The best way to predict the future is to implement it.

Didn't know that Windows 10 could also predict the future !!

Something I can never understand with my boss. This really makes me concerned with the future of the company imo.

I was given a project contract with all of the specifications and how many hours I had to each assignment.

I did my work and I kept myself within the time limit.

Today my boss and I had a status meeting about the project. In which he had an addition to one of my features which would basically require us to start over with it. He started to blame not only me but also my coworker on why we didnt predict that HE would want this addition to the feature. We got into a heated discussion over him putting that blame on us. My point I stuck to, was that the responsibility of specifications lies in the person who briefs a worker, not the worker who is supposed to play guessing game of what the briefer want. He vehemently denied that is how things work.

He basically shushed me and said that is how the order of things go.

Am I in the wrong here?

Boss: <Commits odd and breaking changes to my specs>
Boss: How did these specs of yours ever pass!?
Boss: That's not how this gem works!
Boss: <Doesn't mention that the gem was updated well after I finished the ticket>
Boss: Go fix your specs!

...

I hate time.

Yes, that dimension which unidirectionally rushes by and makes us miss deadlines.

Also yes, that object in most programming languages which chokes to death on formatting conversions, timezones, DST transitions and leap seconds.

But above all, I hate doing chronological things from the point of view of code, because it always involves scheduling and polling of some kind, through cron jobs and queues with workers.

When the web of actions dependent on predicted future and passed past events becomes complicated, the queries become heavy... and with slow queries, queues might lock or get delayed just a little bit...

So you start caching things in faster places, figure out ways to predict worker/thread priorities and improve scheduling algorithms.

But then you start worrying about cache warming and cascading, about hashing results and flushing data, about keeping all those truths in sync...

I had a nightmare last night.

I was a watchmaker, and I had to fix a giant ticking watch, forced to run like a mouse while poking at gears.

I fucking need a break. But time ticks on...

I created some test entities specifically for our staging site. Written in all capitalized letters in the BIG TITLE of the entity I included DO NOT DELETE. This is very clearly visible in the CMS. What's the first thing the content managers do?

You guessed it.

I guess if plain English doesn't work, I'll have to use Kindergarten rules and put a custom lock on them so they can never be deleted.

Muad'Dib fullstackchris can already predict the future, in a few weeks: "hey!!!! fullstackchris, I can't delete these test entities!!!!! whats wrong with the system?!?!"

sigh...

At age 6 I was deemed as an idiot savant. Coding is boring for me now. Age 7-10: I worked for an underground agency that was focused on harvesting people's organ data from MRI machines to predict the economic future. 10-14: I experimented with smoking crack to increase finger efficiency. Since then I've quit, and I've been living in Miami trying to create a lofi industrial folk album using nothing but a TI-84, some wire, and an old fender amp.

The best way to predict the future, is to invent it...

My boss drives me crazy. He hired me for working on his SDK which is game related. So I am responsible for basically everything, including an ingame UI (menu etc.) and to predict the future path of a game object (unit, minion, ..) when a certain spell is casted on it. For that task I divided the prediction into firstly getting the predicted path of the unit without a spell being casted and then a class that would cast the spell on that path and estimate the units reaction to that cast. Simplified, but that way you get a pretty okayish result. Now he thinks that is too complicated. "Can we not put everything into one class, if someone wants to replace the prediction he needs to read documentation for hours". WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU EXPECT, THAT IT'S GONNA BE SOME ONE CLASS 3K LINES MAGIC??

Same for the GUI. We only have DirectX and don't want to use a framework. Guess what, it's more than one class if you want to seperate view, model, controller or whatever fucking "design pattern" thing you use.

And then Git... he seriously said let's not use branches till release, I feel like they slow down things.. before I was there they did every operation on master.

And if it was just that..

/rant

I put much work into this, time to leave?

Oh no AI can destroy hummanity in the future! It is like skynet and such... Bad! It will be the end! FEAR THE AI!

Yeah so i cant sleep now so im writting a rant about that.

What a load of bullshit.

AI is just a bunch of if elses, and im not joking, they might not be binary and some architectures of ML are more complex but in general they are a lot of little neurons that decide that to output depending on the input. Even humans work that way. It is complicated to analyse it yes. But it is not going to end humanity. Why? Because by itself it is useless. Just like human without arms and legs.

But but but... internet.... nukes... robots! Yeah... So maybe DONT FUCKING GIVE IT BLOODY WEAPONS?! Would you wire a fucking random number generator to a bomb? If you cant predict actions of a black box dont give it fucking influence over anything! This is why goverment isnt giving away nukes to everybody!

Also if you think that your skynet will take control of the internet remember how flawless our infrastructure is and how that infrastructure is so fast that it will be able to accomodate terabytes per second or more throughput needed by the AI to operate. If you connect it to the internet using USB 2.0 it wont be able to do anything bloody dangerous because it cant overcome laws of physics... If the connection isnt the issue just imagine the AI struggle to hack every possible server without knowing about those 1 000 000 errors and "features" that those servers were equiped with by their master programmers... We cant make them work propely yet alone modify them to do something sinister!

AI is a tool just like a nuclear power. You can use it safely but if you are a idiot then... No matter what is the technology you are going to fuck shit up.

Making a reactor that can go prompt critical? Giving AI weapons or controls over something important? Making nukes without proper antitamper measures? Building a chemical plant without the means to contain potential chemical leak? Just doing something stupid? Yeah that is the cause of the damage, not the technology itself.

And that is true for everything in life not only AI.

Asking for a precise or accurate estimate is asking me to predict the future, which is essentially asking me to lie to your face.

And I'm a terrible liar. Please don't make me lie.

So, for the last year or so, we've been playing with a natural language A.I.
The goal was to predict port, truck and rail service disruption due to social unrest.
The trick here is that our AI would "read between the lines" of today's news articles and spit out keywords that were likely to appear in near future articles, thus giving us an early warning before some union or army start blockading roads.

It... did not work as intended. But some very weird results came out.
Apparently, we made a robotic "kid that screams that the emperor has no clothes", yielding unlikely (but somewhat expected) keywords when fed collections of articles.

We gave it marketing content about our company. It replied "high suicide rate".

Does any of you have the compulsion to micro-optimize every bit of code that you write? How do you deal with it?

I'm not just talking about algorithmic optimizations, but the real nitty gritty stuff. I'm talking about using bit fiddling to avoid if statements where speculative processors might make mispredictions. Anything that might make a program compile to fewer machine instructions or avoid extra stack frame overhead.

This all started a year ago when I took a systems programming course at my university, and started learning C and C++. But I find myself doing this in the wrong places. Who cares if this trivial program that I wrote runs in 1.2 or 0.6 seconds? My future employers won't care if my code is 10% more efficient when it takes four times as long to write.

It's gotten to the point that I can't bring myself to use languages like Python because I don't know how it's implemented under the hood and can't predict how the different ways I could write a function will affect performance. How do I bring myself to trust that the compilers (or interpreters) and the programmers that wrote them will be sufficiently optimal, and just move on? 😩

Did u know that its true?
Here is my favourite quote:
Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. - Alan Kay