I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Could you explain it in assembly?

It’s structural - you can be open or locked down, and it’s hard to decentralize if you’re not open

You can make it easier or harder to work with that data, but ultimately it’s obsfucation - you could make it hard to parse and obscure details, but ultimately if you want decentralized federation you can’t hide too much

We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync

If there’s any chance they’ve heard about a concept, I’ll ask if they’ve heard of it and take them at their word (without comment either way).

And if they’re kinda nodding impatiently, I’ll wrap up the explanation and move on to the deeper level

At first, people will sometimes be defensive or lie about knowing a topic, but after you establish there’s no judgement either way with you I’ve found people become less hesitant about admitting ignorance and will even want to hear your explanation of something to check their knowledge

I also do the flip side - I pride myself on admitting when I don’t know something, so that might play in too

People just don’t get it… LLMs are unreliable, casual, and easily distracted/incepted.

They’re also fucking magic.

That’s the starting point - those are the traits of the technology. So what is it useful for?

You said drafting basically - and yeah, absolutely. Solid use case.

Here’s the biggest one right now, IMO - education. An occasionally unreliable tutor is actually better than a perfect one - it makes you pay attention. Hook it into docs or a search through unstructured comments? It can rephrase for you, dumb it down or just present it casually. It can generate examples, and even tie concepts together thematically

Text generation - this is niche for “proper” usage, but very useful. I’m making a game, I want an arbitrarily large number of quest chains with dialogue. We’re talking every city in the US (for now), I don’t need high quality or perfect accuracy - I need to take a procedurally generated quest and fluff it up with some dialogue.

Assistants - if you take your news feed or morning brief (or most anything else), they can present the information in a more human way. It can curate, summarize, or even make a feed interactive with conversation. They can even do fantastic transcriptions and pretty good image recognition to handle all sorts of media

There’s plenty more, but here’s the thing - none of those are particularly economically valuable. Valuable at an individual/human level, but not something people are willing to pay for.

The tech is far from useless… Even in it’s current state, running on minimal hardware, it can do all sorts of formerly impossible things.

It’s just being sold as what they want it to be, not what it is

… What? Code quality is “does it work” followed by readability, only then do you get into performance and other things

Good code is better than shitty code by definition.

Well on the flip side, I somehow ended up doing legacy projects with a dude that has been coding for decades and is still actively developing in VB and asp.net. Weirdly, the guys not dumb - he asked me for an API and I blew his mind with generics and cut the code down by a third. I then introduced him to the concept of (primitive) components, he isn’t quite sold on the importance of code reuse, but every time I delete 1k lines of old code and replace it with a 20 line function my soul grows

When we do code reviews, it’s basically pair programming sharing screen… Usually we just push everything and wait for bug reports, because this crazy ass company has been using a reference book, a calculator, and hundreds of people were manually re-entering things by memory into QuickBooks until January 1st this year. They were thousands of dollars off in the second week… We thought it was a bug. It was all user errors

He’s been working on this system for 15 years, I ran into a table with 126 columns the other day. Somehow, this dude manages to swim through a database with hundreds of tables and just as many triggers with rawdog sql.

It’s fucking wild…I split my time between that and working on my virtual assistant that brainstorms it’s own development with me, and an app that I’m trying to make into a unified fediverse client.

I know what a tight ship looks like and I push for best practices when I think there’s something to gain worth the fight, but the sheer spectrum of software dev is incredible. My legacy guy told me about what’s been taking all his time lately today - he has to build a system to screen scrape from an emulated IBM mainframe… And I spent my morning working on a unified activity pub interface and my evening testing my weird observation that LLMs speaking UwU seem to perform significantly better

My point being, there’s a sweet spot between methodology/process, and it’s very rare to hit it. And also, software dev is playing in realms beyond human comprehension, and no matter how orderly if seems it should be, every senior dev who still writes code is superstitious, and often correct to be so

Notify the people you have to notify for your blockers, then embrace the absurdity

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk

Sure, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a Corp that frames fair use as a subset of fair use, making allowances only when it’s beneficial to them for marketing

For the most cut and dry example, they allow blog posts praising them… What about a blog post offering a nuanced criticism? What about a satiric post about them?

