Nobody using “prompt engineer” as a “skill” in “ages.”

Yeah, feels like almost a year since “prompt engineer” faded. In decades gone by people claimed skills in crafting Google search prompts…

When I was “engineering prompts” a year ago, it was absolutely necessary to prompt in certain ways to get better results, but… I could just feel it at the time, everything I was doing was blatantly obvious and the models were learning it almost as fast as I was prompting them - what I had to do one week, I didn’t have to do the next week because the scaffolding incorporated it for future sessions.

The whole thing gets messy when you’ve got too much prompt for the context window, so there’s still some “engineering” to do there, keeping your prompt-info organized so it can be navigated efficiently, not blowing through your context window budget before you get all the relevant information loaded before a task execution…

It is and isn’t.

Only when it doesn’t matter because there’s no observer. Once observed it’s one or the other.

No need to repeat the Scopes Trial - we all know how that ends.

So, the music player rename migration is done - I don’t think too much broke in the process.

The source repo is here: https://github.com/MangoCats/Lempi

In theory, it speaks for itself. In practice, this has been an evolving project and I believe my current automatic song end finder for fade outs is not as good as a previous generation that I built most of my collection with. You can edit each passage’s lead in / lead out points separately and it’s not a half bad editor, but it’s still clumsy and very time consuming.

If I were introducing this to a new music collection, I’d fire up an LLM agent, have it read the project documentation, tell it where the player (Pi) is on the network (give it ssh key access, and have the music files in-place on the Pi for it to find), and tell it to go through the database induction / setup process. That may take most of 24 hours on a collection with ~10,000 songs…

Once it’s setup, you should be able to define the kind of music you want to hear at particular times of day by choosing 5 to 8 representative songs, the “Program Director” will then queue up similar songs automatically and play them through.

I’ve just barely got the “multi-room” setup going, it has several rough edges, but once it gets synced up it appears to be working pretty well.

If you like to play with LLMs for coding, this is an interesting project to try them on. I find it’s right about at the threshold of what a model like Claude Opus 5 can handle / make forward progress with. If anything about how it’s working bothers you, feel free to ask your LLM to smooth those rough edges in ways that make sense to you, you can at least maintain your own branch and maybe we can merge together a “best of both” situation someday.

I don’t know if this ties in well or not, but many times over the years I have talked with otherwise reasonable people who had already, or were about to, make really stupid decisions, and I called them out as such: “this is a really stupid thing to do” - to which they all responded “are you calling me stupid?” - I never succumbed to the temptation of “well, if the shoe fits…” - truth, and what I said, was: “about this particular decision, yes.” They always had some particular goal in mind which overrode all other considerations in their mind, and they couldn’t step back and see how their goal wasn’t 100% all important overruling all other considerations.

fascism genreally is stupid

Strange thing about sociology / political games: stupid works.

In the runup to world war II both the UK and USA were studying Fascism as a potential way of “getting more” from their populations to compete better in the coming conflicts…

Strangely, I haven’t read a single headline about AI making breakthroughs in Quantum computing… but you know certain players are working in that direction.

Back in the 80s they were teaching that cryptography protected secrets “for a time” and how long they need to be protected dictated how hard you go at the key length and other costs of en/decryption. By the 00s we could easily and quickly run key lengths so hard (for conventional computation) to crack that they were essentially protected “forever” - at least until quantum algorithms shake things up a bit. That’s the next unknown: when Shor’s algorithm will start delivering real world results - like the end of BTC.

Couldn’t be much worse than what we have today in the real world…

Then Sally Struthers will ask you to donate “the price of a daily cup of coffee” and 1/1000 people will start giving $2000 per year to feed the hungry…

they made me pay import fee on the value of the listed items instead of on the price I payed (there was a 40% discount).

All this discount / special deal complexity needs to stop. Now the tax-men are scamming us declaring everything to be taxable at the retail rates when nobody pays the retail rates.

One price, for everybody, all the time. One tax rate, for everything, all the time.

The solution is: if it looks scammy, get on a different device altogether and use your normal login to the institution to access the issue through the normal channels instead of their “convenient link” through the sketchy service which may well be skimming your data even if they are under contract to your bank.

Unfortunately, a lot of the institutions’ own interfaces suck so badly it’s sorely tempting to use the quick link.

https://itif.org/publications/2022/09/19/how-the-it-sector-powers-the-us-economy/

You’re starting to catch on…

The surge in unmaintainable vibe coded AI slop open source projects is well discussed.

Hard disagree. Internet discussion glosses over little things like: quality control, discarding of garbage, reverting to better solutions when they are available. Some irresponsible morons will indeed muck up their production code base with slop and be unable to let go of it when they realize their mistakes, but the majority will be able to try again and replace the bad with better.

Agree: a lot of slop has been produced in the last year, that doesn’t mean anybody is using it.

Better software translates to easier, more automatic processes for a lot of white and blue collar work.

This is what I’m getting at. I’m yet to observe any of this.

I’m living it, but then, for the past 30 years I’ve been building systems that make existing processes more automatic, repeatable, less labor and less mistakes. I’m just building those systems faster and easier than ever before now. This isn’t the only advancement in productivity I’ve seen since I started programming in the 1980s - just one in a long history of significant advancements.

Now pipes freeze at 32, so that is a pretty outrageous amount of manadatory wiggle room --23 degrees. I honestly don’t know enough about plumbing or insulation to suggest a fix

If the inside of your apartment is at 55, and the outside is at 9, and the insulation between the pipes and the inside/outside is equal, that puts your pipes at 32. In theory the pipes should be “closer” to the inside temperature, but plumbers don’t always put pipes in with an aim to avoid future plumbing work…

With cheap, clean, safe magic (fusion?) power, you can turn CO2 from the atmosphere back into jet fuel.

They’re talking, they want other people to become more afraid, but is anyone actually afraid - or just latching on to this delusion of power to push their own agendae as if we all should be afraid?

Apologies. In Westpondia nobody knows what Romani means…

The whole political stance that “anybody can do anything if they just put their mind/body to it” is… bunk.

It’s not just in the world of identified “impacted people” with injuries, or congenital differences - we are ALL unique, different, and have differing abilities in differing areas.

The political stance is valuable in terms of preventing discrimination and prejudice. Women can be great scientists and mathematicans, but an honest statistician/sociologist would tell you: it’s not just societal discrimination and prejudice that puts more men in these fields. Then you have the upside-down prejudices where there are more men in middle and upper management, even though, statistically, in a society that doesn’t discriminate based on prejudice, women tend to be better at the actual skills used for good management / people skills.

can we bruteforce any of the Millennium problems related to cryptography

Cryptographic theory says: no. The whole basis of cryptographic security is that brute forcing doesn’t work (in any reasonable timeframe.)

Theories are overturned, from time to time.