I like how you copied someone else’s actual original work to make your own (imo lesser, but to each his own) version of it but called the original creator’s work “slop”.

Yes and no, because I think a thing fiction can’t do is repeat itself, so they must find interesting new angles in which they could reflect possible futures. The very much most likely future of whatever the thing is becoming an ad-laden, buggy, infinite-money ponzi scheme until it’s abandoned 3-72 months after its release and thrown into a landfill isn’t that interesting to see episode after episode.

Just look for the boop beeps in it, obvs.

Advertising is truly evil because if it did not exist the natural tendency wouldn’t be blind consumption.

This is very well-stated, and what I was driving at.

This is solid analysis. Aside from your proposal about banning opaque algorithms, we also don’t really appreciate how powerful it is for any one human to be able to talk to millions of other humans at the same time is (as social creatures). It pathetically shrinks our world view so that it feels like we’re constantly talking about the same 10 people, when there’s so much more of your life that involves the people you work with, the people in your community, your local politics (like who’s deciding the new garbage truck schedule type stuff) that is completely absent from our online discourse.

I’d also say that the marketing and advertising industry has accelerated misinformation, distrust and overconsumption. I see about as few ads as I can figure out how (I know this because whenever I look at someone else’s experience of the same apps and services I use I can’t believe what I’m seeing), and yet I still manage to buy things, hear about things I’m interested in, and research and find out about new products. I spend money in the economy. We literally do not need this industry.

that’s not how you run services in Linux, and hasn’t been for decades

Thanks for your response. I’m open to the idea that Linux is a different computing paradigm, my frustration is on needing to learn that on the fly and how much of a distraction it was, even on a tertiary machine… that said, how should I be thinking about this?

There’s actually a good UI for managing permissions I eventually found in Mint, I think the main issues I’m having with it now are the lack of it running headless and unreliability with running my native scripts. I’ll try the Debian version though, that sounds intriguing. When y’all talk about distro hopping, how much re-setup are we talking?

So my experience has been mixed. I should note that I have always run some Linux systems (my pihole as an example), but I did, about 2 months ago, try to switch over my windows media sever to Linux mint.

(Long story short, I am still running the windows server)

I really, really, really liked Linux Mint, I should say at the outset. I wanted to install the same -arr stack I use, and self-host a few web apps that I use to provide convenience in my home. To be very fair to Linux Mint, I’ve been a windows user for 30+ years and I never knew how to auto-start python scripts in windows.

But, to be critical, I spent hours and hours fighting permission settings in every -arr app, Plex, Docker, any kind of virtual desktop software (none of which would run prior to logging in which made running headless impossible), getting scripts to auto-run at startup, compatibility with my mouse/keyboard and lack of a real VPN client from my provider without basically coding the damn thing myself.

After about a month and a half of trying to get it working, I popped over to my windows install to get the docker command that had somehow worked on that OS but not Linux and everything was just working. I am sorry I love Linux but I wanted to get back to actually coding things I wanted to code, not my fucking operating system.

I’ll go back to Linux because Windows is untenable but I’m going to actually have to actually set aside real project time to buckling down and figuring out the remaining “quirks”.

That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the detailed reply. I think one of the reasons I feel like I’m slower than I want to be is I tend to think a lot about those kinds of edge cases. My main problem now is learning to find the right-size for prototyping/building.

That said, I’ve written thousands of loops at this point but I’ve only done an input loop like that in python once or twice (in classes as I recall), so that specific method of getting the application started would probably be in that “I’d be embarrassed I’d need to google that” category. But I think once I got started I’d code out a decently competent prototype of a basic store (I’ve built an ecommerce store before so I’m familiar with some but not all of those edge cases). I would never think that code would be ready to ship though.

Thanks for this.

I mentor lots of people and i met with someone last week for the first time, and as we were chatting he mentioned several times things like “So I just asked the AI what to do, and then did that exact thing”…. Uh, so… I don’t use AI that way.

