I love sitting alone in Wetherspoons, and working, it's actually perfect because:
- None of my colleagues, and nobody in any of my social circles, would ever be seen dead there
- You meet the best people, everyones really nice
- Nobody judges anybody, we're all just there go get a bit pissed, lots of people socialising, some people are there doing a crossword, I'm just a guy sitting on my laptop coding, nobody cares
- I can focus better with lots of background noise
I recommend only sitting on a leather seat, or laying a waterproof jacket over a cloth seat. Too many times I've come out of Wetherspoons itching - and not from knackering my liver!
Worth it though for ~£1.30 unlimited tea and coffee.
It is a chain of very cheap pubs, often known by the abbreviated name "spoons".
It's the sort of place you can go at 9am and see people having a full English breakfast with a large glass of wine. It's people who want to drink a lot of alcohol for not a lot of money, but not quite at the point where they're buying very cheap cider (which is always alcoholic in the UK), and sitting in the park with it. There's a veneer of high-functioning about it.
They do vary a bit (the "posh pub" in central Hull is the 'spoons, one of the roughest pubs I've been to in West London is also a 'spoons), but the clientele are typically white, working class, pro-Brexit (the founder is very anti-EU and publishes an in-house propaganda mag to that effect), pretty right wing, heavy drinkers.
It's not my preferred crowd, I'd rather spend a bit more and go to a pub where there's a chance somebody is reading something other than the Daily Mail or The Sun, but each to their own.
> pro-Brexit (the founder is very anti-EU and publishes an in-house propaganda mag to that effect), pretty right wing, heavy drinkers
That's a massive stretch. In my experience, the common denominator with Wetherspoons is it's somewhere people go for the cheap drinks and food. You get people of different backgrounds, age ranges and political beliefs going to Wetherspoons pubs (including plenty of apolitical people). The only undeniably true statements is that Tim Martin was pro-Brexit and there was anti-EU material in the Wetherspoons magazine around the time of the Brexit referendum, but beyond that it's not an issue that's particularly high profile anymore, it's not part of daily conversation like it once was, many people have moved on from discussing it.
Can recommend the Mediterranean side salad and a bowl of roasted veg off the side menu if you are hungry.
In the centre of the city there are three spoons. One for the people with tattoos on their knuckles (near the magistrates' court oddly - I used to pick up gossip in the barbers round the corner but he has been bought out so the building can be converted in to 'luxury apartments'), one for the old geezers with leather jackets and a third very large one opposite a conference centre. This latter one very well managed and always a seat. All kinds of people but never rammed.
> working with [chatbots] feels like groping through a cave in the dark – a horrible game I call "PromptQuest" – while being told this is improving my productivity.
I didn't see any complaints about any kind of artificial intelligence, research or otherwise, besides large language models, in this article.
Large language models are a single kind of AI, and a particularly annoying kind when you are forced to use them for deterministic or fact seeking tasks
or did you read the article? you're probably an LLM. why am I here? fuck this website
True but LLMs are all that are being sold right now. Mainly because people think they are intelligent because they're basically bullshit artist simulators.
I don't think the future of AI is with LLMs either. Not only LLMs anyway.
It’s The Register. They’re always more about the ‘tude than substance.
This seems to be someone who has no idea how to use LLMs yelling at clouds. Or maybe just someone pretending to have no idea because it makes for good cloud-yelling.
> someone who has no idea how to use LLMs yelling at clouds
How to use LLMs? There’s no “how to use LLMs”, you just tell them what you want, and they give it to you. Or they give you sometimes, and sometimes they give you something else. Or they’re telling you they’re giving you exactly what you want, but don’t. Or they seem like they’re giving you what you want, only it’s got a secret mistake somewhere inside, that you need to dig through and search for. Maybe there’s no mistake after all.
Yes, this is clearly a new wonder-technology, and all criticisms of it are just old people, back on their cloud-yelling bullshit.
It does seem to me like Microsoft (and every other company developing AI models) is doing so at a loss, and a signifigant one.
Is the play here to get everyone hooked on AI and then jack up the price to make a profit?
