"Gas-guzzler revival" - if a headline starts with hyperbole (no matter your own previously held opinion), you already know it is meant to influence, not inform. As most media these days and for a long time already. (Which increasingly causes the opposite reaction than what they hope for.) Anyhow, that off-topic rant over, what I wanted to say is:

I am not an American nor a fan of american cars. My first car, bought at the end of the last millennium, when I was young and "adventurous", however was a big 3 liter diesel truck (Toyota). Way back then I thought this will probably be my last fossil fuel vehicle, the next one would probably be electric by the hype in the media back then. And I was looking forward to the new tech, it looked exciting and promising. (I also was an early adopter of digital photography, for instance.) Exactly 20 years later I felt it was really time to replace the truck, since keeping it in good repair became more and more difficult and costly. EVs were still not a good, reliable option 7 years ago (in my locale), so again I got an ICE - a more comfortable "crossover", almost exactly what would have been termed an "estate/station wagon" 30 years ago. Went for the model with the best (claimed) mileage. It still has sufficient cargo space and ground clearance for those weekend camping/hiking trips, so a good replacement for the truck, but a little less "robust" - wouldn't take it off the gravel path. It is also wider, with less driver visibility, than the truck, and thus more difficult to park at the shopping mall or in my garage (ironic). When bought, I again had the thought that this might be my last non-EV transport. A little less enthusiastic thought.

I have a young friend who gets a lot of cars to review, in the short-video format that seems to flood social media these days. I get to experience some of them first hand, including premium chinese models. Very nice. Quality feel, lots of features, good driving experience. Constantly looking for a charger (hehe).

But that made me really rethink what I want in a car. I want independence. I do not want to buy constant subscriptions, or have to replace the vehicle every 3 years or so (my own hyperbole) due to planned obsolescence, or be monetized in some other way still to be dreamed up. I want something that is reliable, and can fairly easily be fixed by some independent mechanic in some small town if something does go wrong. Generic tires, for instance. Reliability in my country unfortunately also extends to the electric grid, which has become more and more unreliable over the last 25 years. And I do not want something that constantly sends not only telemetry, but also more onerous data like the feed from an internal camera back home. I also do not want my car to be disabled remotely just because I wake up one day to find myself in an out-of-fashion group or in a country whose regime (which I don't like on the best of days) chose the wrong side in some conflict.

You're not going to tempt me out of that need for independence with more speed or longer range or greater show-off creds. (Yeah, I don't buy Apple products either.)

So I'll probably hang on to the current car as long as possible, again. Let's see where we're at in 15 or 20 years...

Or you could have pointed to something like a Dimethyltryptamine article.

Possibly. My thinking however is that there may be a non-negligible amount of experienced coders who would notice such shenanigans and get the word out, which would junk Claude's reputation quite quick. Implicit (unverified) trust is one of the most important foundations of social engineering exploits, but at the same time a very difficult commodity to acquire.

I'd say having the camera lenses in different positions, or making the case in shiny white instead of glossy white, should count as a significant advancement.

I guess my situation applies to very few people, but I am paid by the hour (and have a certain quota of hours to fill), so I would not lift an ibrow, where Eye in this situation. (Sorry. Have to take humor where I can find it, even if it's half-assed like this....) They are quick to send out mails: office not available today, please work from home.

However, the 2 hours or so per day spent commuting to an office are not part of that hourly quota. (We mostly WFH but have a certain quota of office days to fill, for no compelling reason.) So working those hours for free, as a chauffeur for myself, just to be an actor that makes the expensive office building look occupied, sits less well with me.

There are lots of different species, with different climate requirements, growth habits, etc. Perhaps fire up your least-hated LLM and ask it to come up with a list depending on your location and intended use.

The Hive Mind has no business doing my thinking for me, because it seems the Lowest Common Denominator (or at least the Mean, then) drowns out the outliers, by sheer volume and algorithmic amplification. And the outliers are where progress is at (or doom, so you need to sift them critically, not by popularity or even your own ingrained biases).

