Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

@glyph @sethmlarson @hynek Of course I still use type hints in big projects because they’re useful for other people, or for when I start to build on top of them.

So I guess I’m one of those people who thinks type checking is useful for all kinds of code.

@glyph @sethmlarson @hynek In fact, for more serious stuff, I find that type checking is way more likely to put me in a situation where I’m pointlessly fighting with the type checker and reporting bugs to mypy because I can’t express the contract of the function easily using the type system.

For quick scripts I’m usually just moving around strings or ints or paths or something and I’m not nearly as likely to write something like a function that takes functions and returns classes constrained to look a very specific way, or something with some cyclic references or something.

@glyph @sethmlarson @hynek Weird, I feel like I get the greatest bang for my buck when using at least basic typing on YOLO scripts because I’m never going to unit test them.

For anything serious, I’m writing extensive unit tests, and the type checking stuff is less likely to find bugs that, say, hypothesis wouldn’t.

@hynek I have been teaching my younger son to like vegemite and marmite, I quite like it. A tip I got was to eat it in buttered toast (good butter, small amount of vegemite will do).

@peterdrake @lucifargundam There are some people who argue that an income without a job would lead to despair or a lack of meaning in life, but I think if it were common to have a reasonable income without a job, we would learn to cope…

@peterdrake @lucifargundam To be clear I do not think it’s a bad thing when technology “destroys jobs”. People think it’s a bad thing because, IMO, they confuse costs for benefits (since practically speaking you need a job to get an income, people think they want a job rather than an income).

@peterdrake I never think of creating jobs as good, since a job is a cost of production.

Also, usually the people who talk about job creation are talking about creating them in a specific place, which I don’t care about.

Though in reality a useful job is much better than make work, since make work is paying the cost without producing anything.

It is amazing that this is a disambiguation page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield,_Wisconsin

@simon In the limit of “the LLM is as smart as the smartest human”, you would still expect to need to give it the right kind of context and information to do what you want. Communication skills are super useful on both sides of the table.

Though I suppose somewhere along the way smarter LLMs will proactively recognize ambiguities and ask for clarification, which will lower the degree you which you need to be good at asking it to do something.

@Daniel_Blake Feel free to do a tiny amount of research on the myriad reasons people have for using Signal as their SMS client, and the reasons why this is a horrible move on Signal’s part.

@Daniel_Blake They do not have good reason to pull it.

In fact, I’m kinda, busy apologizing to the people who I sold on Signal with the line, “Oh it’s great because you can use it as an SMS client that just upgrades you to a better protocol when the other person is using Signal, too!”

“You will no longer be able to send SMS messages from Signal soon. Invite to Signal to keep the conversation here."

Lol. I’d love to keep using Signal, but this move doesn’t exactly inspire me to try and sell it to anyone else.

@jacob You also seem to be a very modal runner as well!