Those are both undeniably fair use, but by framing it as outside fair use, they’re being shit heels

The real LPT is always in the comments

Holy shit… The balls of that policy. “Hey, we took two common words of the English language for our project. They’re ours now.”

The psuedo-friendly tone where they define fair use as “all the places we want you to market for us, and none of the ones we don’t” (specifically “showing support of rust”… Not as in “our software supports rust”, but “I want to praise rust publicly”) and you use the word rust in a project… So I guess <my_sdk>-rust can probably be licensed if we ask.

I think I figured out the hack - you use the word rust, along with the logo for the still popular game rust (released 2 years before it). They’ll be paralyzed by the mental gymnastics it takes to twist their stance into a “friendly cease and desist” for months. And when it finally comes, you can insist you were talking about the game, Rust, using familiar programming concepts allegorically to comment on game mechanics and emergent design and through player interaction and feedback.

Then you say “I think I’ve heard of rust-lang in the last couple years, some people really seem to like it. But library availability is a concern, do you have a good package manager? Can I find a package for most things I might need?”

I never used atom, but I could use a new sidearm next to vs code (my plugin list is getting a bit ridiculous)

Is it (or rather proton) worth checking out?

Most of the code I write alone is full of jokes and puns that no one would ever get. But then when I go back to it much later, I smile and go “yep, I know exactly how I most have been looking at the system when I wrote this”

It says you should write some damn code.

Anyone can program, granted they aren’t intimidated by the concept… It’s actually very easy, and most professionals are pretty bad at it.

I, and probably lots of others, would be happy to recommend a starting point based on your interests. If nothing else, it will make you smarter

For me it’s "oh? You really like this creator? Be careful not to binge their backlog all at once! I think you’ve had enough. Let me hide the rest of their content for you so you’re not tempted

Hey, how about this news show where the guys stand instead of sitting, and wear normal clothes? They still awkwardly read off a teleprompter and have a very shallow understanding of the topics, but come on, you should watch them again. I know their shrill, forced, voices make you cringe and exit the video as fast as you can, but let me put that up next on auto play for you again

Well it depends on the method of sync… Doing it through updates would lag, but what if it was through something like quantum effects, or even by treating both bodies and brains like a contiguous organism until the cloning is complete? Like with a cell dividing, there’s no original

Huh. Now my confusion about the chicken and the egg debate makes a lot more sense, it seems odd to me that such an easily answered question ended with so much confusion

I’m now realizing it’s only a debate with non programmers, I thought it was a mutual ADHD communication thing, now I’m realizing maybe it’s just because they learned about inheritance

Unless your pause execution of the original or there’s an ongoing synchronization during the cloning process

Where’s your sense of drama???

Nah, he was named Sequel in the hopes he’d both benefit from and be crushed by expectations

Not really surprising to me. Gay (and now trans) people have long been accused of grooming and/or queerifying children

The first openly gay senator is probably hyper-aware of this, and I’d guess is probably very hawkish on anything protecting children

The other aspect is congressmen don’t understand shit outside (sometimes) politics or the law. On its surface, this has a very compelling description - hold websites responsible if they let children access NSFW content.

It’s not until you ask how (interpreted by the community as providing identifiable information to “prove” your age) that the first flaw comes up - this provides a way to collect data on online use, as social media is considered potentially NSFW by the nature of user submission

Then you get to the things most people without a technical background wouldn’t see

The second flaw - companies are terrible at securing data. Get ready for every scammer under the sun to be able to find your ID numbers.

The third, this won’t work. As a young teen, I blazed past parental controls, because there’s a ton of porn out there and there’s no way to hold back someone determined to find it. If you want this to work, we need to make a child Internet of known safe content and parental controls to keep you there… But just like finding or stealing a Playboy, the fact it exists means kids are going to be stealing passwords or IDs and probably sharing them. If we instead had sites declare content ratings and locked down at the device level, they need to go through a lot of work or get a secret device - it would give parents powerful tools to actually enforce this through Apple, Google, or Microsoft accounts

And finally, this won’t work because it’s inconvenient. Make password requirements too strict, and users write them down. Make content moderation too strict, and people will find shortcuts. People will find ways around this that will likely both end up in the hands of children, but also probably make everyone less safe