Bill Karwin

An egg cushioned by a kitchen sponge and toilet paper rolls, suspended from a paper parachute.

"Now is the time American students have been preparing for, by pioneering technology to protect eggs dropped from the gymnasium roof."

Indeed, it's hard to argue against success like that!

Tangential comment: I'm grateful to my publisher that they ask me to name the title and subtitle for my book. I mean, within reason. They can veto my suggestion if it's too weird.

Confederate statue toppled during Black Lives Matter protests will be reinstalled The statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate general and Freemason leader, was vandalized and taken down on Juneteenth in 2020. It is the only statue of a Confederate general in Washington, D.C.

I propose reinstalling the statue just so we can make it an annual tradition to topple it again every Juneteenth.

I'd guess: "I want to keep my job."

I once asked a friend how his computer upgrade was going. He sighed and then realized how to express what he was feeling:

"I hope the machines rise up to take over humanity someday, because I really *want* to fight them."

IMO, natural language conveys thoughtful and nuanced ideas much *less* reliably than most people think. One individual may have wonderful ideas, but others frequently misinterpret them, and each person misinterprets in different ways.

The only ideas that remain clear are binary.

I wonder how he feels about umbrellas.

It shouldn't be surprising. I assume it bases this phrasing on the millions of code commits and bug comments it has been trained on.

If LLMs were trained on the Slack messages from my last job, all its solutions would be phrased as simply, "try it now."

In 2006 I worked with an AI developer who insisted he didn't need to write tests or a spec because he was implementing the theories of 17th German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz.

I also implement Leibniz' theories when I write any boolean conditions. I guess I do AI too?

SQL Antipatterns Volume 2. It's similar to my SQL Antipatterns Volume 1, but with an all-new set of topics. I'm nearing completion on 50% of the chapters. But it's hard to maintain enthusiasm because of what you mentioned.

I think about this every time I sit down to write. I'm writing a tech book, not a novel, but I wonder if anyone will still be reading books at all by the time I'm done.

Thinking about what is the proper past tense of "slay" in this context.

Past tense of slay as in kill should be "slew," but for slay as in succeed it's "slayed."

If one succeeds by killing performance overhead, which is it?

What if point A and point B are separated by water?

I don't see any term limit either. 👍

Yes and no. One can do both in a given application.

I'm an SQL SME and I create complex SQL queries that an ORM or query builder can't do.

ORM's assume one result row maps to one object, which isn't always the case. You have to write custom mapper code anyway.

Every ORM supports raw queries too.

Even in feudal monarchies, jesters could (usually) make fun of the king without losing their job or their head. So this is an inadequate test of a free society.

Or...

"We made a radical decision:

We cut our salaries to $0.

The LLM finished the product (well, _a_ product, which didn't do much of what we originally designed).

We launched anyway, and then got acquisition offers.

Too bad for the employees, but the founders and investors are very happy."

It's in the business interest of LLM vendors to claim that models have to be huge, because it's a "moat."

That is, It helps them to fend off competitors, if it takes billions of dollars to create a competing model.

I'm no expert, but I'd be surprised if there is any technical reason for it.

A panel from a Tintin comic, in which Captain Haddock substitutes a variety of non-sequitur phrases instead of cursing. He says, "Duck-billed platypus! Jellied-eel! Bashi-bazouk! Anthropophagus! Cercopithecus! Psychopath! Er..." Tintin tries to calm him down.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

This isn't new. I remember 25 years ago during the first dot-com boom when some founders would sell their IP without selling their company. Or they'd jump ship after using their startup as a kind of CV.

Leaving the employees holding worthless stock options.

It was rare but it did happen.

...to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic." — Oscar Wilde, 1891
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"The public have always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing,
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Hasn't this always been true for creative arts, even before the internet existed? The popularity of content has little to do with the effort or talent it took to create it.

I assume this is a typo, she meant "I filed for divorce *in* Biblical Grounds," and that "Biblical Grounds" is the name of the coffee shop where she met her lawyer to sign the papers.

Anthropic wins key US ruling on AI training in authors' copyright lawsuit A federal judge in San Francisco ruled late on Monday that Anthropic's use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under U.S. copyright law.

That's from May. The subsequent ruling on June 23 was more than a hint.

It was disappointing.

I'll be interested to see the outcome of the storing-pirated-books part of that case.

I'm generally a skeptic of LLM's too, but I'm willing to allow that the software development field might eventually find a way to use them properly, to aid productivity without causing damage.

It'll take time to learn, though, and AI hype hinders that process.

My point is that individuals adopt a tool at different times. Collectively, people in that field begin adoption when the tool is first available. Individuals can learn a tool very well, but collective wisdom and best practices are slower to form.

Does that still hold true if it's only been 2.5 years since the new tool was publicly available to anyone, not just you? You haven't necessarily been using it full-time that long.

Example: VS Code was first released in 2015. So you and every other developer must be an expert in VS Code by 2017?