Clearly LLMs are useful to software engineers.

Citation needed. I don’t use one. If my coworkers do, they’re very quiet about it. More than half the posts I see promoting them, even as “just a tool,” are from people with obvious conflicts of interest. What’s “clear” to me is that the Overton window has been dragged kicking and screaming to the extreme end of the scale by five years of constant press releases masquerading as news and billions of dollars of market speculation.

I’m not going to delegate the easiest part of my job to something that’s undeniably worse at it. I’m not going to pass up opportunities to understand a system better in hopes of getting 30-minute tasks done in 10. And I’m definitely not going to pay for the privilege.

Yes, I know I’m doing something illegal (stealing and reselling IP) but it’s in service of something legal (continuing to be rich). You can’t punish me for doing bad things while rich, it would undermine your entire legal system.

The article does not mention paraplegia.

I think we all know where this is going.

1. The Brainchip is trendy in Silicon Valley but doesn’t do much yet. The company says cyber-superintelligence will be available in a year, tops. Investors are pouring billions into it. Everyone says you need to hop on the trend now or you’ll be obsolete in six months.
2. It’s been two years. The Brainchip still struggles to control a mouse or search Google. Everyone’s lost interest in building apps for it. Many users are reporting severe migraines, but the company says there’s nothing to worry about.
3. The Brainchip pipes three unskippable ads directly to your optic nerve every time you go to the bathroom. Notifications ping your brain all day long. You can get it removed if you’ve got $80k to burn, but there’s a high risk of postoperative stroke.

Yeah, no, I’m not putting anything in my brain that isn’t open-source from end to end. And even then probably nah.

I used to waste a lot of time on YouTube Shorts, which is the absolute worst way to waste time. I finally deleted the YouTube app completely, and aside from a couple days of withdrawals, it’s been all positive.

I mean, I don’t know anything about the latest video games or movies anymore. And I have to rely on my family to send me Ryan George skits. But that stuff wasn’t actually making my life better, it was just filling it up.

If I want to watch something interesting on my phone, I’ve got Nebula. It doesn’t have all the same content, but it turns out that doesn’t matter a lot when you just want to be entertained/educated for a couple minutes. (It also doesn’t have a comment section. Or Shorts. So yeah, unequivocally better.)

As a professional dev (okay, okay, forgot where I was, aren’t we all) I approve of this reasoning

For anyone on the “invest in the complete opposite of whatever Don Jr. is doing” plan, there are lots of good ESG’s you can put your money in. Firms like Calvert are gonna perform slightly worse than VTSAX, but it’s typically not more than “slightly,” and at least your money isn’t funding oil cartels, Meta, Amazon et al.

The Microsoft store app that nobody uses? Oh god, anything but that

It’s all hallucinations. It’s just that some of them happen to be right

Or!—hear me out—one woman whose 8 co-gestators were just laid off by someone who doesn’t understand what their job was

“If we run terabytes of text through a statistical model, then spend millions of man-hours labeling outputs, we can approximate the way humans respond to a prompt.” –OpenAI, more or less

Wow, what a surprise. I’ll do you one better: if you take me to a river, I can tell you where the water is going to go next! Maybe we can get some VC money by promising to deliver clean water to every business in the world without all the expense of pipelines and plumbers? I mean, just look at all this water. It may not go where you want right now, but let us dump sewage in it for a couple years and who knows what it’ll do.

This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s

Kavita for my ebook collection—mostly tabletop RPGs, but some comics and sci fi as well.

I don’t actually use the web interface that often. I add books to my Kavita library, then scan the OPDS feed into my scratch-my-own-itch mobile app, Bookoscope, and download whatever I want to read onto my tablet from there.

Side note, PDFs are the absolute worst. Even reading them on a full-sized tablet is incredibly annoying. Anybody have any tips/tricks/apps for that?

Mosquito baiting

Your novel may be well-written. I wouldn’t risk a guess. All I know is the worst writers I’ve ever met have also been the most convinced they were God’s gift to literature.

That said, I can sympathize. Selling a story is hard, and luck is a huge factor. If the next Hemingway is out there, they’re probably getting sick of hearing “sorry, this story didn’t work for us. We wish you the best in placing it elsewhere.”

“If you knew what it was, you’d be using it already.”

This is a great concept. I hope it catches on.

I participate in a pledge called #50forFOSS. On the first Friday of every month, I choose an open source project and give the maintainer $50, no strings attached. It lets me target small projects that may not have a lot of users, but are valuable to me, as well as bigger ones with more expenses. My mindset these days is that I need to insist on paying for the software I use, because if I don’t, someone else will (i.e. advertisers and venture capitalists, which is bad) or no one else will (i.e. abandonware, which is worse).

Disclaimer: I started #50forFOSS and there’s a very small group of us who are doing it.

Mine is yeast, but if Chonkus saves us all I guess it can have second place

Tap-to-pay on credit card chips, too.

I’m with you there. The only explanation that makes sense to me is if they’re really hurting for cash. And if they are, I honestly don’t have a solution that falls between “go bankrupt” and “sell out our users in the least noxious way we can come up with.”