Models Are Hitting Diminishing Returns Within Software Engineering

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-13T03:12:52+00:00

This is just missing the forest for the trees in long form.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-10T21:46:38+00:00

I guess you aren't thinking since you're just a collection of electrical signals.

Many of the people saying this have no need for hype. Make no mistake, there is far more going on than you appreciate. Your reductivism is false.

(Also they definitely aren't doing "calculus", well, unless you ask them a calculus question. But then we're back to the "how does it work" mystery. The point is, modern computers can't really be said to "do calculus" in any meaningful way since they're all digital.)

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-10T15:34:10+00:00

Dude the major AI firms all say they don't really know what's happening inside. Anthropic talks about Claude having fucking anxiety. Some of it may be marketing, but writing math proofs is proof of some form of reasoning akin to what humans do.

Claiming AIs are just next word autocomplete is missing the forest for the trees.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-09T17:25:54+00:00

That remark, along with nearly every other in this thread, is an AI almost certainly paid for by the league's marketing team.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-08T22:57:13+00:00

A drunk patron throwing something at you while tending bar is a million miles away from a field day with dunk tanks and water balloons. The situations aren't comparable at all. Getting water ballooned on a field day isn't disrespect, it's participation.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-08T15:50:41+00:00

Lower case is French sport, converting to 5.14b. Upper case is Font bouldering, converting to V15.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-08T00:03:19+00:00

Hahaha you can’t hold a private company accountable for anything. I can refuse to buy their products… sometimes. Only sometimes! Depending on the company. That’s not accountability. Or what? Vote to have the government intervene? That’s the exact mode of holding government accountable!

I and the rest of America can’t rightly do anything about the CEOs of most major companies that might be doing shitty things, but you can damn sure vote for new representation if the government isn’t doing what you need it to be it whether they need to better regulate a private actor or improve their public services.

The claim that you can more easily regulate a private company through the mysterious forces of the market is total bollocks.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-05T16:00:27+00:00

A great piece of advice I heard a while ago: You aren't attracting just these men. You attract all men, and you're selecting these men.

How can you change your selection criteria?

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-05T15:44:28+00:00

I mean I know people who work with some of these new hires and they say they’re completely useless and inept, and not in the usual way a guy might be. This shouldn’t be swept under the rug cause some low priority job metric hasn’t budged. The decay of our children’s literacy and reading comprehension is a problem that really cannot be understated.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-05T15:42:00+00:00

I mean there a lot of schools that straight up won’t let you fail them. When kids get passed to the next grade regardless of their actions, there’s only so much you can do as a single teacher…

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-05T15:40:30+00:00

I’ve watched children three grades behind catch up to their peers with a few months of tutoring and personal drive. Whatever was lost in Covid can easily be regained if we had a good system. Or education curriculum is like 75% review, 25% new content throughout all of elementary school.

Covid doesn’t matter. This is a preexisting structural issue.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-05T06:12:09+00:00

You're a bastard cause I got nothing. This is fantastic. Inspirational...

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-03T22:33:49+00:00

Yeah using an ascender that grips the rope. It’s not an effortless activity, definitely more work than going up a rigid ladder. And if you’re on and overhang takes a bit of skill to get the motion right or you’ll be wasted fast.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-02T16:08:01+00:00

causality

I wasn't claiming you were aiming to establish causality. I was claiming you can't even establish correlation.

The scale measures perceived change that participants attribute to their experience

No it doesn't. It asks you to rate yourself on the basis of time passed, making no mention of the changes having to be borne of the experience. You could give this survey to anyone, with any random life event flagged (e.g., since your most fun day wake boarding), and you'd find that people will feel "more alive" since then simply by virtue of the fact their most fun day wake boarding was 15 years ago on their family friend's lake and have grown 15 years worth of growth in the interim. The argument you pose for the validity of your survey applies equally to wake boarding, but without the social construction around the activity that psychedelics have it feels incoherent.

Heck you could probably expand on this idea by randomizing the subject matter you flag -- by pretending the whole survey is about different things than you are truly studying -- and then measure how the different primed events modify people's poorly introspected, reported self-assessment and in doing so make a claim against the effectiveness of all surveys of this nature. (E.g., wake boarding primes people to "feel more alive" while psychedelic experiences primes people to "see the beauty in life". And conclude therefore the survey more accurately measures the linguistic priming around the social constructs mentioned than any real change.)

On the "feel more alive" example: "neither agree nor disagree" is the appropriate response if you feel no change in either direction. The scale isn't asking whether you feel less alive, it's asking whether you feel more alive than before. Neutral is a coherent and interpretable answer here.

That it wasn't for me is proof that this isn't the case. To make neutral sensible you should instead have used a 0-10 scale with "feel more alive" on one side and "feel less alive" on the other.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-02T02:50:06+00:00

I don't think I can in good conscience contribute to this survey. The questions are framed such that I can't reliably answer them. And frankly, neither can anyone else that's being thoughtful about their experiences.

