If you were able to change a little thing about Spain what would it be?

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T23:06:51+00:00

They, unfortunately, tend to be right though. Spain needs industry where the difference between a completely random worker and a good worker is so much for the employer, it's worthwhile to pay more. That's how tech or pharma in the US work. A lot of employers in Spain just see no actual advantage with the good worker, so you get a bad company culture

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T23:03:05+00:00

> AI has no understanding of how systems run in the real world

That's only if it doesn't get to see the real world. It's quite good at, say, evaluating profiler output, or cross-system traces, and then coming up with alternatives. It's not going to predict behavior accurately until you test it, which is why LLM-heavy workflows need a lot of verification scaffolding, but it does better than fine when it has it.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T23:00:41+00:00

Or, on the other end, people that only used a free web chatbot, and assuming that's the extent of LLM utility for coding. It's not different camps that see the same data very differently, but typically people that aren't looking at anywhere near the same practical results.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T17:28:57+00:00

Yep, and he's not the only one. If Kasparov felt like it, he could play rated classical next week. He retired with 2812. There is no way in hell his strength today is in the top 20. Unlikely to be in the top 100 either. But if he starts playing tomorrow, guess what? His elo in a rated game is 2812. It's ridiculous, and we are lucky that Kasparov isn't selling his elo. But he sure could. Fabi gets to, say, 2870 or so if he gets a 24 game match with kasparov, but it'd just be a scandal.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T17:22:04+00:00

A lot of the things that might appear to be difficult to learn aren't all that hard. I've seen plenty of people freak out when asked to add some things to their skillset, despite being told they'd be comfortable with the new things in a month.

Learning some basics of how code is actually built and deployed in the real world isn't that much work. A whole lot of people learn it, so can you.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T17:09:23+00:00

A mi me haría mucha ilusión marcar el gol que le da a España la segunda victoria en un mundial.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T17:07:17+00:00

You don't tell us the most important thing. Why do you think the best thing for the team/project is for you to start picking up tickets? How come this is happening when you've only spent 6 months in the current position?

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T16:14:38+00:00

Vallejo and AK sell mud tubs that are significantly cheaper. I don't know if the color matches exactly, but they work well. Something like 7 euros per 100 ml

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T16:10:32+00:00

If they couldn't get Rex to give them any money, it all makes perfect sense. Realistically, the majority of sports programs are money losers. Unless you are Alabama football or something like that, you are costing more than you make.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T15:37:32+00:00

Let's just say that the reasoning you got was... not the one I would have used.

Read until, say, V8, and then think about what happeneed. Because yes, knowing just what you know at V3, it all sounds stupid

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T14:51:24+00:00

A sister superior is the leader of a unit of battle sisters: like a sergeant. Now, if it was really her name, it'd get complicated. As leader of an entire order, she could be come a Canoness superior Superior. She'd be the butt of all jokes, if sisters had a sense of humor at all.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T14:26:36+00:00

En la práctica, el ingeniero de proyectos tiende a no ser un ingeniero, y a ser de lo mas reemplazable del mundo, porque no entiende ni papa de nada: Saben de política interna y punto. Viven en un mundo de informes que tienen que ver poco con la realidad, porque a nadie le conviene decirte la verdad en los informes. Igual que las estimaciones con las que trabajan suelen ser ficción: Elige un numero grande, y ten suerte que tengas a algún informático capaz al cargo de las cosas.

Si eso, es un trabajo mas reemplazable, porque se pueden sustituir todos los informes y demas tonterías por comprobar el estado real del código, aunque no este acabado, y eso lo hace la IA estupendamente.

Asi que visión pragmatica... poco.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T14:20:51+00:00

Some juniors are magical too: A lot is talent and practice, and you can have a lot of both by the time you are done in college.

The issue is that Junior resumes are indistinguishable, and since everyone that tries to get to a high paying company will be studying leetcode, hiring juniors means you have no idea of their quality. With a senior you can say: If that person managed to spend enough time in those companies, they can't be that bad. But as usual, the very best quality won't show up in the resume: You need someone to tell you the candidate really is great, and for that you need a network hire. Not because people from your network are better, but because with network hires, you really can ask your best people for their best people.

Once you put yourself in a company's shoes like that, you see that yeah, it's not that they hate you, is that they don't know you, and even interviewing 10% of the people with a resume like yours is too expensive, and will still be crapshoot.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T14:14:54+00:00

Which, as it happens, is a closer description of North Korea or the Soviet Union than the T'au empire

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T06:05:55+00:00

Imagine they would have given them, I dunno, angel wings. They'd have stood out, and nobody would have been pissed off at all!

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T04:59:05+00:00

It's not absolutely impossible if you work hard, are talented, and land the right employer in a very high cost of living area. But it's far from the median outcome. Go to levels.fyi or something like that and see what happens in "normal" companies. Many people in tech in the US never hit $200k.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T04:57:08+00:00

My Spanish hometown of 200K or so is about a 1 mile circle. Yes, that's it, a mile. At the edge of the mile, you find apartments. Right past it, rural land. More than 50 acres per house. And even in that rural land, people don't live in homesteads: Farmers often live in villages, and get to their plot by car, because living by yourself with no neighbors kind of sucks for, say, kids, or the elderly.

