MagicShel

Yep. I knew that and messed it up anyway. I wish they would just say profit. Who gives a fuck about raw revenue when talking about the value of a company. Unless you're talking about reducing costs to increase profits, revenue doesn't fucking matters.

I know that but somehow always read it wrong. Thanks for the correction.

Yeah, a 1.25 year ROI is insane. There has to be something going on behind the scenes. The potential anti-porn legislation would be a significant risk, I guess?

Sounds like diplomatic immunity...

We don't need to. Most of us are volunteering all of our data to Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook (and others... how is that meal deal at McDonald's? Need to track that Amazon shipment?). The government could just buy it but most likely those services are setting up API's to respond to requests so that the current administration doesn't set its sights on them. Check here to pinky-swear that you have a warrant or other authorization to the data!

Denial of Covid vaccines (& flu? Are those subject to the same 6mo placebo trial?) is 100% a targeted deadly attack on dense population centers designed to hit minorities and liberals (both of while are concentrated in cities) hardest.

That was their plan when covid first struck cities hardest and it's clear they continue to think that's a winning strategy.

If you can, I'd defer to the mid terms. That will say a lot about the direction the country is going in. America has traditionally been a great place to be, and I can't help but think we will be again in the post-Trump era. It's just a question of if there will be a post-Trump era or if we've already had our last free election.

But I understand two years is a long period of uncertainty. It feels like a decade to me.

You're not just making sure you write the letters correctly, you're also following the syntax rules of the language you're writing. And while you're writing, you're reinforcing those rules in your head.

I get where you're coming from, but I've worked with a lot of bad developers who never got the hang of this even as mid-level developers. On the other hand, I understand the utility of knowing how to do these things for ourselves. There are a number of "black-box" libraries that were just an absolute mystery to me until I tried implementing them myself and began to see these libraries are usually not complex so much as they are thorough in covering edge cases that 90% of users will never care about.

It would definitely be a shame if these tools caused new developers to bypass fundamental skill development. My only hesitation is the number of developers who should've developed those skills and never did before AI. There's something wrong either with how developers are learning or who is getting into development.

I spent a couple weeks trying to use CoPilot and at the end I still had to correct its shitty code, which either hallucinated features I wasn't implementing, or hallucinated syntax rules I wasn't using.

We are using CoPilot. As a code-completion engine it is handy. I'm much more skeptical about the new code it writes. Like you, I have not had good experiences with that.

Also, I've never heard of anyone paying $20 a month for the privilege of not writing in cursive, or being unable to write because they don't have internet. Something to think about.

You're right. Tool access is certainly something to think about. I have more nuanced thoughts, but I don't want to disagree just to disagree, you know?

I need a little more context for your question. Are we talking about what might Google fuck up and break their stranglehold on people fully enmeshed in their ecosystem? Are you talking about what can a user do to de-Google themselves? Or are you thinking about a regulatory framework to prevent user capture? Or something I haven't thought of?

I agree, but I acknowledge we could be at a "cursive writing" moment where something that was once a critical skill becomes irrelevant. That's sort of a pending question at this point.

I mean I've spent a lot of time writing regex to automate large sets of changes. Sometimes it can be a bit fiddly to get the regex just so. Like replacing direct field access with getters where you have to find the field access and change .foo to .getFoo() and the capitalization can take a couple of tries to get just right.

With AI you can literally just say "replace all direct field access (e.g. thing.foo) with getters and setters" and the AI will do it in under a second. It will still be a very useful skill to be able to do things like that with regex because not everything is so easy to communicate to the AI, but it will become less frequently needed and a lot of developers who never learned that skill will get by using AI and just doing the rare things AI can't do with repetitive keyboarding.

Surprisingly, the mistakes ChatGPT made weren't related to picture processing. Every time I've sent a picture, it has flawlessly analyzed the text (even if it's a screenshot of a massive Linux log or a screenshot with multiple windows / arbitrary text placement). The problems were more like the markdown table I created would not be reproduced perfectly with the new changes/additions. It's pretty reliable early on, but either as the chat gets longer or the table does, fidelity can be lost. Not very often, but it does happen.

Just to clarify. But I find as long as you're paying close attention and can catch mistakes or verify the output, AI does make such tasks much less tedious.

I see. So AI for gathering the information to put into the accounting/tax software?

That's a more reasonable ask, but I wouldn't personally trust AI with that. I've done something similar in games where I take a picture of something on screen and ask AI to collect all the information from many similar pictures into a table. It's definitely good enough for gaming, but it makes mistakes often enough I wouldn't sign my name attesting to the truth of anything it produced, you know?