What's bugging you? **2025**

[hawing]

Happy New Year! What's bugging you?  This is my Brewerfan(atic) niche and I'm continuing it!

(Before y'all chime in, I know that spiders are arachnids)

[Brian]

On Fox News:

Credit Card delinquency/default rate up 12% in 2024 and over 1.17 trillion owed to CC companies.  Estimates say over 12 billion of that will never be paid. 

I think the never be paid estimate is on the low side. Crazy 

[yourout]

Trying to control my blood sugar through the holidays and winter. 

Being a type 2 sucks but being a type 1 would be 10 times worse.

[Joseph Zarr]

Politicizing Fires. It bothers me. We don't know how these start. Culturally, it seems, every wildfire in a fire alley is pawned off on a political failure. I get it: LA and much of Southern California has a massive homelessness context and this is oft-rife with mental illness. Many a wildfire are started in a sketchy manner by a person living in a camp or on the streets. There may be poor leadership at the governmental level (shocker) and a greater context of unease or problems. BUT, in the time of need and the time of trauma we need to band together and help each other. We don't need to play a blame game. People need compassion and sympathy and HELP. I have friends I in Santa Monica. I spent almost the entire evening helping craft their evacuation route and teaching them what a 'Go Bag' is. It was an apocalyptic hellscape in the Palisades and West Los Angeles. This is going to be, potentially, the most economically devastating wildfire in United States history and it is bringing up a lot of festering wounds within our greater culture about failed management and leadership. Now is the time to help people find safety. Help animals find paths out of the blazes. It is a time to rally and support each other. We can pick up the pieces and get to all the finger pointing etc. after the fires are put out. My prayers go out to each and every one impacted. I pray the communities find the means to come together for a rebuild with a fire plan.

[nate82]

People have made fun of me for having a go bag.  But I don’t care.  I have one in my car and about two or three at home.  Enough cash and ammo to last a few weeks.  Then there is the medical supplies, water, purifiers, matches, important documents all laminated, compass, knives, batteries. lights and an emergency radio.  Only thing I am missing are some night vision or thermal goggles.  

[homer]

1 hour ago, Joseph Zarr said:

Politicizing Fires. It bothers me. We don't know how these start. Culturally, it seems, every wildfire in a fire alley is pawned off on a political failure. I get it: LA and much of Southern California has a massive homelessness context and this is oft-rife with mental illness. Many a wildfire are started in a sketchy manner by a person living in a camp or on the streets. There may be poor leadership at the governmental level (shocker) and a greater context of unease or problems. BUT, in the time of need and the time of trauma we need to band together and help each other. We don't need to play a blame game. People need compassion and sympathy and HELP. I have friends I in Santa Monica. I spent almost the entire evening helping craft their evacuation route and teaching them what a 'Go Bag' is. It was an apocalyptic hellscape in the Palisades and West Los Angeles. This is going to be, potentially, the most economically devastating wildfire in United States history and it is bringing up a lot of festering wounds within our greater culture about failed management and leadership. Now is the time to help people find safety. Help animals find paths out of the blazes. It is a time to rally and support each other. We can pick up the pieces and get to all the finger pointing etc. after the fires are put out. My prayers go out to each and every one impacted. I pray the communities find the means to come together for a rebuild with a fire plan.

Two of my friends have been forced to evacuate

[Joseph Zarr]

11 minutes ago, homer said:

Two of my friends have been forced to evacuate

It's apocalyptic. The Palisades is essentially completely wiped out. With other fires starting in the hills (likely from ember carry and wind driven downed lines before they turned off blocks of power) and zero containment West LA is very very much not in the clear whatsoever. It is devastating for that larger community. I've been in wildfire mindset since 2020 so I know these scenes entirely too well and, yet, it never ceases to amaze what the perfect conditions seem to do annually.

[Joseph Zarr]

35 minutes ago, nate82 said:

People have made fun of me for having a go bag.  But I don’t care.  I have one in my car and about two or three at home.  Enough cash and ammo to last a few weeks.  Then there is the medical supplies, water, purifiers, matches, important documents all laminated, compass, knives, batteries. lights and an emergency radio.  Only thing I am missing are some night vision or thermal goggles.  