I started using it basically as soon as it came out and I started like everyone else, writing out all these requirements into the system, marveling at how it just spit back out a whole program, and then obviously ran into all the pitfalls that that entails.

So, these days, my AI use is limited to what I’d say is syntax conversion/lookup (like “What’s the syntax for instantiating and adding to a set in python?”) and anything I’d immediately verify.

I should also say I’m aware of leetcode/things like that. I play around a lot on Codewarriors and see how others put together solutions and learn a lot from that. I really enjoy the silly grindy aspects of coding like figuring out how to extract all the content from a json object that should be a string but can’t be a string for <reasons>, and building larger/complex systems like game engines (engines to make my games work, not the underlying engine). Components/react and that style of development makes a lot of intuitive sense to me as well.

Anyway I say all that to say I’d be sort of embarrassed to use AI during an interview like I’d be embarrassed to need to google anything, but it would be primarily about syntax and I’d be as likely to distrust anything the AI was saying as to use it unless it aligned with what I’d expect the code to look like.

Do you mind if I ask what a “weeder” task might be vs. a more involved one? As someone who hasn’t worked on a dev team before, I only vaguely know what you mean by “We were hoping to say they needed to write some tests to get a code review”.

I work in software (relatively high up), just not as a developer. Started to take development classes at night to pursue it as my own interest, and work on websites/games for myself. When I’m working, I guess my favorite thing to do is to approach work systematically, and my regular job keeps me pretty well-informed about the front-end aspects.

I really appreciate the suggestion. I’ve written some small contributions to public projects, but (I think I mentioned in the past here) not being a dev by trade I have held back some of it because it doesn’t work perfectly and I don’t have any interest in maintaining it/fixing it for others (as I’d like to be working on games, etc). Anyway this was very helpful, thanks (I got super busy yesterday and couldn’t respond).

I have a question, as someone who struggles with a little developer imposter syndrome. I don’t work as a dev, but I’ve coded from the ground up (using AI initially but basically only these days for syntax checks or to help accelerate writing something routine), including multiple websites (initially in React/Tailwind but lately in raw HTML/CSS), games (using python/godot), etc, for my own purposes primarily (as I have a completely different day job). Is that typical of a candidate you’d see in an interview? Are you having to screen candidates like that for whether they know what they’re talking about or are you referring to more junior people (assuming that what I’m profiling isn’t super junior)?

I’ve been using open webui (search for it with those terms) to run local models in a docker container served from Llama for the last few months and I love it.

Sometimes I serve apps with Flask, he wanted to get into some python as well

Yeah, OK. I just watched a complete novice ask ChatGPT how to go through installing node, pip, and creating a react app (of course ChatGPT being of 2021 suggested CRA). After 2 minutes, his confidence was soaring. And then he tried to run the react app and ran into an issue that required 2 days of troubleshooting for him to resolve. (When he asked me about it I told him he could have just deleted the file and moved on.)

So, yah, just let the CEO type in the code into the magic box, what could go wrong.

I did tell one of them a few months ago that all they’re going to do is train the AI that sometimes people end their posts with useless copyright notices. It doesn’t understand anything. But superstitious monkeys gonna be superstitious monkeys.

I’m in management now but I say go get ‘em please.

I do have a 64gb m1 MacBook Pro and man that thing screams at doing LLM AI. I use it to serve models locally throughout my house, while it otherwise still works as a fantastic computer (usually using about half the ram for llm usage). I still prefer a 4080 for image generation though.

Yeah taken as a guideline and observation that computer speeds/storage/etc continue to improve, I think it’s fair. It may not always be double, but it is still significantly different than other physical processes which have “stagnated” by a similar metric (like top speed on an average vehicle or miles per gallon).

gosh who would want an uncommon character that obviously most average people aren’t thinking about in their passwords, that sounds like it might even be somewhat secure.