Just last night over supper with some relations, one person bemoaned all the cat and off-the-rails preacher videos that get forwarded to her by well-meaning friends. I just smirked and told her "and then you ask me why I don't install Whatsapp".

People whose only accomplishment in life is philosophy may frown at people wanting to unplug from the collective thinking ... but all I can say is everyone's mileage varies.

Vibe coding is nothing new. I am right now looking at some component that the newest, youngest member of our team wrote. They basically took some existing code that did something similar to what was needed, and modified it just enough to "just work". Lots of nonfunctional code: it executes (and eats how many cycles), but has no effect on the result. Some identifiers have not been renamed so as to remain meaningful. Also some crude tack-ons that are pretty hard to understand and don't follow the rest of the pattern. In short, well on its way to be a maintenance nightmare.

Thankfully it is not too big, and I got the task to rewrite it to use a different library, which will require it to be fundamentally restructured in any case (it will be much simpler). Oh, the Pull Request will still show *some* relationship to the previous commit.

But it sort of reminds me of the way LLMs use existing code and mix-and-match it up without really understanding what's up or why something was done the way it was done.

Who says humans even need a life purpose? What if I just want to eat pizza, play Fortnite, and die of coronary disease?

I've gotten a fair amount of short-format videos shoved at me on social media that shall remain unnamed. Driven by a load of psychological bulldustery-driven exhortation. Be a better version of yourself. Be more socially engaging. Speak better. How to dress better, walk better, exercise better, eat better, sleep better. Make more money, rise up the career ladder, "win" at life. First world issues.

Some of it contradicting some other.

Enough, I say. Or rather: already too much. Leave me be. Because humans are not a one size fits all psychology. If I want to be better informed regarding some topic, I'll go search out information on it. I'm fatigued now by The Push. I certainly do not want to be pushed by another slopcial medAI monetization engine.

I don't care about Ruby one way or the other, but I'm baffled that people still consider Stackoverflow usage relevant in the LLM coding assistant age (which parasited off of Stackoverflow et al, acknowledged). SO gradually lost its utility to me, and with it my contributions to it, long before Copilot, what with outdated and ignorant answers and the skewing caused by gamification.

Well, it's a woman. But it seems a lot of us still subconsciously attribute such a cold and calculating stance to the traditional masculine role... She also has a D in law. Makes one wonder if to company plays so much in the legal field that they need a lawyer to (co) head it. Apparently so, she's responsible for policy while the co-CEO does tech.

Well, I like products that also work together simply and seamlessly with products from OTHER brands. (I mean, it's still an ideal in many cases, and unfortunately big brands all would like to have their own walled ghett... I mean, garden.)

I have a few-years-old Garmin, in my setup the charge lasts about 10 days. It warns you when you have roughly 2 days of charge left, so you can plan a charge session. It takes 2 hours to charge, slow charging only. I usually do it when I am at work in front of my computer: I've got the time on the screen and nothing important is happening (like sleeping) that I would want stats on. Yeah, I started wearing it during sleep when I got it, due to some medical issues I would like to keep tabs on. Usually the overnight HRV (heart rate variability, which you can read up on if unfamiliar) scores are my best indicator that I should slack off a bit and give the body more leeway to recover, that an infection or other issue may come to the surface, etc. (Sleep scores don't tell me much that I don't already know.) I about just take it off when showering; if the shower is post-workout, it goes along in the shower to get cleaned of sweat.

At least someone can walk "into" your office. For many, it is open office, with constant chitchat and video calls, people movement, billboards outside the window flashing, air conditioning never reaching a comfortable level and staying at it, and the incessant "fun" or "educational" activities to presumably sweeten the return to office roster. In our "modern" office they even played "relaxing" background music over the speakers, but on loop - day in, day out; thankfully that has now stopped. I'm grateful I'm on a hybrid roster, on office days we have all but given up to get anything urgent or deep done, and we go with the flow of having lots of coffee with colleagues and "networking" and "collaborating".

While another comment mentions The Italian Institute of National Physics (I don't know why them specifically), I believe it is just as plausible that we will be spätzleified, kartoffelpuffer-mit-apfelmusified, or even racletted.