Awesome. This is the way. I have two go bags and a fire proof Gun Safe. It is essential where I live. Then I spend like 50% of my time on my lands doing fire mitigation work. AND, it never feels like enough regardless and I can't control the weather and I can't control how land is managed surrounding my 65-70 acres. Hence, two go bags. Survival in the 'wild' modern West comes with risk. It just is what it is. And we must reckon with the ramifications of inhabiting historical fire ecologies. These lands are fire lands.

[Brian]

Looters are now taking advantage of the wildfires in the Los Angeles area and breaking into evacuated homes. Sickening. 

[Joseph Zarr]

50 minutes ago, Brian said:

Looters are now taking advantage of the wildfires in the Los Angeles area and breaking into evacuated homes. Sickening. 

Arson clearly happening. Looters following. Agreed. It's repulsive beyond measure and just a sad state of affairs.

[Jimbo]

22 hours ago, Brian said:

Looters are now taking advantage of the wildfires in the Los Angeles area and breaking into evacuated homes. Sickening. 

Reminds of the "Emergency!" episode where a twenty-something Tony Dow was a looter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MD-h2Qp5c8

[GAME05]

A go-bag is just being mindful. Don't forget the hand-warmers. I prefer the ceramic water filters to the carbon since they can be cleaned. Just don't let it freeze with water around the filter.

Arsonists always tend to show up with big fires. We had three big ones going in my state some years ago and one arsonist was an amateur meteorologist wanting to make a good audition film, and the other was a pack of 20 y/o kids who lit a tire on fire and pushed it down a mountain. 

There was a lot of looting in Appalachia, too. People were traveling in and making their way to the area just to do so. We had people posted up just to guard big department store areas. Ghouls.

[zurch1818]

Maybe this deserves its own thread, but it is bugging me how AI is being pushed into everything despite it not being as polished as it can be...especially writing code. To me it is a big buzz word.

As a hobby coder that has had no formal coding training and an engineer by trade, I can see the utility of it to help write code/spreadsheets. However, I spend almost just as long debugging as it would have been me writing it from scratch.

I've found if you give it the smallest task, maybe it will get it right maybe 25% of the time and it takes quite a bit of iteration before it is actually usable. If I have it do everything, it is comical how bad it can be. Then I say, this is not right, then it's all "oh, your right, let me fix this for you." It's also notoriously bad at math sometimes.

AI could be better in the future.  However, my job as a structural engineer is not going away anytime soon. Maybe the low level coder is going away, but someone that is good at coding and knows how to design code will still have more value than AI.

[Samurai Bucky]

22 hours ago, zurch1818 said:

Maybe this deserves its own thread, but it is bugging me how AI is being pushed into everything despite it not being as polished as it can be...especially writing code. To me it is a big buzz word.

As a hobby coder that has had no formal coding training and an engineer by trade, I can see the utility of it to help write code/spreadsheets. However, I spend almost just as long debugging as it would have been me writing it from scratch.

I've found if you give it the smallest task, maybe it will get it right maybe 25% of the time and it takes quite a bit of iteration before it is actually usable. If I have it do everything, it is comical how bad it can be. Then I say, this is not right, then it's all "oh, your right, let me fix this for you." It's also notoriously bad at math sometimes.

AI could be better in the future.  However, my job as a structural engineer is not going away anytime soon. Maybe the low level coder is going away, but someone that is good at coding and knows how to design code will still have more value than AI.

As a software engineer, I have found AI to be very helpful.  Perhaps more for menial tasks.  For example porting a stored procedure to LINQ in C# -- I can get the result of the stored procedure and pass the schema to AI to create a new C# class for me.  Then it does a fairly good job of creating LINQ (or Lambda) code.  You are right, though, it has a ways to go.  It has saved me time.

