Mniot

It's so resilient, too. Like, I can see not examining things that Zuckerberg says because they don't sound idiotic on first glance. And the US is very much "more money = better than" so why not give extra weight to anything some rich guy says.

But Musk and Trump say multiple obviously-stupid things every day, are visibly wrong all the time, and still get breathless treatment. "Wow, Elon Musk says he expects oil to go to $69/barrel by the end of the week! Does he know something others don't??"

Hatred Enterprise Linux being marketed to the US gov

Maybe Katana is somewhere with stronger consumer-protection laws than the USA. It's not possible to make judgements about legal/illegal without at least knowing the jurisdiction.

We can say for sure that it's obnoxious and unethical.

If only he could be as sympathetic and intelligent as The Gang.

I guess the "pro sanctions" argument would be that countries have very few ways to influence each other: political pressure (asking nicely), economic pressure (sanctions to make the country poor), and military pressure (bombs). And that hey at least it's not bombs (until it is).

But just like with bombs, sanctions will always hurt a ton of people who were just trying to live their lives and did not want to be part of the conflict.

I hope your friend gets by OK.

Your example sounds fine to me, but I wonder if maybe the real value of AI coding that you're seeing is not "AI writes code" but rather "AI ignores all the coding rules/conventions, which were being badly applied in this case."

Like, I could picture trying to write a simple tool as you describe and running into the wall of "We're an Angular shop so you need to use the framework." But the AI isn't forced to follow these rules, so it can do a decent job.

This has been the main value of AI to me. It's just like, "sorry, the machine won't let me do a refund," as an alternative to listening a customer scream that they deserve a refund.

Even this is disappointing. LLM bullshit is only impressively fluent compared to older generative systems. (It is very impressive compared to them. It just should have stayed in academia longer and its components could develop into useful things. Instead everyone's falling over themselves about a kick-ass demo.)

Now what do you want me to do? Ask an non-deterministic LLM to implement the code from scratch every time I need it in my project?

I have some coworkers who are excited about exactly this and I don't get it at all.

Cars in general are the problem and even if they all went electric they'd be bad. (But cities would be much quieter and they are hella fun to drive.)

If you're able to use a bicycle for some of your trips instead of a car, that's a good change. (And if you're not then you might not even be able to use an EV car if you could afford it. It takes way longer to charge a battery than to fill a gas tank.)

OK but I would hi-five those people. It's harder to fight capitalism if you're also fighting health problems!

Right?? It's bizarre to me that otherwise-smart-seeming people will think they can write "explain your reasoning" to the AI and it will explain its reasoning.

Yes, it will write some fluent response that reads as an explanation of its reasoning. But you may not even be talking to the same model that wrote the original text when you get the "explanation".

I asked plenty of questions on SO and never had a bad experience. But I put quite a bit of work in. You couldn't ask "how do i sort a list in JAVA" and get answers, you had to ask "here's some code I'm writing and it does but I think it should do because what's going on?" and people gave some really nice answers. (Or you could put "how do sort list java" into web search and get a fine answer to that; it's not like SO was the only place to ask low-effort questions.)

One of the bad things with AI is it's soooo helpful that when I get questions now it's like "please create a DNS entry for foo.bar.baz" and they're asking because the AI got completely stuck on something simple (like making a request to api.github.com) and wandered up and down and eventually decided on some nonsense course of action and the developer has given up on thinking about anything.