Polymathosaurus

One of my greatest challenges when it comes to practicing acceptance: doing things un-skillfully. Even playing a video game with persistent progress poorly gives me anxiety...and I'm gonna work on that <3

Kid, once you learn to judo flip your catastrophic thinking into acceptance of catastrophe, well...you just can't lose, can you?

Especially if that helps to keep them in alphabetical order for emergency responders 😊

It's possible that the degradation of online interactions is by design. If social media is how you interact with your peers, and all you see is horrific shit, you'll conveniently not trust anyone except those vetted by fame.

A screenshot from DuckDuckGo stating: 216 tracking attempts blocked from 2 companies in The Weather Channel app

#noaa would never. That's all I'm sayin'

Not saying that the owe us an android app because *waves arms at everything* but just imagine how dope it would be if they could.

What was the first parser you ever wrote?

Mine parsed JSON objects into Kotlin objects in my first android app. Why didn't I use something like Gson? Little dev me didn't *really* understand libraries, yet 😅

My first information system. It wasn't effecient or pretty, but as a learning exercise, I continue to reap the benefits of struggling to make it to this day.

I know it's corny or whatever, but I really like the maxim,

"Strangers are just friends you haven't met yet."

I'd like to think that we'd be in a better place as a species if we humored that perspective a little more.

I don't know what the bias is called but the whole
rural=dumb&bigoted
assumption really needs to stop.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, then this probably applies to you, especially.

Knock that shit off.

For someone who likes to level up faster than an anime protagonist, putting things on the back burner while we build a house feels weird.

An extremely privileged position to be in, just...weird.

I can't help but think about all of the other folks, creating things out of necessity, relying on the easiest (not best) tool for the job out there that are missing out on learning opportunities because of it.

Like a preemptive brain drain...

Thing is, if there were LLMs available years ago...I could've done all of that in like...an afternoon. It would've been buggy, but usable. No one was relying on that app to diagnose anything...but I also would have learned *nothing*

Flash forward a few months, and I'd enrolled in a Master's of Information Systems. I learned a little SQL along the way and eventually got into the back end with server code. I could finally write an app server...

Eventually, I learned enough to create an interactive staining widget. Trainees could watch a vial fill a coplin jar with reagents and watch the colors *change*. Probably wayyy too many lines of CSS to make that happen, but it worked, and I *learned* all of it...

As I went through the free lessons on freecodecamp, I'd apply them in code sandbox, which hosted my code, for free, through a URL that any of my trainees could get to.

At first, they were quizzes with interactive widgets,i.e
"Change the settings of this processor to optimize paraffin infiltration"

freeCodeCamp.org Learn to Code — For Free

I'd had a little experience with coding, between making games with Game Maker and a high school web design class. I started with the basics. I didn't know how to code a web server, and I sure as hell couldn't host one at the hospital.

I started with code sandbox and freecodecamp.org.

We had a few techs that were allowed to perform basic work, but did not have their certifications. My job was to teach them what I'd learned during a year-long internship in a much smaller time frame.

Enter web apps and self-guided learning.

Folks were playing cards, putting together puzzles, anything short of just leaving early as the ~10 of us were sharing a workload of cutting microscope slides from 30 pieces of paraffin tissue embedded in paraffin. That's about 0.5->1 hour worth of work for one person.

Looking back on my software engineer journey, LLMs would have almost certainly torpedoed the whole thing.

My first application was born out of need. I was a histology technician and training coordinator for a hospital that was grappling with the lack of work during the first months of COVID...🧵

But let that plugin run for more than a few minutes (until the RMI connection expires) and it'll throw errors until you restart the app server...which fixes it again!

Inappropriate static variables are now my red flags for AI use in that platform.

I can't count how many times I've cleaned up static-scoped utility variables because they included objects with - you guessed it - RMI-dependent objects.

The insidious thing is, they'll work the first time, which means they'll pass someone's initial testing...

Add things like RMI connections and file servers, and there's just too much for it to handle.

For instance, LLMs LOVE singletons. They're an awesome design choice when you're creating utilities, except LLMs don't understand that RMI connections expire.

Part of my negative attitude when it comes to AI is the space I encounter it in. I extend and maintain laboratory information management systems.

Even if you did (and you shouldn't) allow an LLM to see the entire codebase, the concept of plugins and black box servers just doesn't...compute. 🧵

CLI go brrr...

I just love watching the output scroll

The concept of being "brainwashed" by accessing information is a censorship tactic, and nothing more.

Read everything, and read between the lines.

If your opponent has a successful strategy: learn it, assimilate what you want, and use it.

(This is as much a self call-out as a call to action)

{Term}. is my least favorite glossary style.

In the spirit of not wanting to be led by someone who doesn't understand my job, I'm studying for the CAPM through PMI.

It's not the PMP, since I don't have the years of experience, but hopefully I'll be able to support my PMs just as well as my BAs and devs.

My singing, "...because you're MUTABLE!" like a love ballad is reason #848583 why I just work better remotely.

What if I'm just an AI being trained in a person simulator?

A microcontroller with a red, green and blue LED with a USB cable is affixed to the underside of a white cat food feeder lid

I push code to production all the time, but permanently affixing something I've built just *feels* so much bigger.

So after two years of reliable kitty food level detection, my sensor is finally hot glued to the lid!