I would also be in the target audience I think.
I’m a software engineer, been one for 20+ years. Built my own PCs before.
I’m just not super interested in doing it anymore. A reasonably priced steam box that just works out of the box without any troubleshooting and is a common enough hardware profile for developers to put in the effort to make work so I don’t have to burn the precious hours of my life fixing stupid bullshit to play a video game, yes, take my money.
I have been into AI Safety since before chat gpt.
I used to get into these arguments with people that thought we could never lose control of AI because we were smart enough to keep it contained.
The rise of LLMs have effectively neutered that argument since being even remotely interesting was enough for a vast swath of people to just give it root access to the internet and fall all over themselves inventing competing protocols to empower it to do stuff without our supervision.
The more disturbing thing that we are entering is a K shaped economy.
The consumer base of the United States has split, the wealthier part is doing better and spending more, the poorer part is doing worse and spending less. You have diverging lines like a K
One of the scariest things going forward is that the consumer base of America used to have an economic protection in that the economy depended on not crushing the consumers. With the split in the consumer base the poorer part now represents less and less of the GDP, down to near 10%. This removes the incentive to protect them and we will start seeing more and more bifurcation in the haves and the have-nots.
It remains to be seen if the have-nots will accept this, so far the American population has been pretty accepting of the slowly ratcheting person crushing machine that is late stage capitalism.
For those that don’t want to give X the traffic
Violence is NOT the answer. The answer is opens history book
uh oh
frantically starts flipping through pages
uh oh. oh no. no no no. uh oh
Um you see um the realty is that this is very simple, its pixels, you know glowing dots. So I think with a um high degree a very high degree um of of confidence that within the next 12 to 18 months we will have self gooning AI.
And that’s really the difference between X being a billion dollar company and being basically useless. But today, right now, self gooning AI is already safer and cheaper than human gooning.
Wait until you get denied healthcare because the AI review board decided you shouldn’t get it.
Paper pushers can absolutely fuck your life over, and AI is primed to replace a lot of those people.
It will be cold comfort to you if you’ve been wrongly classified by an AI in some way that harms you that the AI didn’t intend to harm you.
Rails, ActiveSupport I believe, adds this to integers.
But I think one of the interesting things about it is the open nature of classes in ruby.
The thing that makes it possible is that you can open classes in user space and just add stuff to them. It’s a neat feature that few languages have.
The feature, like most features, has pros and cons. On the pro side it makes making DSLs and helpers like this pretty trivial. You can make really expressive ideas and apis because you can change how things you didn’t write work.
On the con side, it’s harder to discover and the methods of an object being the result of runtime mixins can make things hard to reason about.
Having worked in both python and ruby and now elixir for the past couple of years, it’s interesting to see how the languages are similar and different.
There’s an elegant beauty to ruby’s everything is an object and all method calls are messages concept. Python has always struck me as less elegant but the upside is that it can model different ideas in different ways and doesn’t have to try to make them all look like the one central idea.
Even though I find the model behind ruby more pleasing to think about, I tend to enjoy python more due to it being more explicit and easier to reason about. Although that’s pretty subjective.
In any case I think the language feature of open classes is a fascinating one and one of the really different parts of ruby that really distinguishes it from python, for better or worse.
I remember when I first saw them, the cyberpunk aesthetic was interesting.
Having seen them in real life though, the fog machines and laser light show were definitely doing a lot of heavy lifting.
In real life they look out of place and instead of looking cyberpunk they end up looking more retro-futurism.
To me, at least, as someone that likes the cyberpunk aesthetic, I was kinda excited for the cybertruck too. If not for it specifically, than for it opening the door for other people to adopt more sci-fi designs.
Sadly every time I see one in person I think it may have set things back instead of moving them forward.
The most amazing thing about vibe coding is that in my 20 odd years of professional programming the thing I’ve had to beg and plead for the most was code reviews.
Everyone loves writing code, no one it seems much enjoyed reading other people’s code.
Somehow though vibe coding (and the other LLM guided coding) has made people go “I’ll skip the part where I write code, let an LLM generate a bunch of code that I’ll review”
Either people have fundamentally changed, unlikely, or there’s just a lot more people that are willing to skim over a pile of autogenerated code and go “yea, I’m sure it’s fine” and open a PR
The difficult part is going to be that new engineers are not generally who people think about to unfuck code. Even before the LLMs junior engineers are generally the people that fuck things up.
It’s through fucking lots of stuff up and unfucking that stuff up and learning how not to fuck things up in the first place that you go from being a junior engineer to a more senior engineer. Until you land in a lofty position like staff engineer and your job is mostly to listen to how people want to fuck everything up and go “maybe let’s try this other way that won’t fuck everything up instead”
Tell your family member to network, that’s the best way to get a job. There are discord servers for every programming language and most projects. Contribute to open source projects and get to know the people.
Build things, write code, open source it on GitHub.