[Joseph Zarr]

23 hours ago, Samurai Bucky said:

As a software engineer, I have found AI to be very helpful.  Perhaps more for menial tasks.  For example porting a stored procedure to LINQ in C# -- I can get the result of the stored procedure and pass the schema to AI to create a new C# class for me.  Then it does a fairly good job of creating LINQ (or Lambda) code.  You are right, though, it has a ways to go.  It has saved me time.

This seems to be a general consensus. I have a good friend of mine who has created an entire suite (and now an app) for parametric trading within the Pine Script back end of the widely-used trading app 'Trading View'. He was having the most frustratingly difficult time with a component within his system and he determined he should ask AI to research the issue to expedite his own learning - it was a code base issue. He claimed he learned more in the three hours with the AI led research function than he did in the three months of his own frustrated pursuit. It has a ways to go but it certainly seems to be impactful when used wisely.

[nate82]

23 hours ago, Samurai Bucky said:

As a software engineer, I have found AI to be very helpful.  Perhaps more for menial tasks.  For example porting a stored procedure to LINQ in C# -- I can get the result of the stored procedure and pass the schema to AI to create a new C# class for me.  Then it does a fairly good job of creating LINQ (or Lambda) code.  You are right, though, it has a ways to go.  It has saved me time.

Where we work we have our own version of an AI prompt.  It is absolutely horrible for anything dealing with code especially Python.  Python is what is used for the most part where I work along with JAVA.  For Python someone used the AI to write some code and it absolutely destroyed a server because it installed pandas that are not allowed due to risk issues and installed some newer versions that were not approved yet making other code other teams have created to stop working.  It was an absolute mess.  

[Samurai Bucky]

8 minutes ago, nate82 said:

Where we work we have our own version of an AI prompt.  It is absolutely horrible for anything dealing with code especially Python.  Python is what is used for the most part where I work along with JAVA.  For Python someone used the AI to write some code and it absolutely destroyed a server because it installed pandas that are not allowed due to risk issues and installed some newer versions that were not approved yet making other code other teams have created to stop working.  It was an absolute mess.  

That just shows that Python is evil... 

[homer]

37 minutes ago, nate82 said:

Where we work we have our own version of an AI prompt.  It is absolutely horrible for anything dealing with code especially Python.  Python is what is used for the most part where I work along with JAVA.  For Python someone used the AI to write some code and it absolutely destroyed a server because it installed pandas that are not allowed due to risk issues and installed some newer versions that were not approved yet making other code other teams have created to stop working.  It was an absolute mess.  

I don't know why anyone would trust AI-written code right out of the box. I'd still want to test it thoroughly before deploying it.

[Joseph Zarr]

40 minutes ago, nate82 said:

Where we work we have our own version of an AI prompt.  It is absolutely horrible for anything dealing with code especially Python.  Python is what is used for the most part where I work along with JAVA.  For Python someone used the AI to write some code and it absolutely destroyed a server because it installed pandas that are not allowed due to risk issues and installed some newer versions that were not approved yet making other code other teams have created to stop working.  It was an absolute mess.  

Man that sounds like an absolute quagmire. And, it would appear they didn't bench test the code but just fired away? Good grief that must have been a short-term colossal dumpster fire!

[nate82]

46 minutes ago, Joseph Zarr said:

Man that sounds like an absolute quagmire. And, it would appear they didn't bench test the code but just fired away? Good grief that must have been a short-term colossal dumpster fire!

Financial sector especially at a bank is scarping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to developer talent.  So many morons that just barely know how to sign into the systems let alone code.

[CheezWizHed]

I'm closing in on 30 years of embedded SW development and management of teams of developers.  

Knowing AI is a tool and using it wisely when you have a well trained model (both big conditions) makes it powerful and useful.

But I fear that instead it will be used to make people lazy and we lose the ability to know what good code actually is... and we end up with mindless zombies flooding bugs into our products. 

[CheezWizHed]

21 hours ago, nate82 said:

Financial sector especially at a bank is scarping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to developer talent.  So many morons that just barely know how to sign into the systems let alone code.

