birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
2d ago
90% of the backend is Java. 90% of the front end is JavaScript.
We tried flash early on and it resulted in significantly worse outcomes. My favorite was when it couldn't get the code to compile so it modified our build scripts to make the compiler failure return code a success code.
birb_cromble
2d ago
It needs a human to find errors for it and it needs clear human instructions for what to do or else it makes up its own vision for your software.
We should really come up with an exacting, formal language for communicating with the AI so that it generates deterministic outputs.
While it can share certain keywords with natural language, correctness is important, so we should really add in constructs to clearly delineate flow control, Boolean logic, assignment, and mathematical operations.
birb_cromble
2d ago
At least in this codebase, there really isn't even a whole lot of boilerplate in the first place.
At this point, we have a few theories. Either:
- We're wildly incompetent
- What we're doing is so far off the silicon valley beaten path of "Uber for artisanal cheeses, but on the blockchain" that all the model's statistical guardrails break down.
- The people who are using it effectively are lying about how to do so in order to hide a real or perceived competitive edge.
Or
Four - A majority of the people claiming industry shaking performance improvements in Q1 2026 are scamming everybody else for that sweet, sweet substack money.
Hell if I know which one it is.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I'll put in another example here.
I work for a company that is running an agentic coding trial with Gemini 3 Pro. At present, the only developer who has claimed to see a productivity boost from code assist is one who is terrible at her job, and from our perspective, all it has done is allowed her to write bad code, faster.
The rest of us have regular conversations about what we're doing wrong. Everybody and their dog is claiming a notable performance boost with this technology, so we're all trying to figure out what our god-damned malfunction is.
- At first the received wisdom was that our problem was that we were not using a frontier model. We enabled the preview channel to get access to Gemini 3. The bugs got more subtle and harder for the human in the loop to notice, and the total number of bugs seemed to increase.
- Then the wisdom was that our context window was overflowing. We tried limiting access to only the relevant parts of the codebase, and using sub agents, and regularly starting with fresh sessions - it did precisely fuck-all. Using sub-agents seemed to honestly make things worse because it acted as a particularly half assed context compression tool.
- After that the wisdom was that we needed to carefully structure our tickets and our problems so that the tool could one-shot the problem, because no Reasonable Person could possibly expect a coding agent to iterate on a solution in one session. The problem with that solution is that by the time we've broken the problem down that much, any of us could have done it ourselves.
It feels like the goalposts and blame both slide to fit how accommodating the developer is.
Maybe my employer just has a uniquely terrible codebase, but something tells me that's not the case. It's old, but it's been actively maintained (complete with refactoring and modernization updates) for almost two decades now. It's large, but it's not nearly so big as some of the proprietary monsters I've seen at F500 companies. It's polyglot, but two of the three languages are something the agent is supposedly quite good at.
None of us are silicon valley $800,000/yr TC rock stars, but I stand by my coworkers. I think we're better than average by the standards of small software companies. If a half dozen of us can't get a real win out of it other than the vague euphoria of doing something cool, what exactly is the broader case here? Is it genuinely that something like 20 guys on nootropics sharing an apartment in Berkeley are going to obsolete our entire industry? How is that going to work when it can't even do library upgrades in a product that's used by tens of thousands of people and has a multi-decade history?
Because right now, I'm a little afraid for my 401(k), and with each passing day it's less because I'm afraid that I'll be out of a job and more that I have no idea how these valuations are justified.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I'd recommend running a Monte Carlo or historical simulation based on your current holdings and see how they hold up. Here's one I've used in the past: https://firecalc.com/
If you could stop contributing today and still have a solid retirement even in great depression-era returns due the power of compounding, you're probably good to renovate a basement.
It sure sounds like you're doing better than I was at that age, so I think you might be pleasantly surprised.
birb_cromble
3d ago
I have a hard time shaking the idea of it being tied to something like a Chinese social credit score, but American and worse.
I'm not increasing my 401(k) contribution this year, but that's as far as I'm going. I'm already well past my employer match, and it seems to me that lowering my reported pre tax income by 1% is not quite as useful as putting that 1% in something like VTI in a brokerage account.
My case might be a little peculiar though. I am pretty sure I already have enough in my 401(k) and Roth IRA to retire at 62-65 if I don't have to do any early withdrawals, even if I don't contribute more. At this point it's mostly about building up sufficient reserves so that "early retirement" is an option if I get laid off in the future.
