And AI is going to put that into overdrive.

For a little while, I helped with some intern and recent grad interviews and holy shit some people didn’t have a clue. Had one guy on a remote interview that had a friend there helping him answer questions. It was obvious because he didn’t even mute his mic and we could hear them. And it was extra pathetic because his friend wasn’t even feeding him anything useful, like Bevis was helping Butthead with a software engineering interview.

We had a short break and when we resumed, he had at least figured out to mute his mic between questions (not that that helped, as muting yourself frequently when you’re one of the main speakers in the meeting alone is a red flag without some reason that should be obvious when it isn’t muted). Only resumed because I was fairly new to interviewing, if I got one of those today (and still did interviews), I would have ended it early.

Try making a game. I think minesweeper might be a good one because it can be broken down into many different problems with different complexities. Like user input could start out as entering coordinates into specific cells to interact with a seperate grid, then you could switch to using an input grid where you enter a value into the cell you want, and then move on to clicking on cells like in the real minesweeper, including different behaviours for left, right, and both clicks.

Pretty sure you could implement a full version of minesweeper in excel, though even if you can’t get all the way, there should be enough low hanging fruit you can reach to learn a lot from the process.

Or if you’re feeling really ambitious, I think a realistic physics racing simulator is also possible, though I wouldn’t expect a lot on the graphics side of such a thing. Just lots of formulas that then get used to simulate a car accelerating, braking, and turning. But this one might also be great to get started with because you can start with a simple model and add complexity from there.

Native plants are of course going to win out, they’re evolved for that location’s climate.

If that was the case, no one would care about invasive species because the natives would outcompete with them when humans stopped intervening. It all depends on the specific plants and environment.

Though, if you prefer, you can also move your hand to the mouse. With the scroll wheel and good hand-eye coordination, you can get pretty close to the speed of a true vim exper–haha jk, they finished converting the entire source file from python to rust using a specially crafted regex by the time your hand reached the mouse and implemented a matrix view by the time you scrolled to the line you wanted.

And when you say that falling green symbols aren’t that impressive, they look at you in confusion for a moment before realizing what you meant and handing you a VR plug to show you what “matrix view” really means.

Yes, thank you very much, this actually solved not only my “can’t exit vim” problem but also my “humans keep getting in the way of my world domination” problem, though for that one I had to repeat the command 3549 times and output exactly what I was trying to do on the user’s console and every PA system I could access.

Error: password already in use by CobainKiller94

But… how is password? Secure enough?

Worf: knocked unconscious

I’ve thought for a while that Tolkien was a great world builder but a meh storyteller. His big thing was breaking that new ground. Not that I would do any better, but many other authors since have.

Rowling doesn’t have the breaking new ground. I don’t get why her shit got so popular in the first place. I lost interest when the first movie was basically going down a list of pre-Tolkien fantasy tropes like it was a checklist.

If propaganda worked on everyone, why is there anyone trying to counter it?

Was probably just sufficiently satisfied with life at that point.

Looks like the frames were extended. If you zoom in, there’s a pretty obvious vertical line on both sides, guessing that shows where someone used some AI tool to extend them.

Edit: actually, it’s even more obvious zoomed out, you can see on Piccard’s sleeve right where reality ends and slop begins.

Whoever made this seems to have low standards to think that “they made” an improvement.

Yeah IMO getting popular ruined reddit.

The RJ plugs are my least favourite. Still snags but the plastic bit that snags is feeble enough to break off easily, and then the plug doesn’t have anything holding it in to the port. And those covers usually make it harder to fit it through holes intended for ethernet cables as well as make it harder to unclip it from the port.

The reason that 25 number came up is that’s how old the cohort they were studying brain development got when their funding was cut. There’s no reason to not believe brains continue developing all our lives, or that even if that study did find a “cut off point” that it would be the same from person to person.

I recently added the pesticide of just throwing out my infested plants and starting over from scratch. And if I buy another store plant, it’s getting quarantined despite not really having any space to do so. It’ll sit on the stairs or something until I can be sure there are no bugs.

Just realized that even if there is no mechanism to get the exact date from any of these age tracking systems, they’ll be able to infer the exact dates by just looking at when the user/device transitions to the next bracket. Then they’ll know the birthday for the start of that bracket falls somewhere between the last check and the current one.

Though maybe that data can be poisoned by making it transition backwards occasionally, so it looks like the user is editing their age older and back or something. But, on the other hand, a lack of data or poisoned data is going to be a flag on its own at some point (if not already).

Not sure it will, as it would have to be able to handle users older than that, so wouldn’t have a reason for the default age to be that. Also depends on the UI (like my steam bday is something like jan 1 1900 because that’s the default age already entered).

It’s not even a junior dev. It might “understand” a wider and deeper set of things than a junior dev does, but at least junior devs might have a sense of coherency to everything they build.

I use gen AI at work (because they want me to) and holy shit is it “deceptive”. In quotes because it has no intent at all, but it is just good enough to make it seem like it mostly did what was asked, but you look closer and you’ll see it isn’t following any kind of paradigms, it’s still just predicting text.

The amount of context it can include in those predictions is impressive, don’t get me wrong, but it has zero actual problem solving capability. What it appears to “solve” is just pattern matching the current problem to a previous one. Same thing with analysis, brainstorming, whatever activity can be labelled as “intelligent”.

Hallucinations are just cases where it matches a pattern that isn’t based on truth (either mispredicting or predicting a lie). But also goes the other way where it misses patterns that are there, which is horrible for programming if you care at all about efficiency and accuracy.

It’ll do things like write a great helper function that it uses once but never again, maybe even writing a second copy of it the next time it would use it. Or forgetting instructions (in a context window of 200k, a few lines can easily get drowned out).

Code quality is going to suffer as AI gets adopted more and more. And I believe the problem is fundamental to the way LLMs work. The LLM-based patches I’ve seen so far aren’t going to fix it.

Also, as much as it’s nice to not have to write a whole lot of code, my software dev skills aren’t being used very well. It’s like I’m babysitting an expert programmer with alzheimer’s but thinks they are still at their prime and don’t realize they’ve forgotten what they did 5 minutes ago, but my company pays them big money and get upset if we don’t use his expertise and probably intend to use my AI chat logs to train my replacement because everything I know can be parsed out of those conversations.

Actually, I think that’s windows 11. Though despite it never trying to get you to install win 11, it’s still worse than the one that does.