This and quantum computing are reasons I don't invest in crypto. 😉

[Samurai Bucky]

34 minutes ago, CheezWizHed said:

I'm closing in on 30 years of embedded SW development and management of teams of developers.  

Knowing AI is a tool and using it wisely when you have a well trained model (both big conditions) makes it powerful and useful.

But I fear that instead it will be used to make people lazy and we lose the ability to know what good code actually is... and we end up with mindless zombies flooding bugs into our products. 

Ahh, but there is the code review 😉

I do agree with you.  Our clients, or "the business" wants things to be built more cheaply.  The way to combat that is with good requirements (giggle), documentation (giggle harder), and testing (belly laugh).  I don't know about you @CheezWizHed, but we always have to fight to get those line items in for our clients.

As you well know, the coding landscape has changed a lot over the past decades.  When I graduated, C was the big language with C++ being used for OOP.  Pascal was on it's way out.  Now, we have things like .NET to separate us from some of the heavy lifting.  With C, you malloced or calloced your memory and had to free it "manually."  Now, you have frameworks that have led to automatic garbage collecting.  This has led to poor programming practices.

This will be quoted and somebody will say, "It bugs me when people talk about programming in this forum!"  He he he.

[CheezWizHed]

29 minutes ago, Samurai Bucky said:

Ahh, but there is the code review 😉

I do agree with you.  Our clients, or "the business" wants things to be built more cheaply.  The way to combat that is with good requirements (giggle), documentation (giggle harder), and testing (belly laugh).  I don't know about you @CheezWizHed, but we always have to fight to get those line items in for our clients.

As you well know, the coding landscape has changed a lot over the past decades.  When I graduated, C was the big language with C++ being used for OOP.  Pascal was on it's way out.  Now, we have things like .NET to separate us from some of the heavy lifting.  With C, you malloced or calloced your memory and had to free it "manually."  Now, you have frameworks that have led to automatic garbage collecting.  This has led to poor programming practices.

This will be quoted and somebody will say, "It bugs me when people talk about programming in this forum!"  He he he.

But we are here trying to ....debug it! (I'll see myself out!).

I'm in the world of Embedded Development (still heavily C based) that has safety related requirements.  My company is also the OEM, so when regulation requires us to do requirements, documentation, and testing (guess EXACTLY what I was just talking about between my last post and this one....) to meet the regulatory requirements in order to ship our products.  So there aren't many arguments on doing it...just what "good looks like" and how long it will take. 

[TURBO]

Entitlement in general.

Example:  Tonight, pulled in to Kwik Trip, and noticed a car pull in the handicap parking spot.  Young girl, between the ages of 18-22 imo, gets out, and runs in the store.  I get out of my car, walk over to the van she was driving.  Nothing hanging on the mirror, nothing on the license plates, obviously, this girl just thinks she can do as she pleases.  Pissed me off, but I've seen it before.

I walk in the store, there she is at the cold sandwich display.  I don't normally do this, in fact, I can say I've never confronted a person in public before, but the need to say something to this person was so strong that I simply walked up to her, said very calmly, "you know, you aren't supposed to park in a handicap spot if you aren't handicapped or disabled.  I can see you are neither."  She didn't even look in my direction, acted as disinterested as humanly possible, and said "really?" and continued looking over the sandwiches.  I said "really, someone could actually need that spot, and here you are. healthy and not caring"  Her response:  "Are you done yet?"  Again, not even looking in my direction, just not giving a crap that she has done something so despicable that a random stranger feels the need to call her out.  I said "so you don't even care, you think you can just break the law, and you simply don't care?"  Her answer: "Nope, I don't care"  You guessed it, she didn't even look in my direction.

At this point, nothing I can do or say without really causing a scene, so I said "you should care." and as I walked away,  a dude standing there watching this transpire says "she really parked in a handicap spot?"  I said yup, and she doesn't care.  He stared at her for a few seconds, shakes his head and walks away...

Just a nasty, disgusting person...

I'm glad I said something, even though it didn't change anything.