(I did increase my HSA contribution a little)
birb_cromble
3d ago
But the situation in Minnesota makes me realize that a lot of people are going to look for political causes and use those as an excuse to harass others while feeling morally superior in doing so.
I think this is precisely the reason that we're unlikely to see UBI, even if we somehow reach a post scarcity society.
The 'U' in UBI means 'Universal'. It means that people will receive it even if you don't like them. There's a portion of the population who absolutely will not accept that. Unfortunately, they're also the loudest and have enough energy and free time to end up in positions of power when any program that calls itself UBI will be enacted. Think of a bad HOA committee, granted the power to decide whether or not you'll live in an apartment or starve to death in a gutter.
Everything will be means-tested. Everything will be revocable if you commit a crime. Everything will be contingent. The definition of those things will change every time new hands are on the levers of power.
We'll see political graft and handouts, but not UBI.
birb_cromble
4d ago
It might be worth it to check if your state allows holographic wills
birb_cromble
4d ago
But even when the marketing does hit?
What was the last big marketing push for a movie that you can remember in general? In the last five years, I can remember:
- Dune (2021)
- Oppenheimer (2023)
- Barbie (2023)
- Wicked (2024)
I can't even think of anything for 2025. The wicked sequel might have had something resembling hype, if you squinted.
Maybe I'm just living under a rock or something, but it really feels like movies as a cultural touchstone have just sort of fizzled out.
birb_cromble
4d ago
always democracies
Sometimes they're people's democratic republics, because they're definitely reaffirming, and not protesting.
birb_cromble
5d ago
As somebody who is also hypermobile and has joint issues, it's actually not too bad. You just have to know your limits and be willing to tap out when somebody has you dead to rights.
The broken fingers, however, are a lot harder to avoid.
birb_cromble
5d ago
I'd like to make it clear that I don't endorse this idea. It's more of a question of what happens when the system starts to break to the point that a sizable portion of the population can no longer engage with it.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Welp, now I have a new book to read.
birb_cromble
6d ago
That's precisely why I'm sticking to ETFs for now.
It's still fun to do the research, back testing, monte Carlo simulations, and all that, even if I do end up just buying more VTI/VT, SGOV, and SCHD.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I'm not spiritually prepared for day trading yet. It's only been in the last year that I've even been stable enough financially and emotionally to invest in equities outside of a retirement account at all.
If you do get into day trading, please occasionally fill us in.
birb_cromble
6d ago
My recent hobby has been investing. I'm putting a fixed amount of money into it and I'm treating it like a loss from day one. Given that I'm only really picking low expense ETFs for now, it's basically saving with extra steps. Nonetheless, I'm telling myself that every dollar invested is another minute closer to leaving the rat race.
birb_cromble
7d ago
I'm not quite sure where to ask this, so I'll start here.
I've noticed an increased sense of precariousness among both my blue and white collar family members and friends. I've never seen it so strong or so pervasive. Everyone is convinced that they will be out of a job soon, and a significant percentage think their entire industry will be functionally dead before they can retire.
It's really wild. It's people ranging from bartenders to retail to professors to writers to software developers to painters (art) to painters (houses). Really the only people who seem optimistic are servicemen. I don't quite think I've seen anything like it.
Either something really bad actually is coming or we, as a society, have really done a number on our ability to accurately predict the future.
What do you all think is going on here?
The question above got me moving down another line of thought shortly after.
Let's assume that the technocrat dream future is half true and some fraction of the population can live off capital gains in luxury forever.
What do you do with everybody else?
In the last few economic wipeouts, the answer seemed to be "let people fend for themselves until things correct themselves. The worst off can eat a shotgun or overdose in the meantime".
Imagine that the US had some sort of "survival guarantee", where you could, no questions asked, be granted housing and food that would keep you from starving or dying of any notable nutrient deficiencies unto perpetuity.
The catch is that a single person would get a spartan efficiency apartment in a giant, Soviet-style mega construct. A couple could get a similarly spare one bedroom. A family with with kids could get an apartment with one bedroom per two kids.
Food would be simple - rice, beans, rehydrated eggs, and other cheap staples. This might be served from a central kitchen like an army ness, or handed over in boxes.
You wouldn't get anything else. You'd just be guaranteed to not starve or freeze.
The constructs would be built in out of the way, inconvenient locations. If you had a car, it might be a 20 mile drive to the nearest grocery. A van would go into town and back once a day for those who didn't have a car.
