Hetare King

In my pockets, my keys (including a NitroKey for accessing my passwords), which are literally chained to my trousers, my phone and a little towel the size of a handkerchief.

I also carry a little, what to call it, pochette? It’s a little carrying thing around the size of my hand, that is either clipped to the strap of my messenger bag or carried on its own with a shoulder strap. It contains my passport, public transit pass, bank pass, just-in-case-cash, pen, mechanical pencil, cloth for wiping glasses, and a folded ecobag.

As for the messenger bag, it contains a carbon steel folding umbrella, which folds down to around the size of a glasses case and is very light, a larger ecobag, notebook, headphones, a bunch of USB cables and adapters, a USB memory stick, and a teeny-tiny nail clipper. Not for actually clipping my nails, but you know how sometimes a little triangle of skin around the corner of a nail gets loose and all hard and annoying? It’s for that sole purpose. Also, I typically carry the bag when traveling a longer distance (like my commute to work), so there’s usually a book and a 3DS in there.

The big one is going to be once it stops being subsidised and people have to start paying the actual cost.

Wouldn’t it be the home they lived in the longest for most people?
Wait a minute, I know what you’re up to! You’re trying to discover whether there are any bears on the internet, aren’t you!?

Bubble will burst, many AI companies will go under, the ones that remain will have to price themselves out of reach of most people. Lack of investor confidence will trigger a third AI winter, which will affect even actual valuable uses of machine learning models and the further development of locally-run models. People who graduated college between 2023 and 202X will have a harder time getting a job. AGI will still be a far-off dream.

I have no dog in this race as far as Claude is concerned, but this is pushing a false dichotomy. Not using, say, WinForms or something, because it’s too limiting or because you don’t want to make a unique UI for every platform, doesn’t have to mean strapping an entire web browser to your frontend, there are plenty of other options.

The reason frameworks like Electron are popular is that we’ve spent a long time hammering a square peg into a round hole and there are now a whole bunch of tools for designing on top of web technologies and a lot of designers with experience with those tools. And of course, the fact that code can be reused between the web app and the desktop app helps too. But it does have a performance cost. The fact that you can have poorly performing and bloated native UIs too doesn’t change that no matter how well-optimised your HTML+CSS+JS is, you can create something of the same complexity that is faster and leaner using native widgets. And when people opt for the desktop app instead of web app, they typically want something that performs better than the web app.

I’m not sure that analogy works. The machines used for making clothes are reliable and produce repeatable results that are good enough. I recently had to throw away a 15 year old T-shirt because it was getting a bit too ratty, but it still technically functioned as a T-shirt. Also, mass produced clothing in standardised sizes didn’t actually replace the bulk of tailor-mode clothing, that was always something for the rich, but that’s getting too deep into it.

In comparison, LLM-based code generators are inherently unreliable and by their very nature incapable of ever becoming able of producing good enough results, at least with the current dominant paradigm. Many execs may not feel that way, but that’s very much a FAFO situation, because unlike clothing, where poor quality may cause it to degrade faster, but that still takes time, the effects of degradation of quality in software are immediate. Of course, it’s very difficult to dislodge a dominant software product from its place in the market, because people are willing to tolerate a lot of quality degradation if the cost of switching to something else is high, but there is an upper limit of what people are willing to take, while there is no limit to how bad their software can get if companies keep riding the LLM bandwagon.

I’ll say this much: people don’t have to work for a big, publicly traded corporation. There are still smaller software houses out there where the executives aren’t little more than the shareholders’ fluffer and trust devs to know how to do their jobs, though you may need to look outside of mainstream applications. Whether they have the collective capacity to absorb everyone who wants to be a professional programmer, I don’t know. But in a world of slop, being able to provide even somewhat reliable software may be a gap in the market that could be exploited and allow for that capacity to grow.

Makes sense, the people who are able to comment first would be the ones that haven’t actually read the article or just skimmed over it and just have a knee-jerk reaction to the title or something. Maybe a solution is to have not a per-user delay but a global delay, i.e. the comment section doesn’t open until some time after the article is published. That won’t keep anyone from commenting without reading and reflecting on it, obviously, but it might prevent the knee-jerks from dominating the early comments and limit their influence over the tone of the rest of the comment section.

I don’t, and probably never will. A whole bunch of reasons:

• The current state of affairs isn’t going to last forever; at some point the fact that nobody’s making money with this is going to catch up, a lot of companies providing these services are going to disappear and what remains will become prohibitively expensive, so it’s foolish to risk becoming dependent on them.
• If I had to explain things in natural language all the time, I would become useless for the day before lunch. I’m a programmer, not a consultant.
• I think even the IntelliSense in recent versions of Visual Studio is sometimes too smart for its own good, making careless mistakes more likely. AI would turn that up to 11.
• I have little confidence that people, including myself, would actually review the generated code as thoroughly as they should.
• Maintaining other people’s code takes a lot more effort than code you wrote yourself. It’s inevitable that you end up having to maintain something someone else wrote, but why would you want all the code you maintain to be that?
• The use-cases that people generally agree upon AI is good at, like boilerplate and setting up projects, are all things that can be done quickly without relying on an inherently unreliable system.
• Programming is entirely too fun to leave to computers. To begin with, most of your time isn’t even spent on writing code, I don’t really get the psychology of denying yourself the catharsis of writing the code yourself after coming up with a solution.

