jmoiron plays the blues

@jmoiron.bsky.social "I think many people find the stupidity and incompetence of this administration deeply offensive. Institutions of political power are usually aspirational: Politicians [..] broadcast a vision of our better selves. The Trump administration is the opposite; it even lies artlessly."...

@jmoiron.bsky.social Denis Villeneuve: So Robert in this film you play Scytale, who is a face dancer that has the power to shape shift. Robert Pattinson: That sounds like a great role, who am I going to look like? DV: You will look like Paul Bettany. RP: Oh, okay.. and? DV: And what?

@jmoiron.bsky.social Another amazing deal on offer from mr good deals where European energy companies get $1bn and the US gets nothing except increased fossil fuel dependence in the midst of an oil shock of its own design. Indistinguishable from sabotage. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/c...

@jmoiron.bsky.social Finally completed my "virtual cycling trip" from Torre de Belem in Lisbon to Plaza de España in Sevilla. I plotted a cycling route on Google Maps and loaded it into incyclist.com Quite a few backroads had no coverage, but overall it was a fun way to gamify some exercise.

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: OTOH, if inference is already a bad business how are bigger models going to make it better? Not that it's surprising for delusional SV narcissists to play roulette with the entire US economy, but if this is true and it all blows up, I don't see what distinguishes it from eg. FTX.

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: If inference is already super profitable then I don't understand why the practice around quotas is so vague and they've been pulling back access consistently over the past few years. That feels a lot more like a company tuning for profitability/oversubscription.

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Unlike "How will AI impact jobs?", the answers to these questions are knowable; there are people who know them already! But without data, their claims are indistinguishable from the kinds of misinformation you get from elusive marketing speak or the overconfident vibes of laypeo...

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: There are other basic questions that are frustratingly inconclusive, too. I don't buy LLMs as a path to AGI, personally, but have we hit the scaling wall yet? There is a long history of blog posts claiming we have! GPT-5 leads me to suspect we have. But I don't really know.

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I don't think everyone would be rushing to build more expensive frontier models if the current inference business model didn't work. But if you listen to their rhetoric, they are insistent on the valuation friendly story that the hockey stick continues far into the future.

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: It's not obvious to me which of these is correct. Attempts to quantify inference costs in the general media seem to fall victim to overly simplistic cost modeling or to confuse API price for cost: martinalderson.com/posts/no-it-...

@jmoiron.bsky.social I've seen people very confidently claim two opposing narratives on inference: * AI inference is in a VC backed burn phase and the real cost of inference requires pricing people won't pay * AI inference prints money and AI company burn rate is mostly due to training new frontier ...

reposted @bryanl.dev: If coding is your favorite part of software engineering, keep coding. AI doesn't stop you. But if coding was the only part you were good at, that's a different conversation. The job was always bigger than the code. #bransoncognac blog.bryanl.dev/posts/ai-sen...

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: It's like a war movie in that sense. I was 16 when I came out and I was easily fooled by its rebellious anti-consumerism into viewing project mayhem as a valiant struggle. Fully understanding it in my 20s and reckoning with my failure informed how carefully I navigate political...

@jmoiron.bsky.social I didn't expect "agentic AI" to usher in a resurgence of the Unix command line, but it makes sense in hindsight, as composition has more leverage now. It's also resulted in a rush to poke holes in the walled gardens that have been closed since the death of web2 APIs. github.com...

@jmoiron.bsky.social "but it might work for us" tobias funke meme where the first panel says "a beheading strike on the current leadership will result in a favorable regime change"

@jmoiron.bsky.social Caught this PBS segment on an organic Asian vegetable farm in upstate NY, and I need you to know that the farm is called Choy Division. "Growing up, food felt like the one thing I really had in common with my family" is such a universal child-of-immigrants thing. www.youtube.co...

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: The current terminology isn't great. "Engineer" is too general and ambiguous and in some places reserved for a particular level of education. "Hobbyist programmer" is even worse; it sounds pejorative or patronizing. Maybe GenZ or GenA will recognize this dichotomy and help us ...

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: The opposing force also causes problems. A trend of "industrial programming" getting adopted by small shops and individuals for which it was unsuitable. "This is how we did it at Google." In an earlier era, this was best described in the "Hammer FactoryFactory" story by Benji S...

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: This has all led to two unending issues. The first is "code as craft" people and functional programming zealots constantly tutting (irrelevantly) that the industry is doing it wrong. Those people are great programmers, but they're making a category error.

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: In my professional lifetime, we've tried to distinguish between "programming" and "engineering", but this is more about of all of the extra-programming activities and processes you need to build software at scale. I'm talking about different types of programming.

@jmoiron.bsky.social Programming is a new and relatively undeveloped discipline. I've long felt that we're missing language to distinguish between different activities that we just call "programming." For example, we have "carpentry" and "woodworking", but nothing clear like this for programming.

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I don't begrudge anyone on the Go team adding this feature. They are incredibly exacting and conservative in what they add, more than most. But languages always decide to become more complex, and it was nice for a time to have one that didn't. I'll miss that. Can we get some go...

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I've only written generic Go code once or twice since then. It's is not particularly useful most of the time, but on occasion it's vital. There are a lot of these kinds of things in programming. A language can either decide to become complex, or to remain less/unsuitable to some...

@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: The first draft for Go Generics was about 8 years ago. At the time I wrote a post that was linked in the usual places and pretty well received: jmoiron.net/blog/notes-o... This proposal was ultimately rejected and a different, better one was adopted.

@jmoiron.bsky.social Go generic methods have been accepted. Don't find this particularly readable: func (*G[P]) m[Q any](x Q) { … } Go's advantage has always been how transparent the code is. Maybe you hate for loops, but you knew what they were doing! Even that's not so true anymore.