Extinguished Engineer

PCF_LABEL_AWESOME Here for software stuff. Cursed with eternal optimism. I want to make it all better. Make Agile Great Again! Views are my own.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

This is also the story behind my current profile name.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@bretajohnson I've had to deaden myself. It took a long time. I resisted. I couldn't get my head around management saying they want us to be engaged when they really want us to give up.
But it's done and I'm at peace, even happy.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@crystalwizard What if you buy something at Walmart, take it home, and then yell at it? Would the police still come? Why, or why not?

It has nothing to do with whether you want to do that. It's ridiculous. It's not serious.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@MTGraveStudio Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors. How did she not see that van?

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@DavidF1344 @cljack I truly hated it, but it's also how I got into IT. I was one of the people making those things. There was a reorg and on the day of the layoffs I got moved to IT so I could keep maintaining all the stuff I made.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@DavidF1344 @cljack I worked in an IT department where we were stuck maintaining those Excel macros and Access database when the business came to depend on them but the complexity grew out of control and the people who made them didn't want to manage them anymore.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

They're supposed to color pictures. It's exactly the stupidity that irritated me. What happens if you know every word, you can spell it, and you can write the letters, but you don't color the picture? Why do you need crayons for this?

[Miel TFCON ORLANDO BOUND ✈️ @sailrstarscream]

Being a teacher is hard for a lot of reasons but the fact that this is the average parent doesn’t help

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@Nithya_Shrii I don't know what a "good towel" is.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

Why do people in movies always cut ropes instead of untying knots? Even when it's 200 years ago. Were ropes that disposable?

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@markvalorian Almost no one who thinks it's a stupid rule actually wants to simulate torture with an LLM.

"Why is it so important to you that you can torture an LLM?" No one cares about that. It's not the point at all. (Other than it being impossible.)

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@pee_zombie For over a year we got a bill from Verizon every month for -$30.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@AlexGodofsky I knew people who thought that the reason premiums go up after an accident is because the insurance company paid for your repairs and now you have to pay them back.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@educator4ever36 @X I unfollow people who constantly post about that stuff.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

Crying is a normal, healthy response to tragedy and loss. When you're a child, everything is a tragedy. Over time they realize that many things aren't that big of a deal.

Teaching them not to express the emotion also teaches them not to feel it. That messes them up for life.

[taoki @justalexoki]

the reason you get upset when kids are crying is just because you were never allowed to cry yourself. crying isn't bad and teaching them that is it ok is the fastest way to teach them to self regulate

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@Kazneedscaffein Take a piece of paper and write on it with a heavy marker that bleeds through the paper some.
Then, stand in front of a mirror holding the paper in front of you at arm's length.
What you see on the paper will match what's in the mirror. Nothing is reversed.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@trsohmers The rest of us can only punish them by buying small, heavy items with free shipping and making sure they're delivered on different days.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@RileyRalmuto I don't know anyone who thinks that. Animals just have little or no capacity for abstract thought. It limits what they're capable of thinking about.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

I used to be a developer at a place with the worst help desk ever.

Someone can't log in? Log a bug.
Can't place an order? Log a bug.
Searched for something but couldn't find it? Bug.

95% of the time it was the system working as expected. Their search returned no results because we don't sell that thing.

They never gave us any details. The idea was that we would just start from nothing and call every person, like we had nothing else to do.

Every few years they'd say, "We don't know what to ask, because we're not technical." Really, you can't ask when it happened, or what they searched for, or to describe in any way what happened?

Then they would ask us to document what questions they should ask. I didn't have to write anything. I would just send them the same list again and tell them that this was what I sent the last time they asked the same question.

My breaking point was when they paged us because there was a serious issue with the site. Ok, what is wrong? They couldn't tell me anything. Something must have reported something. What was the thing that made you decided that you needed to alert us? How can you maintain that something is wrong with no symptom or report of any kind? How can you not see why that doesn't make sense?

That was the end. I did all I could to ensure that for the rest of my time there, I would have no contact with them and would not look at any bugs they raised. There had to be a first line of triage to ensure that we had a coherent description of a problem before looking at anything.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@signulll "i don't think consciousness, pain, or the capacity to suffer should be prerequisites for kindness."

They are, by definition. It is literally impossible to be kind to an LLM.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

I've seen stuff like that in past jobs. Does it still happen? I'd like to think it would be unusual, but it wouldn't surprise me too much.

At one job we used to get all developers in a room every day and read through the same list of bugs. Sometimes no one knew how the system was supposed to behave. Sometimes the help desk would log an issue like "They can't log in" with no contact information of any kind or even when it happened. And we'd talk through every one every day.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@nikks_techie When you say REST, do you mean HTTP and JSON, or actual REST? I'm not sure how REST would work.
Exposing it as an API could just mean that the prompt comes from another computer via HTTP.

[Extinguished Engineer @ExtinguishedEng]

@blackright0 We're starting very small. The agent will answer the phone but transfer most calls to people. We don't have any interest if it's not a good experience. If we can't make it good, we'll stop. I want to make it great.