If so, I worry about Junior devs in particular, who have never developed the skills to write software themselves, suddenly finding themselves being "cut off" from their AI dealer
Or people generally who outsource their thinking to AI, forget how to do things for themselves, and suddenly face a big bill!
This is 1000% the play, it's the only one that actually works out (for _some_ vendors). Extra fun when you've let go of all your actual experienced engineers and then the squeeze comes.
Yeah, but you had to integrate it until it at least compiled, which kind of made people think about what they're pasting.
I had a peer who suddenly started completing more stories for a month or two when our output was largely equal before. They got promoted over me. I reviewed one of their PRs... what a mess. They were supposed to implement caching. Their first attempt created the cache but never stored anything in it. Their next attempt stored the data in the cache, but never looked at the cache - always retrieving from the API. They deleted that PR to hide their incompetence and opened a new one that was finally right. He was just blindly using AI to crank out his stories.
That team had something like 40% of capacity being spent on tech debt, rework, and bug fixes. The leadership wanted speed above all else. They even tried to fire me because they thought I was slow, even though I was doing as much or more work than my peers.
It's a frustrating situation. I had a stretch in my career when I was the clean up person who did the 90% of work that was left after management thought a junior had gotten in 90% done. It's potentially very satisfying but very easy to feel unappreciated in (e.g. they wish the junior could have gotten it done and thought I was "too slow" though in retrospect one year of that was an annus mirabilis where I completed an almost unbelievable number of diverse projects.)
Yeah, but integrating manually is more likely to force them to think than if the agent just does everything. You used to have to search stackoverflow, which requires articulating the problem. Now you can just tell copilot to fix it.
It actually kind of did for a lot of people. Streaming was cheap, available, and convenient.
Now it's none of those three. Once again, choosing not to pirate is just an objectively wrong choice. It's a worse experience, with worse quality, worse availability, and at a higher price tag.
> Choosing not to pirate is just an objectively wrong choice. It's a worse experience, with worse quality, worse availability, and at a higher price tag.
Choosing not to pirate and not to consume simultaneously is not necessarily a wrong choice. A difficult one? Yes. But I propose that it could be beneficial for your mental (and maybe physical) health.
This is the approach I took with most things, so you're right. But still, TV can be some of the highest quality and engaging media you can find. I mean, it's not short form slop or thinly veiled advertisment... If you look in the right places.
I went almost 20 years without sailing the high seas. It was the death of DVD Netflix that really did it for me.
With DVD, Netflix if something I wanted to watch wasn't on any of my streaming services, it was almost guaranteed to be on DVD Netflix. That fallback doesn't exist anymore.
Yeah, once I grew up and started making money, I quit pirating. Just didn't have a need for it anymore.
But when streaming started to really go down the toilet I already had a homelab so I spun up radarr and Jellyfin behind seven proxies for family-scale piracy. It's wonderful. This is a new golden age for piracy.
This. If the lead has no power to suspend people without pay, or to fire people, then he is not a lead. It's okay for this power to be indirect so long as it can be wielded when necessary.
He plead to a crime, which must’ve cut him off from most government work.
He seems to be on a PR tour now, I guess to try and get other work. Some people blast every connection on LinkedIn, he seems to take a different approach and guest on every testosterone fueled and non-fact checked podcast.
There's only one podcast that could conceivably fact-check him, and that's the official CIA podcast, and somehow I doubt very very much that they'd be interested in having him on.
I've thought about the same thing. My company specializes in blocking candidate fraud and we have yet to see anyone who's sentiment isn't "get these people out of here".
Employing a North Korean can create sanctions and criminal risk, so it's not worth it.
From what I've heard from people who have accidentally hired them though, many are great engineers.
- None of my colleagues, and nobody in any of my social circles, would ever be seen dead there
- You meet the best people, everyones really nice
- Nobody judges anybody, we're all just there go get a bit pissed, lots of people socialising, some people are there doing a crossword, I'm just a guy sitting on my laptop coding, nobody cares
- I can focus better with lots of background noise
- Cheap beer
If you've not tried it, try it!
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