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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Edit: I wasn’t actually disagreeing with the comment above. You should downvote me to too.

    Board of directors

    Correct. The board defines the company, not the CEO.

    CEOs are usually puppets. Whatever role they play, you can bet they were hired specifically to play it, and were incentivized to stick to the script.

    Their job (legally, their fiduciary obligation) is to maximize shareholder value, to take the credit or blame, and fuck off.

    The board (typically key stakeholders) are so pleased when the public focuses on their CEOs, even if it’s for their shitty opinions, behavior, or obnoxious salaries.

    Because the worst thing that could happen to them would be for the public eye to actually follow the money, and it’s easy to see why.

    If the rabble truly fathomed just how many of those “golden parachutes” stakeholders stockpile with every disgraced CEO, however ceremoniously disavowed…

    Accountability would shift to more permanent targets yes but, more importantly, it would quickly become common knowledge that, all this time, there were in fact more than enough golden parachutes to go around.



  • For example the tools for the really tedious stuff, like large codebase refactoring for style keeping, naming convention adherence, all kinds of code smells, whatever. Lots of those tools have gotten ML upgrades and are a lot smarter and more powerful than what I remember from a decade ago (intellisense, jetbrains helper functions, various opinionated linter toolchains, and so forth).

    While I’ve only experimented a little with some the more explicitly generative LLM-based coding assistant plugins, I’ve been impressed (and a little spooked) at how good they often were at guessing what I’m doing way before I finished doing it.

    I haven’t used the prompt-based LLMs at all, because I’m just not used to it, but I’ve watched nearby devs use them for stuff like manipulating a bunch of files in a repeated pattern, breaking up a spaghetti method into reusable functions, or giving a descriptive overview of some gnarly undocumented legacy code. They seem pretty damn useful.

    I’ll integrate the prompt-based tools once I can host them locally.




  • Haha, I see where you’re coming from. It’s a fairly old and ongoing debate: the importance of classical humanities in the curricula of primary and secondary education. To illustrate, at one point children were not only taught literature from the Greco-Roman period, but also the languages they were written in.

    In fact, that’s one of the key reasons for all the institutional Greek and Latin usage you see in higher ed. That was the tradition. These were languages only the educated knew. The effects of that on society were mixed, in my opinion. Fast-forwarding to today, the recent trend has been to prioritize knowledge more relevant to the modern era, including STEM subjects and practical trade-related skills.

    That’s the reason for the lingering notion, among older generations especially, that classical works are foundational knowledge, a common intellectual inheritance that everyone should know. While I’m more used to thinking this way, and can probably make some convincing arguments for it, I recognize that in many ways and for many individuals, it fails the test of relevance. So maybe it really is for the best that it’s only taught in the optional extension of higher ed.

    Yes, zero expectation from me to read that book, but if you ever become curious, mythologies are often short, fun, and memorable stories to read. And once familiar with them, you’ll see references to them basically everywhere, including the names of blockbuster films and spaceships, like the Apollo.