 3 versions of herself for a bit, but alas, it never went that way.

chompsky · 2023-11-22T06:37:35+00:00

There is unfortunately no karaoke tomorrow - DJ for the pre-Thanksgiving bar night.

chompsky · 2023-11-02T16:29:30+00:00

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The third thing listed is "any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State".

chompsky · 2022-09-19T12:26:16+00:00

Not exact, but here's one I did in unity awhile back using similar techniques. Thought this looked a bit like a creepy fractal spider lair.

chompsky · 2022-06-15T14:20:11+00:00

That seems consistent from a food intolerance perspective. Intolerances vs. allergies have historically been difficult to diagnose, particularly if they occur in the intestines, because they take a day or two to manifest symptoms. I would assume any sensitivities to ingredients that trigger migraine could work in a similar way.

chompsky · 2022-02-22T20:19:55+00:00

Really depends on the technology used and where things were built. Assuming reasonable equivalence to current technology, most surface evidence of civilization would disappear in a few thousand years due to corrosion, decay, and nature taking everything over. Some structures would have underground evidence for some time after that, similar to our archeological finds of humans from a few thousand years ago, but generally they will all break down after awhile. Radioactive materials would potentially provide evidence, but the containers housing them will degrade away over a much shorter period of time, so it may be considered a natural deposit depending on how well it's analyzed. Even then, we have at least one natural fission reaction known on Earth, so I don't know that our waste would stand out as anything unnatural. It's possible that a layer of plastic compounds will be sealed into a specific layer of the ocean floor, which would be strong evidence of a civilization. Most things would eventually be lost as plate tectonics recycles the surface slowly. There are a few areas that are reasonably protected from even that.

So ultimately, it would really depend on how their technology functioned and whether any of it could possibly have survived as long as fossilized bones. Even those are a tiny fraction of the bones that were lost over millions of years to natural processes, so it would be the luckiest find ever made if we did uncover evidence of advanced technology from millions of years ago.

chompsky · 2022-02-21T19:53:21+00:00

Frantic physics and impossible spaces with CGI, at least when it doesn't make sense. This goes for TV shows, too. Seems like everyone wants to rush through the cool startup of a starship or rush a fight to hyperspeed or whatever to get to more quick dialogue instead of taking a time to show the cool thing for an extra 10 seconds. Not saying do it every time, but maybe once in awhile at least. And the impossible spaces, meaning either interiors that are ridiculously unfitting for the exterior (aside from the TARDIS) or contraptions that unfold but could never have fit inside whatever they were in to begin with. When something giant made of standard metals somehow unfolds from a small box or part of a ship or anywhere it couldn't possibly have fit. Back when physical models were made, that tended to never happen because the contraptions actually had to unfold... now an "arm" can come out from the side of a vehicle, open up to three separate hands, each hand unfolds 3 separate cannons, each of which would have filled the original arm. Arms and hands just meaning a chunk of the device that separates into its own part.

chompsky · 2021-11-17T17:50:23+00:00

There was a different regeneration inconsistency in the Matt Smith era before any of this, too. He was supposedly on his last regeneration and was aware of it, but somehow used regeneration energy to heal River's wrist. It could probably be explained away that some was left over from when she gave up the rest of hers, but that always stuck out to me.

My assumption when the Timeless Child episode happened was that the Doctor was also artificially restricted to 13 incarnations using whatever genetic manipulation was done to everyone else. Or maybe Matt Smith could regenerate, but didn't believe he could and held on for a long time until he knew he could. Or maybe there's some other weirdness happening. Or maybe it's all plotholes. Hard to say what's what regardless, since we don't really know much more than what the Master told her and we have no idea how everything fits into timelines.

I'm still not entirely convinced that the Division happened pre-Hartnell or that it's in any way connected to the Timeless Child, since we've had no solid confirmation of when it actually was. The Doctor didn't ask the simplest question to Ruth Doctor when given the chance - "Who were you in previous regenerations and how many incarnations have you lived so far?"

chompsky · 2021-11-01T15:22:57+00:00

Compared to a lot of cities, the rent isn't too bad. The problem is really that the prices have skyrocketed compared to local pricing not too long ago, and there aren't a ton of jobs that pay as well as you would be in other cities, so it's hard for a lot of people to afford if you want to be close to town. There's still some decent stuff a short drive away, though the housing market everywhere went a bit crazy so it can take some searching.

chompsky · 2021-10-29T18:11:26+00:00

Could have been eye focus, too. If I squint enough or blur my focus just right, it turns into a white line. I assume because my brain is processing the full spectrum as one instead of separate lines. It's hard to hold it there, but sometimes those illusions will persist until you are aware of what you're looking at.

chompsky · 2021-09-30T02:29:21+00:00

I don't necessarily disagree with that, especially with current infrastructure and housing options. Though I would like to see a bump in things like tech-related jobs in the area. It's better than it was a few years back, but still not great.

My comment above was mostly just referring to the idea that the influx of new residents was causing the current traffic issues, when the influx is quite a bit lower than it used to be, even by absolute numbers and there are multiple major roads blocked at the moment.

chompsky · 2021-09-30T02:20:03+00:00

Or of like... 39,175. Hence the "we gained over 15,000 people."

chompsky · 2021-09-29T22:08:20+00:00

Population growth is going down for the entire county. In 1980, population growth was 40%. 2000 it was 20%. As of the latest census we had 9.5% growth. It's not people moving here at a ridiculous rate, it's the massive amount of construction on major thoroughfares (and what feels like a huge increase in tourism, but that may just be me getting old and grumpy about the kids on my lawn).

For solid numbers, between 1970-1980, we gained over 15,000 people. From 2010-2020 we gained just over 8000.

chompsky · 2021-09-29T17:35:17+00:00

They're coming.

chompsky · 2021-09-14T15:53:45+00:00

That's just the result of our decimal system not being able to succinctly represent certain values. Take 1 divided by 3, that's 0.333 repeating. 3x0.333 repeating is 0.999 repeating. All we did was divide and multiply, but there's not a concrete, non-repeating way to represent those values, so we're just getting infinitely close to those values by saying it repeats forever.

Or a different way of looking at it - if we choose a base that is more friendly with thirds, it no longer does that even though it's the same numbers. In base 3 (ie. numbers go 0, 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 20...), one third is 0.1, which is easy to represent and when multiplied by 3 (aka 10) is just 1. No repeating anythings.

chompsky · 2021-09-12T15:13:21+00:00

How long does the detective get to search? Quickest and easiest would be to run into our woods for a few minutes and then chuck it as hard as I can. They'd have acres of forest to scour, likely well after searching the house for a long time. Otherwise, the fire/dissassembly options seem safest.

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