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The Rise of Whatever

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Re: The Rise of Whatever

#241

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

Semaphor wrote: post #201
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which can be done in an induction cooker almost as fast, with the result tasting better, and without the need of a specific appliance that takes up considerable space.

I guess, if you have one of those. Vastly more expensive and more involved to install, especially when renting. I’ve never used one because I’ve never been at a place with one.

When I rented I had a standard ceramic hob and still didn't see the point... sure, you gain some time, but it's maybe 5 minutes of unattended time where you can often be doing something else, vs. much worse taste. But I understand that with slow cookers it can make sense for other people. With induction I think it's outright pointless.

As an anecdote, in my country there is a very popular brand of supermarket pizzas, Casa Tarradellas. I never buy them but a friend of mine used to eat them really frequently. So once he shows up at my house with one, and I say OK, I'm going to heat it. I serve it, he tries a bite and is totally blown away. He says "What did you do? I've been eating these pizzas for years and they never taste like this, this is amazing, the best Casa Tarradellas pizza I've ever had".

The answer was that he used the microwave and I had heated it in the regular oven...

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#242

Post by Almondsetat »

The author claims that computers aren't fun anymore and then talks about payment methods and social networks. Not only I fail to see how a website would magically make a piece of hardwars boring, but computers have always been boring and it is the job of the user to get something fun out of them

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#243

Post by Kon5ole »

matsemann wrote: post #189
chrismorgan wrote: post #100

> Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type " and the result is "|"? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it. I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press somethin…

> and it’s wrong often enough How is it ever wrong, though? If I insert a (, and then a {, and the editor appends so that it's ({}), that's always ?correct. Can it ever not be. Maybe because on a Norwegian keyboard { is a bit awkward, but I like it. Then even if we're 5 levels deep with useEffect(() => {(({[{[ I can just press ctrl+shift+enter and it just magically finishes up everything and put my caret at the corre…

>How is it ever wrong, though?

Whenever you edit something existing that already has the ), ] or } further down and you end up with a ()), []] or {}}. Or when you select some text that you want to replace and start with a quote only to end up with "the text you wanted to replace" instead of the expected ".

I never notice when it works but get annoyed every time it doesn't, so I feel like it never works and always sucks.

I guess it's muscle memory and some people are used to it, but it feels fundamentally wrong to me to have the editor do different basic editing things based on which character is being pressed.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#244

Post by rcxdude »

simonw wrote: post #62

Looks like I was the inspiration for this post then. https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lt2xbayttk2... > Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw. The reaction to that post has been interesting. It's mainly intended to be an argument against the LLM hype! I'm pushing back against all the people who ar…

Also, if you don't have a table saw, just cutting a straight line efficiently and accurately is a fairly important baseline skill for doing carpentry, something which becomes a lot less of an issue with a table saw, and that makes some of the skillset of carpentry less important for getting good results (especially if you then make things that only consist of straight lines and so you also don't need to be able to do more complex shapes well). I think it's a pretty decent analogy.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#245

Post by bruce511 »

ako wrote: post #210
bruce511 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think your basic premise is false, hence your conclusion is false. >> We all need jobs to afford living In many countries this is already not true. There is already enough wealth that there is enough for everyone. Yes, the western mindset is kinda "you don't work, you don't get paid". The idea that people can "free load" on the system is offensive at a really deep emotional level. If I suggest that a thi…

Sounds great in theory, but doesn't seem very realistic. There will always be people that want power over other people, and having more than others will give them that power. And universally, if you have nothing, you lead a very poor life. You life in a minimal house (trailer park, slums, or housing without running water nor working sewage). You don't have a car, you can't travel, education opportunities are limited.…

You have equated a basic income with equality. That's a misunderstanding.

I'm not suggesting equality or communism. I'm suggesting a bottom threshold where you get enough even if you don't work.

Actually Norway gets most of that from investments, not oil. They did sell oil, but invested that income into other things. The sovereign wealth fund now pays out to all citizens in a sustainable way.

Equally your understanding of dole living in Europe is incomplete. A person on the dole in the UK is perfectly able yo live in a house with running water etc. I know people who are.

Creating a base does not mean "no one works". Lots of people in Europe have a job despite unemployment money. And yes most-all jobs pay better than unemployment. And yes lifestyles are not equal. It's not really communism (as you understand it.)