It’s kind of hard to tell because it’s a low-poly model at a low resolution, but it looks like they’re wearing the mask kuroko wear, who are stagehands in Japanese theater that you’re expected to pretend aren’t there while they move things around on the stage.

This is from Tomodachi Life, right? I haven’t actually played it, but from what I know of the game, all the characters are Miis. So if the store staff were also Miis, there would be nothing to distinguish them from regular characters, so maybe they’re trying to avoid giving the impression that you can interact with them in the same way as you can with regular characters.

I’m still fond of the classic “Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine!”
Those kids going on about 6-7 like it’s some kind of power couple don’t know what they’re doing to poor 6.

Same idea as behind “Enough is enough, an egg is an egg.”

Testing and validation are very important, but they’re no replacement for structurally making mistakes as impossible as possible to make in the first place. In fact, that was the conclusion from the Gimli Glider incident, that using mixed units increases the likelihood of mistakes being made, and so they stopped doing that. It’s kind of absurd to acknowledge that people make mistakes and therefore their work needs to be validated, but when the people doing the validation also make mistakes, they get all of the blame even when the people who made the thing did things in a way that increased their chances of making mistakes when they could have chosen not to.

Also, that’s some contrived scenario you’re painting.You make it sound as though every machine shop in the US would have to replace all of their equipment. First of all, for anything computer-controlled the units are arbitrary and software-defined. But even for purely (electro-)mechanical machines, it’s not like those can’t be (and aren’t already) modded up the wazoo. Why replace the entire machine when you can just swap out some of the gears or even just the dial? If a machine has been around since 1945, they’ll have done things like that many times already.

Of course no transition is going to be instant or painless, but it’s better than keeping up this situation forever. I mentioned two incidents because they’re the most dramatic, but things like that happen every day and the cost of lesser incidents also builds up. Somehow, almost all of the rest of the world managed to go against centuries if not millennia of tradition and momentum and transition in a fairly short amount of time during a period when precision engineering was already a thing that happened at a large scale, but the US is special? Give me a break.

Well, I do think that has value too. This example is going to be fairly specific to my situation, but as a programmer working on simulation software, it’s not uncommon for me to see or need to enter values in terms of meters that I think of as being in the realm of kilometers. Being able to reason more intuitively about these distances just by moving the decimal point around instead of having to multiply/divide them by 5280 or something is helpful. And the reason I have this intuition to begin with is because I use the same units in everyday life. This does require the system of units to be based on multiples of 10, however.

It’s not my measurements I need to convert, it’s other people’s. Don’t forget, American content is pretty overrepresented on the internet, so I actually need to do conversions pretty regularly.

Beyond the day to day, a spacecraft has burned up in the Martian atmosphere and an aircraft has run out of fuel mid-flight because of unit conversions not being done. These happenings aren’t very common, but the repercussions can be pretty big when they do, and the fact that this is a completely self-inflicted problem just makes it worse. Also, the shipping industry spends a good amount of money on unit conversions.

As for the problems with base-10, certainly a system based on base-12 would in principle be better (mind you, imperial isn’t one either). The problem is our numerals are base-10 and so our intuitions around numbers are based on that. 12 can still be dealt with, but once you get to 144 or 1728, it gets a lot harder. I can certainly name more integer divisors of 100 and 1000 off the top of my head despite having fewer of them.

I think the story reboots every few games, so it’s not like say, the Mega Man games where every game is part of one big continuity. There’s a setting and recurring characters that’s built up over the years and that’s about it; everything else is specific to that game or subseries. Basically, the Bombermen (M/F), who may or may not be siblings, are some kind of space police from the planet Bomber and they have to fight a villain, usually but not always Bagura/Buggler, to protect the peace in the galaxy.

There is a bit of a rabbit hole (puddle, really) you can go into where some of the earlier games have a connection to the Lode Runner games, because Hudson Soft did the Famicom port of Lode Runner. What it boils down to is that Lode Runner used to be Bomber Man. This connection hasn’t really been relevant for a long time, but the fact that Lode Runner is a Galactic Commando may have influenced the current setting.

I have a collapsible silicone bucket with a lid for popcorn making that goes into the microwave. It’s easy to use, doesn’t require any fat, also serves as a bowl and you can just throw it into the dishwasher. Size-wise, it’s probably not that different from an air popper when collapsed, but it’s easier to find a spot for; mine is on top of the stack of roughly bowl-shaped things. And you could also use it as a bowl for other things, so it’s not necessarily single-purpose.

This was in elementary school. It was pretty cold, even inside, so I was blowing into the inside of my elbow to get warm air into my sweater. I’m not sure how, but I messed up the alignment or something and ended up making a loud fart noise. And without getting any opportunity to explain, I was made to stand in the hall.

That sounds more like tinkering around the edges to me. Whipping companies like Twitter into behaving, while it absolutely needs to happen, won’t fundamentally change anything about the dependency of Europe to those companies and the pressure the US can exert through that dependency.

It’s an inevitable outcome of its structure. With memes, it’s usually just the low-information image, which is typically visible from the post listing. There’s no article to read, no video to watch (or just a very short one), no question to think about, and you can upvote it straight from the post listing, so there’s not even a link to click. In other words, memes have a very low barrier-to-upvote compared to other types of posts, and as a result, are more likely to get upvotes and end up on the front page.

For serious conversation what you really want is a forum or only join communities on Lemmy where memes are frowned upon.