Freyi

I think it’s even dangerous and irresponsible even to use them as summarisation and document “assist” tools, especially where someone’s life could literally be on the line. No matter how careful you think you are, these things do not understand anything and will inject hallucinations or incorrect interpretations into summaries, influencing the user’s judgement in ways they can’t predict. And because they present their output in a seemingly professional, neutral way, the user won’t know when they’re being misled.

Not sure I follow your argument. Are you saying that, because forums exist and can be used to communicate, it’s okay and not illegal to lock teens out of every other online space?

Same here - nitpicky “I would have introduced a factory” reviewers embracing mass-scale slop has been a really jarring thing for me too. Like, I got into this industry because I started programming on the C64 and absolutely loved it… so I have no interest in giving up the thing I most enjoy. But did those nitpicky devs not also love writing code? Otherwise why would they hold up PRs for days/weeks over (usually) purely subjective preferences?

Tbh I’m having a hard time coming to terms with it all. People keep saying “use it or be left behind” - I think that’s what I want.

Charlizard!

When do we plan to fart?

The devs do get some say, but often propose (or “champion”) overcomplicated bullshit in the hopes of being promoted up the engineering chain. That’s why we used to have all these fuckers drawing diagrams with Kafka and Zookeeper supporting a service mesh (provided as a pod sidecar in Kubernetes) spraying events into a topic to be consumed by Flink etc. Usually it’s an internal service receiving 10 requests per hour, which could easily have been handled by a one-page Python program running on a Raspberry Pi. I don’t know if the utter hopelessness and death of craftsmanship caused by companies embracing LLM slopcoding has made all of that worse or dampened it.

Totally agree that a lot of bullshit requirements are mandated by execs though; even when they had their “we do Agile” masks on.

+1 to that – when I was a kid, I saw a cop drop his bike while trying to park it on the kickstand. He couldn’t lift it back up (at least, within the 30 seconds I was gawking), and he looked fairly strong…

I put links to pages I want to read in a local HTML file and run PyPlucker on it, which scrapes up to a specified depth (usually 1). Then I send the resulting PDB file to my old Palm T3 over Bluetooth and read it all offline. There’s a desktop viewer but I haven’t tested that yet.

Before that I used to use a Chromium extension “EpubPress” that dumps all open tabs into an EPUB, but that relied on a 3rd party service and no longer works. There’s a project called EpubPressX which tries to do it fully local but it didn’t work for me. There’s also offpunk which is a text-only local CLI offline reader.

The smoothness at the 1:20 mark is delightful!

I watched the whole thing when it aired too, and the last episode was the biggest table flip moment… it was like the writers had no clue where to go, and someone said “ok sorry but we need a script that ties off all loose ends. You have 10 minutes to come up with something.”

I may be misreading it, but it sounds like he wanted to start coding (for real) again after, presumably, being convinced or coerced to use LLMs at work for a while?

I go to bed early to catch up on 30 years of sleep deprivation, and fall asleep before midnight! Then I awake at 1am and, knowing it will be difficult to fall back asleep, take out my tablet and watch Youtube videos until 5am, then fall asleep until it’s time work about 4 hours later.

They just watched the last episode of Lost

I try to avoid going back to any shop that implements that utter bullshit. It already felt like joining the queue at the abattoir, now it’s just incredibly insulting.

It probably just burns when applied.

Yes, the top just lifts off cleanly with no sharp edges or metal cutting debris. It still feels like magic every time… and/or I am easily entertained.

After watching Technology Connections’ video on YT about those weird can openers that cut under the rolled lip and don’t leave any sharp edges on top, I bought one and use that on every can even if it has a pull tab.

Tiddlywiki with the Stroll extension for backlinks. Stored as one big encrypted file you can lob onto a network drive etc. Mine is in Dropbox.

Can’t really use it across devices safely though, or at least I haven’t tried.

There has been some international criticism of the IDF actions that caused a lot of civilian deaths, but probably less so in the US and Germany where it is very difficult to make any criticism of the Israeli government without being labelled antisemitic. This means it’s socially and politically safer to say generic things like “we stand with Israel no matter what”. Ironically there is far more critical debate within Israel itself.

Probably a bunch of cats taped together.