I program now for fun, not professionally.

UID checks out.

Something changed late last year. It may just be that the shine is wearing off, but I find most of the AI products producing less quality results than they did previously.

Empirically, speaking around to a few people yeah something now somehow feels not quite as good as it used to be. I think the yes-man problem has got worse. If you're trying to find the API/argument/etc to do X it will always tell you what a great idea it is and give you the code, even if there is no way to do it. I think it's got more sycophantic and that makes it harder to break out of the doom loop to say that "tool X has no flag to do X" or whatever.

On the other hand my boss vibe coded an impressive demo last weekend. Basically a functional mockup (it was never destined to be production code). It's interesting though because he isn't non techincal, and does have some experience of web dev, enough to ask the right questions of the AI, I suppose. He was all "yeah I told it to use [list of frameworks I'd never heard of]". It does seem good at writing react components.

Well, plenty of blockchain proponents and companies do/did.

No need for lifetimes and stuff like that for "mortal" programmers...

You say there's no need, but why not? So far the known solutions are:

1. GC (large overheads, eliminates Rust from the spaces it's trying to occupy)
2. C-style #YOLO!!
3. C++ style: take the C model, automate away a lot of the complexity but with quite a few nasty holes around the edges remaining
4. That new C++ compiler that adds memory safety at the cost of overhead. Can't remember the name!
5. Rust: explicitly mark out everything that's implicit in 2 and 3
6. Ada/SPARK: you think Rust is pedantic? Your code won't compile if the compiler can't prove it meets the pre/post conditions (which include memory safety). They've started adding borrowing copied from Rust to expand what the theorem prover can prove.

What you can't have is something with the speed of C, the overhead of C and memory safety but without the hassle of Rust or SPARK. At least, no one has a damned clue how to make such a holy grail language.

If you're prepared to sacrifice full native performance with full natie memory performance, there's D with it's GC and I think it can be memory safe if the GC is there. There's the modified C++ compiler which will run slower and have some memory overhead. There's also go, which is natively compiled with a GC, but if you've come from a scripting language you might well find its facilities very weak compared to Ruby or Python.

is one of the biggest feats of mental gymnastics I've seen in a while.

Couldn't you tell from the formatting and use of dots that this guy is so high he's tethered somewhere in the stratosphere?

They elected Trump because the previous President suffering from dementia

So what you're saying is Americans love a president with dementia so much they decided to have another one? I suppose with Harris they couldn't get the dementia they so heartily craved so they had to vote Trump.

Or the other extreme, it gets colour graded for high end sets that can show a lot of detail in dark areas, and people complain that on their SDR LCD everything is black.

It seems to be the fashion now that TV is basically now unviewable unless you have a cinema grade setup, due to everything being muddy brown and grey in low lighting. But that's OK because they also make it impossible to tell what's going on by having mumbled, quiet speech with high levels of background noise.

I'm a bit younger also my parents had slight luddite tendencies, so we got a microwave in the 90s. It did come with its own cookbook. Mostly it was used as an adjunct, prepping parts like rice or veggies and so on.

I spent about as much relatively recently (inflation adjusted) as that one cost as best as I could find, and you get a heck of a lot of microwave for that amount of money now! The one downside is this model is a bit spotty for microwave mug cakes because the duty cycle is a little obnoxiously long (10 seconds). If they had it at 2s it would be the perfect machine. On the other hand they've since released the inverter version, so that probably is.

I have used it for a rapid roast: from 0 to roast dinner in 45 mintues, but with the aid of an oven too. Basically nuke the spuds, slam them in the oven, nuke the chicken and then do the same. I do find it subs in for a second oven for large cooking events like a big dinner party, but takes a fraction of the space and is much more versatile the rest of the year.

Wouldn't it be funny if all of these companies that are trying to out AI each other all go bankrupt in the arms race.

They are. The trouble is that something really shitty pushed hard by a dominant player can destroy something much much better. Enshittification in action :(

I look forwards to the posts where because Apple is not an absolute monopoly they are somehow immune to any accusations of anti-trust.

No one would ever sign up to such insane terms if Apple wasn't in such a powerful position that they could dictate such terms. In other words, their position and size in the market is such that they can enforce things that no one would be able to do without that kind of size, regardless of product quality.

Them demanding this is 100% confirmation that anti trust action is entirely warranted.

Women seem to be perfectly able to be elected Governor.

Well not al the country is ragingly sexist.

America will absolutely vote for a female president.

There is no evidence this is true.

empty-headed,

Are you telling me that someone with a functioning, full head would ramble the following in a speech about crime?

But you want to have, when they come, the leaders come to our country to sign documents that the war is over or whatever, or for other reasons, they come for trade and you want them to come through so beautifully, you ride down those roads, everything should be perfect. You shouldn't have medians falling down into the roadway, median, the metal things that are always⦠Somebody had a great lobbyist because I've never seen them look good. I've been looking at those things with the little rut, they're always broken bad, but here they're really bad. We're going to either put new or fix it and it's not expensive, it's not really expensive or we're going to fix our roads a little bit. We're going to clean up our sidewalks.

So it seems like empty headedness is only important of you're a female candidate.

NPC

Ah yes, NPCs have famously bad AI like when they coded it wrong and got the US president to salute an enemy general. Oh right NPCness only matters if you're female, got it.

whose politics are whatever is popular this week.

Ah remember when that candidate railed against Mamdani as a " a 100% Communist Lunatic", then threatened arrest and insinuated he'd have his citizenship stripped? But then immediately flipped into a complete love-in when Mamdani won referring to him as a "really great mayor"? Oh no wait that was Trump, so apparently wild flip-flopping on politics only matters if you're a female presidential candidate.

As soon as one runs who isn't a completely unlikable opportunist,

Are you telling me Trump is likeable and not an opportunist? Turns out being one only matters if you're female.

It isn't sexism that has kept women from the White House

Absolutely it is. 100%.

BuT hEr EmAiLs!!111one. Lock her up!!! Remember that? Where's the rage against Trump for not imprisoning Hegseth? Oh yeah, turns out no one actually cared about the emails. So why did they claim to?

IOW you're a massive hypocrite. Literally everything you accuse Clinton and Harris of, Trump has done 100x worse.

Turns out dementia only mattered for Biden. When the choice was between Trump with dementia and Harris who had the gall to be female and not white, a "funny laugh" is way more important than dementia.

It's almost like the MAGAts were making up excuses for voting for Trump (even they know they need excuses funnily enough).

E.g. Microwaves have become more common

I've been winging it myself. I've not really found anywhere that makes more than surprisingly basic use of a microwave, so I've been experimenting on my own.

I hate recipe sites.

You do realise what they said applies to basically every category of site? Google want to feed you their own rehashed version of other people's works so you will stay with google, seeing google's ads and google gets to keep everything.

No one is going to produce anything to anonymously feed google's bottom line. If they keep this up it will destroy the best of the internet.