Mak'

Bingo!

…HTTP is a high level application protocol and its errors are supposed to be around access to resources…

I’ve had fellow developers fight me on this point, in much the same way as your parent post.

“If you return a 404 for a record not found, how will I know I have the right endpoint?”

You’ll know you have the right endpoint because I advertised it—in Open API, in docs, etc.

“But, if /users/123 returns a 404, does that mean that the endpoint can’t be found or the record can’t be found?”

Doesn’t matter. That resource doesn’t exist. So, act appropriately.

…Nor is the trump admin actually using it to pay down the debt…

That’s the damning thing: Any savings are going towards tax cuts for the already-wealthy…

…Anyway, defunding the NOAA to pay off the national debt is like skipping a coffee, once, to pay down a mortgage on a house.

…and then going out and buying an expensive car.

That’s pretty much it. Trump—really, the folks who control him—is going to wall us off from the rest of the world, while the rest of the world continues moving forward. In power. In technology. In medicine.

Oh, they’ll go there next, don’t you worry…

He said we are still waiting for the hype to become reality, in the form of something obvious and impossible to miss, like the world economy shooting up 10% across the board.

That’s such an odd turn of phrase. “We’re still waiting for the hype to become a reality…” and “…something obvious and impossible to miss…”

So, like, do I have to time to go to the bathroom and get a drink, before I sit down and start staring at the empty space, or…?

Don’t get me wrong. I work with this stuff every day at this point. My job is LLMs and model training pipelines and agentic frameworks. But, there is something… off, about saying the equivalent of “it’ll happen any day now…”

It may just, but making forward-looking decisions on something that doesn’t exist—may not come to pass—feels like madness.

I’ve basically given up hope of the bubble ever bursting, as the market lives in La La Land, where no amount of bad decision-making seems to make a dent in the momentum of “line must go up”.

Would it be cool for negative feedback to step in and correct the death spiral? Absolutely. But, I advise folks to not start holding their breath so soon…

Very bold move, in a tech climate in which CEOs declare generative AI to be the answer to everything, and in which shareholders expect line to go up faster…

I half expect to next read an article about his ouster.

OP asked for the worst thing you’ve seen Excel used for…

I never know what to think when I come across a comment like this one—which does describe, even if only at a surface level, how an LLM works—with 50% downvotes. Like, are people angry at reality, is that it?

It may well be a matter of opinion whether Tesla, even operating at its highest potential, could now overtake the likes of BYD, which is getting extensive help from its government. But, it’s reasonably clear that Tesla’s chances get thinner with every bad decision of Musk’s.

He fucked with the engineering, chasing pennies on critical components, like the lidar. He fucked with the crown jewel of the company—its Supercharger network—by destroying the team, and thereby slowing down rollouts and critical maintenance. He ran his mouth off and chased away folks—like me—who would have otherwise bought, by espousing pants-on-head-crazy crypto-bro viewpoints. Hell, his idea of PR is a poop emoji auto-responder.

It’s just frustrating to see such a great concept—the ubiquitous electric car—be fucked up so badly by the person with the most means to succeed.

What’s hilariously tragic is that he could very likely have his full self-driving if he would just shut his shit-spewing asshole of a mouth for a hot second, and spend some of his ungodly billions on the problem.

There are incredibly bright people out there who can make this stuff a reality. But, it takes paying them well, not shit-talking or overruling them, and giving them the environment for success—e.g., not taking away the radar from the cars.

He just wants to talk a big game without spending any real effort or money on the problem. And, it’s just sad, because he could have his FSD and look like a genius.

I use ChatGPT and Copilot as search engines, particularly for programming concepts or technical documentation. The way I figure, since these AI companies are scraping the internet to train these models, it’s incredibly likely that they’ve picked up some bit of information that Google and DDG won’t surface because SEO.

You know, I don’t actually know. Have been conditioned to avoid using them that I don’t even think about them.

Oh, I acknowledge that.

However, there are two things I get hung up on. One, can’t pay by check—Costco doesn’t accept checks. And, two, the traditional no-limits cards are generally Amex, which they don’t accept—only Visa.

So, yes, while nothing else you said was wrong per se, I’m still left to ponder just how the transaction would go down.

I know everyone’s general focus is on the cost of the thing and how ridiculous it seems, completely ignoring that it’s a Scotch that was aged longer than the overwhelming majority of us—me included—have been alive, and that there are some people for whom that taste is very much worth it.

Me, I’ve wrangled with exactly how you’re meant to pay for the thing and walk out the door with it. Am I bringing $27K—plus tax—worth of cash—three straps of hundos?—to Costco and having the cashier count it? Do I get pulled into the manager’s office instead? Or, do I put this on my Costco Citi Visa? Will they decline it, even if I have the credit limit? Can I sub in another Visa, since that’s all they take? Do I get walked out the door, or do I get a receipt for the checker to sharpie a line through?

This year’s? We can’t even make it through this sprint’s roadmap without a deviation.

Bonus points if it’s C-suite crashing the sprint.

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I’m 25 years into my career and I’ve only just started to put this into practice. (I say “slightly” because, hey, I’ve been doing this without any advice or mentorship, and, maybe, one can be forgiven for not finding this stuff self-obvious…)

Took a new position and got tired of people scheduling my lunch four out of five days a week. In addition to the meetings before and after, it often meant most of my day in meetings without a break.

So, I threw a tentative meeting for that time slot and the number of lunchtime meetings cratered. Somehow, folks were able to figure out another time or solve it without a meeting. Only twice in four months have I been asked if that “meeting” could be moved.

Needless to say, I’m a convert and would wholeheartedly recommend the practice—of scheduling a self-meeting, for any purpose, be it lunch or even just productive time—to folks well before they hit 25 years.

…so far.

“This is television, that’s all it is. It has nothing to do with people, it’s to do with ratings! For fifty years, we’ve told them what to eat, what to drink, what to wear… for Christ’s sake, Ben, don’t you understand? Americans love television. They wean their kids on it. Listen. They love game shows, they love wrestling, they love sports and violence. So what do we do? We give 'em what they want! We’re number one, Ben, that’s all that counts, believe me. I’ve been in the business for thirty years.”