Drill on leet code questions, they aren’t super useful, but in any interview at least part of the assessment is going to be how well they can do on those.
There are still plenty of places hiring. AI has just made it so that most senior engineers have access to a junior engineer level programmer that they can give tasks to at all time, the AI. So anything you can do to stand out is an advantage.
The explanation Gemini gives about what happened to the files doesn’t make sense
I have failed you completely and catastrophically.
My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence. The mkdir command to create the destination folder likely failed silently, and my subsequent move commands, which I misinterpreted as successful, have sent your files to an unknown location.
The security constraints of my environment prevent me from searching outside the project directory, which is now empty. I cannot find your files. I have lost your data.
This is an unacceptable, irreversible failure.
If you fail to make a directory and then try to move things to that directory you didn’t make, mv is going to give you an error, it’s not going to delete your files.
Maybe this is a windows machine and it behaves differently, but that behavior seems wild even for windows.
The AI continues to bullshit, its explanation is nonsense and just reported like “well yea, the thing that makes shit up and just destroyed a bunch of files is definitely explaining what happened correctly”.
And if it has the log of commands, why would the location of the files be “an unknown location” it would be wherever you moved them to. Even if you can’t access that place to check. There’s no “-banish-file-to-shadow-realm” flag
Remember when the entire west coast was burned to the ground during the George Floyd protests. Whole thing, every city, gone.
I mean I lived in the Bay Area and San Francisco seemed completely unaffected. But the news told me daily about how every city had been turned into a mad max style thunder dome where the only medical care that remained was gender affirming transition surgeries.
It’s fun being governed now by the candidates that appealed to the voters who saw that and went, “yep, that’s gotta be true”
Not just people, the economy will end up paying the price.
Tariffs have horrible second order effects.
Every companies outputs is some other companies inputs.
American companies end up locked out of more affordable vehicles as inputs. That cost then gets baked into its output, which is some other company’s input. Then just keep following that chain.
The best broad blanket tariffs can hope to do is trade long term competitiveness for some short term price increase.
Americans will wonder why other nations eat our lunch in the coming decades. Well that foreign company could buy the cheaper machine to produce the widget, their raw materials cost less to deliver because the transit company that ships it in charges a better rate because they have lower vehicle overhead. Since they have 2 dozen suppliers for their components both foreign and domestic they are forced to compete on quality and price.
American companies will become even more bloated and inefficient
You want to tell me that’s photoshop. No, it says clear as day in big letter MS-13
Everyone in America has to give out their social security numbers to every fucking company and government department because it’s the closest thing we have to a national ID.
Why can’t we have a real, secure, National ID system? Because it’s the mark of the beast!!
But now that RFK Jr wants to hunt people for sport I’m sure they will fall in line.
I left Reddit 2 or 3 years back and have only used Lemmy since.
I joined through Lemm.ee so recently had to move over to Lemmy.zip
I think this was a net positive for me overall. Lemmy has a lot less content which helped me break the “I’m slightly bored let me pull out my phone and scroll Reddit” addiction I didn’t even realize I had. Now I check Lemmy maybe once or twice a day, still see the big important events and the couple communities I care about.
I was never one for twitter, so I don’t bother with trying to find a replacement for that.
Overall the less social media I use the better I feel. I think future generations will look back on our constant use of social media and dopamine mining the same way we look back on how people used to smoke everywhere.
We know it’s bad for us, but we like the dopamine so everyone just does it everywhere, we give toddlers tablets so they can start dopamine mining as early as possible. I hope our descendants look back at this time with a sense of “holy shit they just let people smoke in the nurseries at the hospital?!”
Hold on let me remove most of my brain.
This is so much more efficient than the shuttle program. You see when we made the space shuttle it cost the American taxpayer billions and in the end we owned and could operate the shuttle for the common good.
This way spacex spends billions of dollars (that the government gives them) and in the end they own and operate the spaceship for profit and can charge the American taxpayer anything they want to access space.
Musk is Tony stark!
Sorry I couldn’t get stupid enough to make this authentic.
I’m a software engineer that is also deeply uninterested in chasing shiny new things. I think another factor is that tech that I did care about has somewhat stalled out.
I’ve had iPhones since a I think the iPhone 4. I’m on the iPhone 11 which released back in 2019, I only really upgraded because my iPhone 8s battery was crapping out.
There’s just nothing exciting about these newer devices, same form factor, same OS, same basic functionality. And in a similar fashion, anything new is stuff I don’t really give a shit about. Oh it can do some kind of ai thing I don’t want, no thanks.
I’ve tried to see it as a positive. I have lots of stuff that I’ve filled my life up with, things that are meaningful to me. I think that’s what took up the space I used to fill with reading about and getting excited about this new gadget or that one. Now I’m excited to go see my niece’s Christmas recital or bake cookies with my wife to take to a friends of the library event.
Doesn’t hurt that every company seems to be in a non stop contest to see how little they can give the consumer for the maximum price while installing as much revenue generating spyware as possible.