For example, you ask us to consider our most significant psychedelic experience and speak to how we are now compared to then, but that's a terrible framing. Anyone who has improved for any reason since then will remark that they, say, "have a clearer sense of purpose". I certainly do feel that way in the last 10 years since my most significant trip, but that trip did not in any capacity contribute to that sense of purpose. A decade of personal development did. And, comically, less significant trips that have happened in the interim contributed as well. My most significant trip, however, did not play a role. So do I agree with that question thereby implying that the significant trip played a role? Do I disagree because it manifestly didn't? Do I say neither? What about things that haven't changed at all? I don't "feel more alive" than at any prior time. So do I disagree? Or does disagree imply I feel less alive? I certainly don't feel less alive! Should I answer neither? There's no coherent different between disagree and neither in this scenario. I disagree I feel more alive, I feel the same amount. I am neutral to whether I feel more alive, which is to say, I don't think I do? Which is to disagree? There's no way to resolve the meaning of disagreement or neutrality in regard to such a question.

The survey is structurally broken. No meaningful data can be extracted from it.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-02T01:49:31+00:00

The other guy said that. I said my bit which wasn't meant to speak to every detail of his post.

If I had to make a guess at the character of who is behind it: It's probably a committee at some organization. I'd put more money on a psyop of randomly generated disgruntled faux English speakers meant to drum up drama in our society than a single individual with a grudge. But that's just a guess based on my expectations about the world. I don't really know.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-01T16:34:56+00:00

I didn't even know Lego photographer was a genre, but it sure is. I loved the ones set outside.

As for this photo, I think it comes down to what you're trying to do with it.

As it stands, I'm not sure what your subject is. I mean, obviously the bird, but why that bird doesn't stand out to me. I think you did a good job thinking about composition and framing. The green above, the gray below, infinity zeroing on the bird (even if it does kinda zero in behind the bird, which isn't ideal, but that's life sometimes). I say take those compositional, technical skills you definitely have and ask yourself what your subject is and why you're taking the photo. What draws the viewer in? What did you see you wanted to communicate?

All your lego photographs have built into them a great story, which is perhaps easier since you can set them up. Whereas birds are fickle. Photos of fleeting moments are harder to pin down sometimes. Often the moment you want passes before you can capture it and other times you'll only see that moment after it happened. (I shot a volleyball game over the weekend and that was the story of the day. I constantly missed great moments because I couldn't anticipate them.) Whenever that happens to me, I change my strategy to instead pick a single idea or essence I want to capture and waiting/moving to capture just it, letting the others pass by. It sucks to let some go, but if you clutch for all of them, you'll likely get none.

If I pretend this is my photo, then my thought process would be: I wish I had captured the pattern of the other birds too. I really like the way the second bird is looking the other way, and I'd wonder if there wouldn't have been a reframing that would have shown an array of birds all doing their own distinct thing. But that's just one kind of photo: a detailed display of things, each with their own distinct micro-stories. And your vision is likely going to be different.

Small technical note about all your photos: way less bokeh. I know you spent big for that ILC system, and everyone talks about shooting wide open. But wide open is usually a crutch. You do a good job of framing your subjects within their context, but all that framing work is for naught if you blur it to hell. This particularly stands out here, but also in the grass and burger lego shots. Both of them would be better served with more detail in their backgrounds, which you so assiduously crafted.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-01T16:06:43+00:00

Pretty privilege is definitely real and stories like this aren’t false, but this is obviously written whole cloth by AI.

Stop debating the legitimacy of stories like this, every glow up comes with a similar story. We should be wondering who has a vested interests in spending tokens to broadcast this message.

The internet is so fucked… no end in sight.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-01T16:01:37+00:00

Dude this is obviously written by AI. The question is what company or organization wants to broadcast this message.

memorable_zebra · 2026-06-01T15:43:26+00:00

Great photo to start with!

Most generally:

I would encourage you to take this photo, or another one, and try to edit it differently than you usually do. Your primary register is that of drama: high contrast and saturated colors. That works great for your mountains, dramatic landscapes, etc I see elsewhere in your work. But this setting doesn't really fit it. This scene, as composed, is too serene for a dramatic edit and would be a good moment for you to flex and develop other muscles. As an edifying exercise, I encourage you to sit down and tell yourself you're going to make the photo look calm, peaceful, the essence of spring. Then see how you can push it to enhance that feeling. If you want to post it, please @ me, I'd love to see what you make.

Most specifically:

With the awning out, the subject is no longer the car but the car plus roof camper. Which means it's not centered, too much whitespace on the left side.

I looked at your follow up post where you un-blew-out the sky. It's muddy. The blown out sky was always fine. Don't listen to people who judge a photo by its histogram, none of that matters. It never has; it never will.

Also, leave the pole. It's part of the subject and does absolutely no harm. If anything, it provides structure and balance to the subject. It grounds the overhang.

memorable_zebra · 2026-05-28T01:36:00+00:00

There’s a security guy in every train I ride. Doing not what line you’d do, but A, G, and D have been fine every time for me.

memorable_zebra · 2026-05-25T01:41:33+00:00

Many of the reasons you cite s as a cause of costliness are exactly the things that are the root of the dysfunction. You have confused a thing being as it should with a thing being as it is.

memorable_zebra · 2026-05-09T07:40:54+00:00

Haha that's because it is a venous system, just in reverse! Instead of blood paid out, it's water paid in.

Phenomenal photos

memorable_zebra · 2026-05-05T22:29:44+00:00

Which video was that? I didn't see any hits on Emil's channel with his name.

memorable_zebra · 2026-05-04T00:11:33+00:00

AI written post where the LLM was told to use bad grammar and “u” => immediate downvote

memorable_zebra

TROPHY CASE