Yup this is the real world take IME. Code should be self documenting, really the only exception ever is “why” because code explains how, as you said.

Now there are sometimes less-than-ideal environments. Like at my last job we were doing Scala development, and that language is expressive enough to allow you to truly have self-documenting code. Python cannot match this, and so you need comments at times (in earlier versions of Python type annotations were specially formatted literal comments, now they’re glorified comments because they look like real annotations but actually do nothing).

Holy shit you’re right, I’m an idiot. Thanks for helping me shift my perspective.

If you didn’t have an agenda/preconceived idea you wanted proven, you’d understand that a single study has never been used by any credible scientist to say anything is proven, ever.

Only people who don’t understand how data works will say a single study from a single university proves anything, let alone anything about a model trained on billions of parameters across a field as broad as “programming”.

I could feed GPT “programming” tasks that I know it would fail on 100% of the time. I also could feed it “programming” tasks I know it would succeed on 100% of the time. If you think LLMs have nothing to offer programmers, you have no idea how to use them. I’ve been successfully using GPT4T for months now, and it’s been very good. It’s better in static environments where it can be fed compiler errors to fix itself continually (if you ever look at more than a headline about GPT performance you’d know there’s a substantial difference between zero-shot and 3-shot performance).

Bugs exist, but code heavily written by LLMs has not been proven to be any more or less buggy than code heavily written by junior devs. Our internal metrics have them within any reasonable margin of error (senior+GPT recently beating out senior+junior, but it’s been flipping back and forth), and senior+GPT tickets get done much faster. The downside is GPT doesn’t become a senior, where a junior does with years of training, though 2 years ago LLMs were at a 5th grade coding level on average, and going from 5th grade to surpassing college level and matching junior output is a massive feat, even if some luddites like yourself refuse to accept it.

In my line of work (programming) they absolutely do not have a 52% failure rate by any reasonable definition of the word “failure”. More than 9/10 times they’ll produce code at at least a junior level. It won’t be the best code, sometimes it’ll have trivial mistakes in it, but junior developers do the same thing.

The main issue is confidence, it’s essentially like having a junior developer that is way overconfident for 1/1000th of the cost. This is extremely manageable, and June 2024 is not the end all be all of LLMs. Even if LLMs only got worse, and this is the literal peak, it will still reshape entire industries. Junior developers cannot find a job, and with the massive reduction in junior devs we’ll see a massive reaction in senior devs down the line.

In the short term the same quality work will be done with far, far fewer programmers required. In 10-20 years time if we get literally no progress in the field of LLMs or other model architectures then yeah it’s going to be fucked. If there is advancement to the degree of replacing senior developers, then humans won’t be required anyway, and we’re still fucked (assuming we still live in a capitalist society). In a proper society less work would actually be a positive for humanity, but under capitalism less work is an existential threat to our existence.

Not all gamers are triple A gamers. I’d call myself an avid gamer (I used to put in easily 80 hour weeks gaming, now it’s almost always lower, but I’ll still go on gaming binges during long vacations or holidays).

The vast, vast majority of my time has been WoW and LoL. I have played other games throughout the years, but usually in the same genres (mmo/moba).

A lot of these games have entry fees of below $70. Right now most of my gaming time is cata classic, and that requires $15 a month. Over time that will obviously add up, but everything adds up overtime, and $15 a month is not prohibitively expensive for most people. Also it’s really only $15 for the first month, just by leveling in cata classic to max you make enough to buy a wow token, and can easily pay $0 a month every month by just using in game currency.

20 year olds are not generally getting night terrors from watching disturbing content on tiktok. They’re not losing sleep, or coming away with genuine psychological scarring. We don’t need government regulations to control media content for the sake of literal adults. And children in theory should already have their content moderated by the correct degree by parents, not the government.

It’s just content I find dumb

If you watch anything on YouTube that you don’t think is dumb, there is stuff on TikTok you also wouldn’t find dumb. I don’t use TikTok either, but I think you genuinely underestimate how much content there is, and overestimate how uniform that content is.

