I'd wager very damned few apps are ever distributed via sideloading. meta makes Facebook and Messenger available via sideloading, mainly to get around some locked-down non-Alphabet Android devices, but for the vast majority of users, if it's not on the default app store on their device, it might as well not exist.

I'm pretty certain he is trying to make a joke about shoplifting.

How thick are people here???

The idea with UBI is you CAN get a job. Getting the job does not mean you lose your UBI, which is a serious problem with welfare (which this idiot compared UBI to). This means the job can pay a lot less and still be worth taking. It also means people will gravitate more towards interesting jobs.

There are problems with UBI but you are not identifying them. As I see it there will be vast numbers of job openings, limited only by regulations needed to prevent scammers from fooling people into doing work for no or negative reward.

So every country in the Europe is not in any way socialist. Got it.

I'm not sure about that. The republican trick is to make sure everything is "means tested". This allows them to complain about cheating, and they completely ignore the bureaucracy needed to prevent cheating probably costs more than the payments. It also means the average person never actually gets one of these payments, since they would easily learn how exaggerated the "cheating" stories are. Yes you can buy lobster using EBT, but so few you will starve, and direct knowledge of this would defeat all the stories.

No that obviously won't work. If getting a job means you lose the UBI, then the job would have to offer substantially more than UBI. If UBI is enough to live on that is going to effectively mean minimum wage is huge, more than twice the rent for a single person.

Generally with UBI people can get a job and that income is in addition to UBI. The tests have shown that people do this quite willingly. It is possible the minimum wage can go way down (probably not to zero to avoid scammers fooling people into doing work for nothing) and this is kind of difficult to test (ie minimum wage was removed for people in a test, the local McDonalds would immediately lay every body off and hire exclusively the testing subjects).

Hm. Perhaps this is a use of 'grifter' I wasn't aware of.

These tests have to be means tested, since most of the questions are about the effect on lower-income people. But this is just used to select the subset of the population to test, the behavior is not "means tested" in that changes to job or income do not effect the UBI payments. IMHO this is perfectly reasonable testing criteria.

Your other criticisms of tests do apply, though the impracticality of testing the taxing effect is also a reason any accurate test has to be only of poor people. A problem I also see is that the tests tend not to remove existing payments (ie food stamps, welfare, etc) that are intended to be replaced with UBI.

Good luck fighting the robot army

Sure, if you want it to become an unusable cesspool. If you just hate YouTube and want to kill it, this is the way. Same with any other site that hosts user-provided content -- if it's popular and unmoderated it will become a hellscape in short order.

How is Geerling a "grifter"?

So you're saying that neither of the groups of people (one of which includes you) keep their eyes on the road. This directly contradicts your previous message. Cute.

The buy-now-pay-later services being used are zero interest as long as payments are made on time, so it could just be a case of people who are living paycheck to paycheck (which indicates bad financial management more than poverty) using this to smooth out their expenses so they don't have to wait for their paycheck to be able to buy groceries. It could be a significant improvement for those who used to occasionally use payday loans (which are not zero interest). These people would be better off adjusting their spending habits to maintain a buffer of their own cash instead, but if they aren't going to do that BNPL is a better option than waiting for payday before buying food or using a payday loan service.

But obviously the only reason these by-now-pay-later services are in business is because some of their customers fail to make the zero-interest payments and end up having to pay interest, and this number is high enough to make them profitable. It would be very interesting to find out what that percentage is. People who are paying interest on regular purchases like groceries are throwing money away, which is clearly bad.

Eyeline != focus. You're not keeping your eyes on the road.

The rest of your comment is basically correct, if unnecessarily negative, but this isn't. Traditional tools like diff make it very easy to see exactly what has changed. In practice, I rely on git, staging all of the iteration's changes ("git add .") before telling the AI to fix whatever needs fixing, then "git diff" to see what it did (or use the equivalent git operations in your IDE if you don't like the command line and unified diffs).

I also find it's helpful to make the AI keep iterating until the code builds and passes the unit tests before I bother taking a real look at what it has done. I don't even bother to read the compiler errors or test failure messages, I just paste them in the AI chat. Once the AI has something that appears to work, then I look at it. Normally, the code is functional and correct, though it's often not structured the way I'd like. Eventually it iterates to something I think is good, though the LLMs have a tendency to over-comment, so I tend to manually delete a lot of comments while doing the final review pass.

I actually find this mode of operation to be surprisingly efficient. Not so much because it gets the code written faster but because I can get other stuff done, too, because I mostly don't mentally context switch while the AI is working and compiles and tests are running.

This mode is probably easier for people who are experienced and comfortable with doing code reviews. Looking at what the AI has done is remarkably similar to looking at the output of a competent but inexperienced programmer.