The point, in one sentence:

If you are the product, not the paying customer, then not only is there no incentive to cater to your needs, there exists incentive to make the product worse for you if it means the paying customer extracts more from you.

Users of freemium software are basically nothing more than willing cattle. Housed and fed for free only to be slaughtered.

Maybe people just can’t help themselves? I fear we can’t have a fair and free market if people are so easily manipulated.

I broadly agree with your sentiment, in particular computing equipment that I purchase and ongoing trends in tech (like smart TVs) that are abusive to consumers.

However, I find this argument not terribly persuasive in this particular case. The content of a website isn’t an extension of your property. It is not even public property. Visiting a site is voluntary. You clearly didn’t pay for accessing the site, nor was it subsidized through a social program. So exactly how should content (regardless of how trashy it is) be funded? Statements like “rights” (i.e. temporary government-granted privileges) suggest you are espousing libertarian views, but at the same time, you are not expressing willingness to pay for a service privately?

I dunno, it just comes across as demanding a handout. Meanwhile, not visiting websites that don’t meet your vision for how funding content should be done seems like a perfectly simple and reasonable approach to have for this problem.

How about we ban software in cars in general, beyond basic engine control.

If it’s such a problem, maybe we just collectively move on to ES or TypeScript nomenclature?

This is what happens when stack overflow is used for training.

Generative AI is not smart to begin with. LLM are basically just compressed versions of the internet that predict statistically what a sentence needs to be to look “right”. There’s a big difference between appearing right and being right. Without a critical approach to information, independent reasoning, individual sensing, these AI’s are incapable of any meaningful intelligence.

In my experience, the emperor and most people around them still has not figured this out yet.

Not too surprising if the people making malware, and the people making the security software are basically the same people, just with slightly different business models.

I suspect rebasing makes sequential commit IDs not really work in practice.

I think this is satire. Poe’s law is stronger than ever

You use LLMs for everything? Seems strange, as they don’t reason. They are specifically designed to mimic human speech. So they are great for tasks that require presenting information that looks intelligible, or at least are very easily testable, but beyond that you run into serious issues with hallucination fast…

Or do you mean “AI” as in data science and automation? That’s a very different thing which is a bit off topic. That Kind of “AI” is neither new nor has the hallucination/ecological/cost/training effort issues associated with it

I dunno dude, all your answers talk about “AI” in suspiciously vague terms. “I use AI to …” is the new “built with blockchain”. Skip the marketing terms and talk shop.

Sounds like neither of you watched the video. Fortunately, I did so here’s a quick summary. The thesis is that music is getting worse, for a few reasons. Author argues:

• Auto tune and other modern digital sound production tools are overused to correct pitch and timing, making music too synthetic. Real music has imperfections that makes music just sound more artificial. Basically, taking the human element out of it.
• Streaming has cheapened the value of a single song because of how easy it is to skip to another song. So arguably it is not technically just worse music, it’s our appreciation for it.

The first point has been touched on by many other people. It’s a common trend in a lot of places outside of music too. People are replaced with machines and processes in a lot of settings especially in corporations and commerce, and while that’s great for efficiency and predictability, it creates a sterile landscape devoid of human expression. This is not to say all music has this. But mass market music is a chief culprit.

The other point really resonates with me with videogames and videogame sales. You can get a dozen great steam games for the same price as a single Nintendo title, yet I probably put 10x the time into that one Nintendo title than all the other steam games combined. Had to get every bit of value out of that expensive Nintendo purchase. YMMV on this point though. I don’t stream music so I can’t say how it has affected me personally.

Terminals are powerful and flexible, but still slower than a dedicated UI to see states at a glance, issue routine commands, or do text editing.

Terminal absolutists are as insufferable as GUI purists. There is a place and time for both.

The benefit of AI is overblown for a majority of product tiers. Remember how everything was supposed to be block chain? And metaverse? And web 3.0? And dot.com? This is just the next tech trend for dumb VCs to throw money at.

Just wait till the advertisers find out the eyeballs they are paying for are also just AI sock puppets. Enshitification strikes again.

Can’t tell if you are joking. I know a lot of junior developers who think this is a legitimate solution.

The wording of the article implies an apples to apples comparison. So 1 Google search == 1 question successfully answered by an LLM. Remember a Google Search in layspeak is not the act of clicking on the search button, rather it’s the act of going to Google to find a website that has information you want. The equivalent with ChatGPT would be to start a “conversation” and getting information you want on a particular topic.

How many search engine queries, or LLM prompts that involves, or how broad the topic, is a level of technical detail that one assumes the source for the number x25 has already controlled for (Feel free to ask the author for the source and share with us though!)

Anyone who’s remotely used any kind of deep learning will know right away that deep learning uses an order of magnitude or two more power (and an order of magnitude or two more performance!) compared to algorithmic and rules based software, and a number like x25 for a similar effective outcome would not at all be surprising, if the approach used is unnecessarily complex.

For example, I could write a neural network to compute 2+2, or I could use an arithmetic calculator. One requires a 500$ GPU consuming 300 watts, the other a 2$ pocket calculator running on 5 watts, returning the answer before the neural network is even done booting.

Asking your employer for more compensation because you are exerting more effort due to inexperience isn’t so different than a AAA studio charging high fees for a crappy product because of corporate bullshit and inefficiency.

In fact, these two things tend to be two sides of the same coin.

I do OOP because it naturally encourages me to do this sort of thing: abstract complicated logic into inspectable, reusable, testable properties of an object.

Article summary: Japan’s system is not interchangable with systems outside Japan, which is a friction point for export.

I’m pretty sure Windows is a key part of their “cloud stuff” strategy. You are right that consumers are not the direct focus of Windows, since they are not the direct paying audience, and that shows in the direction Windows is going, but getting consumers to use Windows is a big part of creating corporate buy in for Microsoft cloud services. Corporate environments will shun Microsoft cloud services if employees can’t use Windows, or Windows features run afoul of corporate policies (like blanket LLM bans).