Considering the country that runs it (…)

ByteDance already stores U.S user data within the U.S, allows third party firms to scrutinize its data privacy policies far more than any other U.S media group, and has come back with a clean bill from groups like Citizen Lab (a Canadian research lab). No U.S userdata goes to the Chinese government.

Government officials know this, they’re just putting on a show. Leaked phone calls have made this clear, the actual issue is the lack of policing around the kinds of content served. ByteDance is not aligned with U.S foreign policy interests like Meta/Google are. They are more than happy to showcase the horrors of the apartheid, genocidal state of Israel, and that’s having a real impact on the literal more than half of Americans that use TikTok.

It’s clearly against the YouTube T.O.S

Videos against YouTube’s T.O.S of the October 7th attacks have been on the platform since October of last year. They’re much more strict about removing videos showcasing the much larger-in-scale violent acts done by Israel than anything done by Hamas. TikTok isn’t. This isn’t a coincidence, and the U.S needs TikTok to fall in line here.

If they don’t young people will continue to hold extreme views, like bombing tens of thousands of children in an open air prison that has been violating the GCIV since 2007 is somehow problematic. They need the American public to have the understanding that Palestinians are simply human animals; they’re savages that need to be put down. Not unlike native americans.

Towards the end of the culling, when enough of the population has died to no longer pose a threat, they’ll give them small territories like the U.S did with native americans and feign sympathy. Imperialism hasn’t changed.

When we say younger, we might just be talking about different age groups. I imagine 16-30, and in that age range you’re not likely to come away with severe psychological scarring, but you will be deeply upset and that’s a good thing (we shouldn’t ignore genocide, we should be upset by it). Being upset leads to change.

If you’re talking about like 10 year olds watching it, sure I can agree. They can’t really do anything about it. They can’t go out and protest, or advocate for change, or vote, etc. Plus they’re much more likely to have genuine scarring. Issues sleeping, night terrors, trouble concentrating, etc.

As for “that content is dumb”, I assume you’re talking about tiktok in general. And again, for some people it’s definitely not dumb. People get served different things. Tiktok isn’t a platform trying to do good in the world, like any other social media platform it’s trying to drive engagement. However, it’s one of the few social media platforms outside of the U.S media interest groups, and that’s why the U.S is either banning them or forcing them to sell.

The end goal is to censor all of that raw footage of genocide, because it changes views. When you can hide behind rhetoric and not show how horrific the mass bombings are, you get a lot more leeway. That’s good for Israel, and why AIPAC and other Israel lobbies are the main forces behind this push in the U.S. In the end, the ban is bad for humanity (will allow the genocide to escalate without public backlash), but will be good for Israel and U.S elites.

Yes, genocides are emotional. Watching children being blown up is something that should upset you. That’s actually happening in the real world.

Emotion isn’t the only thing that should inform your decisions, but pretending like you shouldn’t be upset at watching kids being blown up, or begging for their parents, or whatever else have you is just foolish.

Yeah fuck people who are against animal abuse and actually live out their principles.

Like you could at least say “preachy vegans”. This is still problematic, because it ignores that everyone is preachy about issues they understand are immoral (we’re all preachy anti-racists, anti-rapists, etc.)

But just saying “vegan” is wild.

I don’t use tiktok, but some people have unusually based tiktok feeds. They can get direct footage from the genocide happening in Gaza, for example. I never get that recommended on YouTube, despite my very obvious socialist leanings, watching pro-Palestine content, etc.

This is the actual reason tiktok is being banned (if they don’t sell) after the election. One of the largest lobbying groups in America, AIPAC, in probably the most well-funded policy categories (pro-Israel policies) backs most of Congress. They’ve determined tiktok has far too much influence on American youth, and has made the Israel/Palestine divide a young/old divide more-so than a left/right divide.