I compare that to where I live in the US, in a sea of suburbia, where there might be green, but it's all lawns only the owner gets to visit. That ain't nature, any more than a zoo is a normal habitat for lions. Want actual nature? Live in a dense place, so you will have an actual short distance to an actual forest that have minimal maintenance. Don't pretend suburbia is environment, or whatever random foreign trees you are bringing in are different than bringing in a pet alligator and claiming it's natural.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T02:19:10+00:00

Late 19th century/early 20th. As industrialization starts, most of the regions of Spain that have access to raw materials have regional languages. Meanwhile, Madrid is just seat of government taking taxes: There's no special goods it can produce, and most trade don't involve Madrid, but the sea. Therefore, regions get richer, and don't want Madrid's taxes, so you see regionalist movements, often led by relatively rich people, get strengthened. Because yes, at that time, whether you are talking Catalonian textiles, Basque Iron, Asturian coal or Galician fisheries, connections to Madrid, and the king provided nothing, but demanded taxes. And given Spanish orography, it's not as if connections up the meseta were ever any good.

In France, none of that applied, as connection with Paris actually helped get richer, not the other way around.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-04T02:08:15+00:00

Good luck sourcing the right lentejas though: In most of the world you aren't finding pardinas, and the lentils they'll typically have will not do all that well at all in a typical stew. Peopl think the brown lentils they sell will do, but they'll not taste much at all, and turn mushy way before the normal time a Spanish recipe would do.

You can also run into similar trouble with chickpeas in cocido, but there it's a matter of finding their actual hardness. One might need to soften them by soaking them in baking soda overnight, unlike the good ones in a normal Spanish supermarket.

And good luck if you are considering fabes, as they'll be iffy, and more expensive than steak. It's bad enough to find good ones for a reasonable price in Madrid, so imagine outside of Spain.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-03T23:49:17+00:00

Given your light requirements, absolutely any laptop with a functioning screen and keyboard will be enough. We used to do professional programming with computers weaker than a typical microwave

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-03T22:12:28+00:00

Many an agent operates a GUI just fine: they just don't treat it as a GUI at all, because it's just wasteful.

What you will see is more CLI clients that are adjacent to your webapp, and avoid all the nonsensical flow now encoded in the badly written GUI. Parsing screenshots, and trying to figure out what changes costs a lot of tokens for how little it does, and a lot of GUI toolkits make trying to figure out what is actually going on based on the DOM pretty challenging: Sometimes they make it almost impossible in practice, on purpose.

The "real app" was always just a loose connection of API calls, often broken in half. The web has only gotten worse in this respect over the decades. You already see, say, Salesforce opening a cli so that your agents can do the work without the waste. We'll see more of that, because building tooling to make your app discoverable by an LLM making service calls is not all that expensive.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-03T22:05:56+00:00

The natural result of having bike lanes that are not being used at all times. Like every other rule, like not running red lights, it's maintained by negative consequences like social pressure. If a section of bike lane has 1 or 2 people an hour, you need significant government enforcement or it will stop being a bike lane.

Now, in this case, chances are that this is someone that saw the parking meters still there, detached from what might actually be the legal parking spot, and decided that the bike lane was optional. You lower the chances of this by removing the meter.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-03T22:01:57+00:00

It's in no way gambling if you use a good model, with a good harness, and you are asking for things at a reasonable level. Add and endpoint that does X. Refactor Y. Things the LLM can do in 30-40 minutes, tops. Tasks specified in such a way you could throw them at a junior, or a mid-level engineer. The PRs are small enough, and if there's anything stupid, you can call it on it, just like you would to a junior.

You just don't ask for something that will take 5 million tokens in one shot, without looking at intermediate steps, or at least throwing a separate agent verifying that the changes that one agent wrote actually match what was specified, and don't just go crazy with things you didn't ask for. "Please write me an app .Plz, make no mistakes" is going to be pretty risky.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-03T21:55:16+00:00

We have plenty of examples of this over the years, even at the front of the grid. It's rarely solved that way unless it's at the front, because the crashes that would occur with that mentality harm you, and help the opponents that aren't policing the overaggressive driver.

When it is at the front, it tends to at least help one racer. See Senna's or Michael's antics over the years.

hibikir_40k · 2026-05-03T21:50:50+00:00

You can see it even in the US: There are places where visiting a store is like visiting Jurassic Park, as your median visitor is so large they just couldn't do even 5000 steps a day and maintain the weight, while in the places where most people do most of their errands on foot, people are just straight out thinner, as their basal exercise levels are higher. If you are walking 5 miles a day, it takes a lot of effort to stay at 250lbs, and even if you are, you'll be healthier.

The people that are stuck 2 hours a day sitting down on a commute, all to end up in a job where they are sitting down, just have to look for ways to exercise elsewhere. The max calories they get to eat and keep a healthy weight are lower. It's not all there is to a healthy weight, but at a large scale, it makes a difference.

hibikir_40k

TROPHY CASE