tias

Eating the crispy chicken while thinking of the people who burned alive

It's a compliment. You're skilled and valuable enough that the company won't dare to give you any bullshit for leaving on time.

I can't imagine how you think it's incredibly simple. These things are hell to explain to pretty much any normal person who needs to know why there's no picture on the monitor or why their laptop/phone is not charging, or why the keyboard isn't working in BIOS (no USB 3 support so you gotta switch to a USB 2 port). Add to that the combinatorial complexity of different cables and hubs supporting different things, and no tools for troubleshooting what feature is missing (and where in the chain) or what is suboptimal.

Worse, sometimes it's my boss who thinks they can cheap out and get a USBC dock instead of a proper dock, forcing me to run at non-native lower resolutions or unable to use a second screen.

Search patterns yes, but also location data, and it's aggregated over all your friends. So if you go to a restaurant together with a friend who recently searched for some clothes brand, the algorithm will know that and show you ads for that brand. Chances are you talked about his interests when you met, so you incorrectly infer that it was listening to the conversation.

Critically, "Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft told 404 Media they have no involvement with CMG’s Voice Data tool."

But more importantly, they can't listen on your microphone unless you give them permission. It's not a thing that is technically possible. And like the article says, these days phones even show an indicator to alert you when the microphone is on.

Yeah I'm not sure that war crimes work that way. You don't get a pass because the opponent is doing illegal things.

sometimes, it feels like managers hate engineers

They hate engineers because the engineers ask difficult questions that somebody needs to answer in order to really automate a process, and they take the time necessary to do so.

SQL was explicitly designed to allow "normal humans" to query the database. Nowadays even "normal developers" aren't able to use it properly.

Oracle has a product called Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) that it sells as "you can write the rules in plain English in MS Word documents, you don't need developers". I worked for an insurance organization where the business side bought OPA without consulting IT, hoping they wouldn't have to deal with developers. It totally failed because it doesn't matter that they get to write "plain English" in Word documents. They still lack the structured, formal thinking to deal with anything except the happiest of happy paths.

The important difference between a developer and a non-developer isn't the ability to understand the syntax of a programming language. It's the willingness and ability to formalize and crystallize requirements and think about all the edge cases. As an architect/programmer when I talk to the business side, they get bored and lose interest from all my questions about what they actually want.

I want something that runs a small local LLM for text prediction, but there's no proprietary alternative for that either.

This has to be a joke