There’s already a strong correlation between political leaning and age, which is problematic for the future of the fascist movement in America, but this issue falls outside the norm. You’ll find a lot of young conservatives calling for an end to the needless killing of civilians. They won’t call it a genocide because admitting Israel is a genocidal apartheid state is too far for them, but they can at least admit killing tens of thousands of children is not the right path here.

That kind of extremism (e.g not greenlighting any amount of culling of “human animals” Israel feels it needs to do) is unacceptable to the pro-Israel lobby, and they’re not used to getting this kind of pushback from the American public.

As someone who has primarily used spaces, I still use the tab key. I sincerely hope most space users understand that your editor can expand your tab key into spaces, and people aren’t genuinely going around spamming their spacebar 2->16 times for various indentation levels.

Do they keep the male chicks? This is pretty rare, the vast majority of “local” egg farmers either macerate baby males alive or sell them to someone else to raise for a few months before slaughtering.

Yes but in different ways depending on the country. The U.S has a pretty clear analogue, the Native American genocide.

The main difference between Israel/Palestine and the U.S/Native Americans is the former is happening currently, the U.S has already successfully completed the genocide on their natives, while Israel is in the middle of its extermination.

Germany also clearly has the Jewish Holocaust, but they weren’t successful in WW2, so that genocide didn’t get white-washed and instead was shamed to paint a clear good guy/bad guy narrative, despite the Nazis open praise of the U.S for our successful extermination of the natives, U.S business interests aligning with Nazis before and during the war, and the U.S trying to stay neutral between the Allies and Axis powers until Japan forced the U.S into action.

This is the natural order, yet paraplegics live, why? Because we live in a society that attempts to circumvent the natural order in many ways, for the good of all.

You should take a broader materialistic look on society, who does the work (the working class), who benefits from the work (the owner class), and instead of focusing on amping up people to devote their lives to serve the interests of capital, instead focus to reframe the goals of society to serve the interests of workers, which includes working less, or even not at all. Work is not labor.

we have to take Trump at his word

No we don’t, I’ve never done this and I’m not going to start now. He’s already tried and failed to seize power as a sitting president. He’s proven he’s too incompetent to become a fascist dictator.

I won’t go as far to say as it’s literally impossible, but the fact that so many liberals now believe in Trump’s ability to overthrow the government just as much as his own supporters is baffling. He’s not a reliable source of information. He’s not intelligent, and he’s not capable. He’s an old, pathetic moron that is on the verge of dying due to age, not some capable fascist mastermind.

If the Democrats have any self-interest in holding power, they’ll actually try strategies to regain power. If they lose in 2024 by a percentage that is covered by the green party, they could conclude it’s easier to go left and get Green members rather than pull people from the Trump cult. I’d agree with these future Democrats, I think you’d have very, very little success pulling people from the Trump cult.

Especially if the people who voted green in 2024 have previously voted Democrat, it showcases that these people are willing to go Democrat if certain material concessions are made.

To continue on this, the spoiler effect is a shorterm strategic problem, not necessarily a long term one.

There absolutely is a strategic difference between

• 52% Republican

• 48% Democrat

and

• 47% Republican

• 43% Democrat

• 10% Green

The former tells Democrats their only option is to move right to resecure some Republican voters. The latter tells Democrats that they have the ability to also resecure votes from the left by making concessions that to Green Party politics.

People who say these two situations are literally identical are being disingenuous or ignorant. Even if the same number of Democrats/Republicans voted in both, and the only difference is people who didn’t vote instead voted green, this results in actual differences in signals and potential future policies.

tldr: voting third party is not identical to not voting, even strategically.

Linux is a far more reliable operating system at the kernel level, which is why the vast majority of the Internet runs on Linux, and is very stable compared to anyone’s personal computer (no matter O.S). It’s also lighter weight at its core, which is a big plus for servers.

The thing about Linux desktops that tend to be finicky is interop with some proprietary software (e.g nvidia drivers) or desktop environments (gnome can freeze/crash if you like running bleeding edge before bugs are ironed out). Windows has issues too however, free software often literally doesn’t run on Windows (requiring WSL, the same way games on Linux require wine), and the desktop environment is essentially indistinguishable from the base operating system. When you get a desktop environment crash on Windows, your system will BSOD and restart with no recourse, in Linux I can ssh into my still functioning computer and kill my DE, or drop to the TTL and do the same thing.