This is not about equal power or equal wealth. It's about the idea that a job should not be linked to survival.

Why is 60 the retirement age? Why not 25? That sounds like a daft question, but understanding it can help understand how dome things that seem cast in stone, really aren't.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#246

Post by eesmith »

zpeti wrote: post #192
eesmith wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rarely. I feel lost when I use GPS to get places. Alec Watson of Technology Connections points out that GPS routing defaults to minimizing time, even when that may not the most logical way to get somewhere. His commentary, which starts at https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA?t=1804 , is an example of his larger argument about the complacency of letting automation do things for you. His example is a Google Maps routing which…

OK I don't think I'm going to persuade you if you don't use GPS. Buy 95% of the population do.

Pardon? I said I use GPS.

I'm also aware of the failure modes with GPS complacency, including its incomplete knowledge of the variables that I find important.

And that's with something that makes mistakes far less often than LLMs and related technology.

Which is why I don't think that your mention of GPS use is a strong counter-example to bryanrasmussen's comment against using hallucinating devices.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#247

Post by rcxdude »

hyper57 wrote: post #233
thombles wrote: post #113

Speaking as a grump who recently chilled out, put reservations on hold and gave Claude a crack... it turns out that the anti-AI crowd (which still includes me in many regards) gets a lot wrong about the experience of using it, as demonstrated in TFA. You don't get reams of wishy-washy code unless you ask for it. If you're an experienced developer who Knows What They Want then you can wield it like a scalpel. None of…

> You don't get reams of wishy-washy code unless you ask for it. I've found that they get pretty wishy-washy when you correct them. As an example, yesterday I was working on porting a function from the open-source CUE4Parse project from C# to Python (for a hobby project), and the LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro) suggested the following translation of a C# method: @staticmethod def from_name(name: str) -> 'FPackageId': # C# Encod…

It's pretty difficult to have a useful back and forth with an LLM, because they're really heavily finetuned to be agreeable (and also they're not particularly smart, just knowledgeable, so their 'system 1' is a lot better than their 'system 2', to analogize with 'thinking fast and slow'). Generally speaking if they don't get a useful answer in one shot or with relatively simple, objective feedback, they're just going to flop around and agree with whatever you last suggested.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#248

Post by adastra22 »

zpeti wrote: post #132
dalemhurley wrote: post #111

> "live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal." I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our bankin…

I don't get this sentence. It's pretty damn hard sending money in the EU too. We only had SWIFT and CHAPS too like in the USA. The EU isn't some banking haven with ultrafast transfers. If they are talking about the new legislation about fast transfers (SEPA), that came 1 decade after paypal.

The US doesn't have SWIFT btw.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#249

Post by wiseowise »

squidbeak wrote: post #86
simonw wrote: post #62

Looks like I was the inspiration for this post then. https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lt2xbayttk2... > Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw. The reaction to that post has been interesting. It's mainly intended to be an argument against the LLM hype! I'm pushing back against all the people who ar…

The thing is that at this stage, LLMs, and perhaps AI in other forms, also have careers. Right now they're junior developers. But whose career will develop faster or go further? Theirs? or the new programmer's?

Who cares?

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#250

Post by roncesvalles »

>It feels like the same attitude that happened with Bitcoin, the same smug nose-wrinkling contempt. [...] But the Bitcoin people make more money if they can shame everyone else into buying more Bitcoin, so of course they’re gonna try to do it. What do programmers get out of this? Unless you work at Microsoft and have a lot of stock options, you aren’t getting rich off of how many people use Copilot.

The reason for this is as follows: A good number of software engineers make a fuckton of money, but not all of them (it's bimodal/trimodal/whatever). SWEs are also one of the highest paid people within tech companies, often earning more than the MBAs, the CPAs, and the JDs (who tend to come with massive chips on account of actually having actual credentials, and tech companies being prestigious destinations within these profession).

It seems that over time, this phenomenon has caused the emergence of a large coterie of people whom I would kindly describe as being "bearish" of these high-end software engineering salaries and double-down on any narrative that undermines the livelihood of the software engineer, basically just to make themselves feel better.

tl;dr people desperately want AI to succeed because they're envious of software engineers

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