owen @owen@mastodon.transneptune.net

Tired: how would a centaur wear jeans

Wired: how would a centaur wear a tank top

Might stand up a git hosting service. You pay me an annual fee, and I make sure your code is available. Under this business model I'd be able to commit to _not_ performing Stupid Monetization Tricks to subsidize free hosting, since there's no free hosting to subsidize.

What's that worth to you?

Anyways, https://github.com/ojacobson?tab=repositories

I know, this is barn doors and horses; any code I had there that was public is presumably part of Copilot's corpus forever, and at some level that's what I agreed to by using the service.

I'm not going to be party to Microsoft's next effort on this front.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUirpopmlOI

We'll see whether this works, but the medium-term risk here is that we eliminate the junior developer role in its entirety, and just slam the gates shut on this career path for a while.

Worse, it's pitched at developers, not at hiring managers. So the downward pressure is implicit, and largely invisible: instead of competing against copilot, you're now competing against developers who use copilot, on the premise that if you don't, then you cost more money than they do for similar results (or produce fewer results for the same money).

Whether it can actually deliver that isn't really material - whether people with the capacity to make hiring and budget decisions _believe_ it works is what matters.

Here's the theory: for $100/seat/year, Copilot promises to deliver code that's about on part with what a first-year employee ($50k-$150k/yr, depending on local market) can deliver.

You still need a competent developer to wrangle it, but you need that with junior developers, too.

I've seen a fair bit of hay going around about Copilot and intellectual property or Copilot and bad code, but I think there's a more serious issue. Copilot is an attempt to exert downward pressure on the programming labour market, and it's not one we're well-equipped to resist.

Huh. &! is a legal (but uninhabited) type in nightly Rust.

imagine conceptualizing the leviathan and thinking “it me”

On a related note, no amount of organizational power or authority allows you to tell someone else what their service level agreement is.

You can tell them what your expectations are, but you can't tell them "you agree to this."

The reason this meeting was not an email is that a meeting socializes attention and consensus, whereas an email does not.

The contents of the meeting could have been an email, but the outcomes would have been very different.

I don’t know where we get off on giving raccoons a hard time for their diet. Have you seen what the human liver thinks of most things?

playing deep rock galactic is not a form of radical protest

but it sure do have the aesthetic of it

the average person actually experiences zero murders. rippers jack is and outlier and should not have been counted.

circles "you are here" on the right half of a log-normal distribution, skateboards out of the room

zero return values: bad. what are you calling this for, a side effect? come on.
one return values: amazing. perfect. formally interesting. galaxy brain stuff.
two return values: pretty great. can give more information, or pass keys and values in the same response. very practical-minded.
three or more return values: no, get out.