The apartments would share qualities with prison cells and cheap corporate real estate to minimize costs and reduce maintenance overhead. Think concrete or sheet vinyl floors, one overhead light per room, bathrooms that are all plastic walls where the toilet is also the sink with a metal mirror, and other measures. The apartments come with basic furnishings (eg: a Murphy bed per room, maybe a kitchen table with chairs and a couch), but nothing else.
Internet and cable hookups would exist, but would not be covered unless the resident set up their own account. Electricity, heat and cooling (centrally set), water, and trash removal (accessible via central chutes) would all be covered.
How many people do you think would take up that offer? How do you think it would end up?
birb_cromble
7d ago
My guesses for how quickly this stuff will progress haven't done great
Reading over your prediction, are you certain that it was wrong, or that you wildly underestimated how much money people were willing to throw at the problem despite the quadratic curve? My personal prediction was that we'd see moderate efficiency gains that would help, but I never thought we'd wrap up over a full percent of the US GDP in it.
birb_cromble
7d ago
The help side is mostly for his wife, who's kind of overwhelmed.
With my dad, I've been watching more football than I have in years, since that's what he wants to do now.
It's been my experience that in the winter the amount in a multivitamin isn't enough. Also, the vitamin K in most multivitamins usually doesn't include K2 mk7, which is really important for making sure that your body puts calcium in your bones and not your circulatory system.
birb_cromble
8d ago
I've had mild success healing a tongue ulcer by packing it with salt for 30 - 60 seconds once a day for a day or two.
It's really uncomfortable, but it does seem to make it heal faster for some reason that I don't understand. I think it kills bacteria that are interfering with the healing?
I went down to visit my father over the weekend. As soon as I walked through the door, he asked me to sit down with him on a call he was on with an estate lawyer. Due to all the various contingencies, I am in line as a guardian for my youngest brother as well as a trustee for his bequests.
He also wanted to be there when discussing what he wants to leave me. My father has always lived fairly simply, and I didn't realize he was as well off as he was. He apologized that he couldn't leave me more, then told me what his intentions were.
It's a life-changing amount. I don't think I'd be able to retire today with it, but it moves my retirement horizon from 20 years from now to like... four years from now.
The whole time he was going over it, all I could think was "I don't want any of that. I just want my dad." It's an absolute mindfuck. I don't want to think about it at all, but it's very important to him that I have a plan on how to be responsible with anything that he leaves me.
End stage cancer treatment is very expensive, so all of this is up in the air, but I need to think about how to handle this.
On the purely medical front, the side effects of the chemo don't seem to be nearly as bad as he feared it would be. He's also on an enormous cocktail of drugs meant to keep those side effects under control. At least one of those drugs is an anti-psychotic, and at least one is an antidepressant. They're being used off label for appetite stimulation and nausea, but they're still having psychological effects. He's in a weird state where he knows he should be more distressed than he is, and he knows that should distress him as well, but it just doesn't.
Side effects or not, at least he's eating now. He's lost enough weight that I can feel his bones when I hug him. We're all hoping that the appetite improvement keeps up. The doctors have said that losing too much weight during chemo can be harmful.
My youngest brother seems to be taking things better than I have been. I don't know if it's because he's compartmentalizing, or if he just hasn't grasped the magnitude of what is happening, or if it's because this has been going on for such a long part of his short life already that he's had a chance to come to terms with it. Thankfully, he has a huge extended family who are always there to support him.
My step-mother is trying hard to keep it together. She and my father run a small business together and she's trying to pick up the slack.
I've been trying to help out with household tasks whenever I'm down, but she's very particular and it feels like trying to help just results in more work for her. I want to help, but I'm not really sure how I can other than just physically being there because my father likes to have me around. Unfortunately, that means that I get to sit in a chair as my dad falls asleep and I get to listen to him struggle to breathe.
I'm not sure if I'm really looking for advice here, because I don't know what to ask.
Maybe the only thing I really can ask is what you can do to help someone who's clearly overloaded, but can't stand it when something isn't done the way they would do it, and doesn't know how to explain what they want?
We do have one feature that is:
For a toy project like that, Gemini flash 3 does reasonably well, with one glaring exception. If you have methods that have similar names to methods from a library that you are using in the same project, it will develop an obsessive certainty that your methods are the library methods, and that you're using them wrong.
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