Shakespeare's collective works span virtually every genre and introduce virtually every character archetype that is still used in modern literature and media. His works are brimming with word play, which often has triple or quadruple meaning; often dramatic, philosophical, and comedic at the same time. He was so prolific and such a good writer that there are conspiracy theories that he was actually several different playwrights sharing the same pen name.

Granted it's not as easy to appreciate his works today because of how the English language has drifted over the last 500 years, but what other work of literature from 500 years ago can you even point to as being popular today in its original form?

If you want to give Shakespeare a fair shake from the literary appreciation point of view, try reading an annotated copy of his works that provide context and translate the less familiar turns of phrase. It probably won't make you enjoy reading his works, but it should at least help you understand why he's so revered.

In terms of actually enjoying Shakespeare, well... He was a playwright, not a novelist! His works are meant to be seen on a stage. There are some really good performers out there whose emotivity can help bridge the language gap. Some troupes also tweak the dialog to make it more accessible to a modem audience, but I don't generally like that because they tend to lose the puns or at least diminish the layers or the poetry.

Working for Palantir is like working for LexCorp. There's no way anyone is working there without already knowing their work is evil.

If you ever try to tell someone the publicly released undisputed facts of the Iran-Contra affair, you will come across like a conspiracy nut because what happened is so utterly absurdly criminal and yet there were virtually no consequences for anyone involved. One fall guy went to jail for a while and then came out as a Fox News correspondent.

"The famously conservative president of the United States illegally sold weapons to a radical Islamist terrorist organization in Iran (the US's mortal enemy in the middle east) and then used the proceeds to fund Central American guerrilla fighters that were also narcoterrorists? And nothing much ever came of it? Hah, as if!"

20 years ago, many of us thought George W. Bush's legacy would be that he was the most embarrassing president to ever happen to America...

Never forget that Trump is the most embarrassing president that we've ever had yet...

Champagne implies the existence of Champleasure

It says something about how sad of a state the world is in when I can't tell if this is satire or not.

One hour of being able to cook in the midst of a 12+ hour blackout can make a world of difference to hungry people.

Honestly yes. If I need to manipulate the filesystem or manage processes with any amount of conditional logic or looping, I'd much rather do it with Rust than shell scripts.

The only thing I use shell scripts for anymore is completely trivial sequences of commands.

It's much easier to fight when you don't care about what kind of damage it'll do.

I'm not saying this to defend the Democrats, just to point out that Republicans have a massive natural advantage on this stage. I don't think their success comes as much from competence as it does from being naturally aligned with doing harm.

I imagine this should count as illegal stock market manipulation, but the government would be too toothless to prosecute it.

Or would the band name be "Actual Dragons"?

*Laughs in Calculus of Variations*

They want to place all the blame for the problems in America on the shoulders of this one hapless clown because it spares them from reckoning with the deep systemic problems that led to us having this syphilis petri dish in the highest seat of power of the nation with the most powerful military in human history.

So you are in fact the opposite of this meme.

I assume you're referring to the technicality that the thirteenth amendment allows unpaid labor to be legally compelled out of prisoners, and that's a valid thing to be outraged about, but your statement is wildly misleading to anyone who isn't already aware of that technicality.

The existence of the loophole is terrible and should be amended, but it's nowhere near the humanitarian crisis that widespread chattel slavery was. Ironically that will probably make it that much harder to be fixed since it's more difficult to draw pubic outage towards it.

Your description actually illustrates how terribly inaccurate the metaphor was. If enslaved people imitated the people who enslaved them, they'd be sitting in a rocking chair on a porch sipping lemonade.

The US has a unique and relatively recent relationship with chattel slavery so people are more sensitive to it now.

The earliest record of the master/slave terminology being used in engineering is 1904 by which point slavery was already outlawed in almost every country, including the US. You're right to say that chattel slavery in the US was a uniquely grotesque form of slavery, but there is no system of slavery in history where slaves are primarily imitating their masters. No matter what anyone's sensitivity to the topic is, it's a bad fit for what's being described.

Outside of my own specialty I can people in the software industry bogged down by managing excessive boilerplate. I think this happens most often in web dev and data science.

In my opinion this is an indication that the software tools for those ecosystems need improvement, but rather than putting in the design effort to improve the tools in the ecosystem, these Big Data companies see an opportunity to just throw LLMs at it and call it a commercial product.

As a senior dev I hate vibe coding. I can write code an order of magnitude faster than I can review it, because reviewing code forces you to piece together a mental model for something made by someone else, whereas when I write the code myself I get to start with the mental model already in my head.

Writing code is never the bottleneck for me. If I understand the problem well enough to write a prompt for an LLM, then I understand the problem well enough to write the code for it.

I don't think this is a fair comparison because arithmetic is a very small and almost inconsequential skill to develop within the framework of mathematics. Any human that doesn't have severe learning disabilities will be able to develop a sufficient baseline of arithmetic skills.

The really useful aspects of math are things like how to think quantitatively. How to formulate a problem mathematically. How to manipulate mathematical expressions in order to reach a solution. For the most part these are not things that calculators do for you. In some cases reaching for a calculator may actually be a distraction from making real progress on the problem. In other cases calculators can be a useful tool for learning and building your intuition - graphing calculators are especially useful for this.

The difference with LLMs is that we are being led to believe that LLMs are sufficient to solve your problems for you, from start to finish. In the past students who develop a reflex to reach for a calculator when they don't know how to solve a problem were thwarted by the fact that the calculator won't actually solve it for them. Nowadays students develop that reflex and reach for an LLM instead, and now they can walk away with the belief that the LLM is really solving their problems, which creates both a dependency and a misunderstanding of what LLMs are really suited to do for them.

I'd be a lot less bothered if LLMs were made to provide guidance to students, a la the Socratic method: posing leading questions to the students and helping them to think along the right tracks. That might also help mitigate the fact that LLMs don't reliably know the answers: if the user is presented with a leading question instead of an answer then they're still left with the responsibility of investigating and validating.

But that doesn't leave users with a sense of immediate gratification which makes it less marketable and therefore less opportunity to profit...

Looks like this whole post is an ad for someone's project. The links hardly have to do with the post.