The end might not seem like a big deal for some people (who cares if you have to restart by a button press or kill your DE and login, they’ll take a similar amount of time), but for someone like me where reliability is a big concern (as in, uptime for the half a dozen services/containers I run for people), this is great. People watching media off of jellyfin don’t have to stop because of a DE bug, but on Windows a BSOD would stop their media (and within the last week we’ve had several BSODs on Windows PCs due to bugs relating things like adaptive sync or sometimes just unknown reasons).

For what it’s worth I also game exclusively on Linux, vk3d, dxvk, and proton are godsends. Somethings don’t work, developers who won’t flip the switch for EAC (e.g Fortnite), but for me the games I play always worked. This will actually change soon, Vanguard is coming to League and that only works on Windows, but also probably not my last install of Windows (I tried W11 when it came out because I’m just curious about new tech), but I had to do a TPMBypassCheck despite having ftpm enabled in the BIOS, and afaict, at least from people I know with similar builds to me, if this happened then firmware TPM probably isn’t being picked up by W11, and that means I need to buy a TPM module or drop to W10 to play League. Plus, vanguard is an intense rootkit with full 24/7 access to your O.S so I probably don’t want that installed anyway, even if it happened to work on Linux. Just going to stick to SoD for now in my free time lol

I get the appeal of saying something provocative like “EVs are dumb” (which could be initially interpreted as an advocacy for ICE cars), and then clarifying your position. Makes for an interesting comment.

However, it’s a technically incorrect way to phrase it. Buses, for example, can be ICE or electric. It’s not dumb to have public transit electric. You’re (correctly) advocating for public transit over personal vehicles, but you shouldn’t frame it as electric being a negative. In both personal and public transportation, electric tends to be far better. The only exception atm is for longer trips. Even then though, having a 20 minute break to charge every 300 miles isn’t terrible for humans as we get to stretch our legs for a bit, and it’s not so much longer than a 3 minute break every 400 miles.

Overall, no EVs are not dumb, they’re the future of both personal and public transportation. We should lean towards public, but that public should be electric.

I’ve seen a couple of posts in here about sound. It’s wild that I’ve been through dozens of distros since the start of high school (12 years ago), installed them on at least 10 machines over that time, and can’t remember one issue with sound that took more than 15 seconds to fix (e.g discord choosing the wrong sound device because I have 6 things plugged in that can technically output sound, which also happens to my friends who use Windows).

Maybe I’m just lucky. The only issues I recall having in the last decade are essentially graphics related. Either game compatibility (though proton/wine is much better than it was in 2015) or desktop environments being finicky (freezing on sleep for example), but the latter afaict was entirely due to proprietary nvidia drivers. There are proper, high-performance open source drivers in the works, so nvidia might be on par with amd in 2-3 years on Linux (which is to say literally no issues for the vast majority of people, probably far more stable than Windows).

In the same time I’ve had lots of people come to me with problems that we’ve specifically troubleshooted and found Windows to be the issue even when it seemed like hardware problems. Like monitor flickering/black screening, and plugging in a different monitor the issue goes away. On the surface it seems like a hardware problem, but both monitors worked flawlessly on Linux for literally months. Full reinstalling Windows did not fix the issue. Upgrading from Windows 10 -> 11 did not fix the issue.

Same thing with another friend’s external SSD. For some reason it wasn’t being detected on his Windows 7 install. We installed Linux and the drive was picked up. Maybe Windows 10 would’ve also picked up the drive in this circumstance, but a lot of people hated the idea of Windows 10 at the time (this was just after Windows 10 was released, when Windows 7 still had a similar market share).

There’s likely a huge percentage of problems people attribute to hardware that are actually Windows being a shitty O.S, but nobody actually checks if Windows is the problem.