> cacophony of notifications, emails, texts and phone calls
This is not true for me at least. All group chats are default muted. I rarely get phone calls and maybe a handful people text me on a given day. My email is actively curated, almost no business has perms to email me and standard outlook spam filters seem to work well enough.
I don't think any other apps have perms to make notifications. None of it is important.
> I've spent hours and hours unsubscribing, deleting, uninstalling, toggling settings, but then I find myself reinstalling, resubscribing
why do you find yourself re-connecting to the notification spam? The real root of your problem is there, not anywhere else.
> hand us the list of the evil countries that we should invade.
All the ones not currently complying with the will of the greatest nation on earth. Obviously
It's for their own good!
In all seriousness. Perhaps you missed the tone of my previous comment? There is nothing you can do past a certain point other than either embrace the colonial attitude or let the country do its thing. There are no more levers to pull.
Maybe I'm being naive, but it has always seemed pretty trivial to me to use the post-security shops to assemble something that will meaningfully damage the aircraft - so the whole thing smacked of theatre.
If you have good tests, certain types of change can be merged without manual testing. One problem specific to AI is that it has a tendency to game/bypass/nerf/disable tests, as opposed to actually making the code do the correct thing.
> It is almost impossible to escape the constant barrage of takes and news headlines these days without being a total luddite
It really isn't that hard, if I'm looking at my experience. Maybe a little stuff on here counts. I get my news from the FT, it's relatively benign by all accounts. I'm not sure that opting out of classical social media is particularly luddite-y, I suspect it's closer to becoming vogue than not?
Being led around by the nose is a choice still, for now at least.
I think the comment you're replying to isn't necessarily a question of opting out of such news, it's the fact that it's so hard to escape it. I swipe on my home screen and there I am, in my Google news feed with the constant barrage of nonsense.
I mostly get gaming and entertainment news for shows I watch, but even between those I get CNN and Fox News, both which I view as "opinion masquerading as news" outlets.
My mom shares so many articles from her FB feed that are both mainstream (CNN, etc) nonsense and "influencer" nonsense.
Right, and my point is how easy opting out actually is.
I have no news feed on my phone. I doubt on android it is any harder to evade. Social media itself is gone. The closest I get to click-bait is when my mother spouts something gleaned from the Daily Mail. That vector is harder to shift I concede!
Fair points on both fronts! Though I think you may be conflating simple with easy. Removing social media from one's life is certainly simple (just uninstall the app!), but it's not that easy for some people because it's their only method of communication with some folks. I mostly don't use SM but I log onto Instagram because some of my friends only chat there, same with Facebook.
> Programming is just shifting to a language that looks more like Jira tickets than source code.
Sure, but now I need to be fluent in prompt-lang and the underlying programming language if you want me to be confident in the output (and you probably do, right?)
No, you have to be fluent in the domain. That is ultimately where the program is acting. You can be confident it works if it passes domain level tests.
You save all the time that was wasted forcing the language into the shape you intended. A lot of trivial little things ate up time, until AI came along. The big things, well, you still need to understand them.
> You can be confident it works if it passes domain level tests.
This is generally true for things you run locally on your machine IF your domain isn't super heavy on external dependencies or data dependencies that cause edge cases and cause explosions in test cases. But again, easier to inspect/be sure of those things locally for single-player utilities.
Generally much less true for anything that touches the internet and deals with money and/or long-term persistent storage of other people's data. If you aren't fluent in that world you'll run software built on old versions of third party code with iterations to make further changes that have to be increasingly broad in scope against a set of test cases that is almost certainly not as creative as a real attacker.
Personally I would love to see stuff move back to local user machines vs the Google-et-al-owned online world. But I don't think "cheap freeware" was the missing ingredient that prevented the corporate consolidation. And so people/companies who want to play in that massively-online world (where the money is) are still going to have to know the broader technical domain of operating online services safely and securely, which touches deep into the code.
So I, personally, don't have to be confident in one-off or utility scripts for manual tasks or ops that I write, because I can be confident in the domain of their behavior since I'm intimately familiar with the surrounding systems. Saves me a TON of time. Time I can devote to the important-to-get-correct code. But what about the next generation? Not familiar with the surrounding systems, so not even aware of what the domains they need to know (or not know) in depth are? (Maybe they'll pay us a bunch of money to help clean up a mess, which is a classic post-just-build-shit-fast successful startup story.)
You can get some of the way writing prompts with very little effort. But you almost always hit problems after a while. And once you do, it feels almost impossible to recover without restarting from a new context. And that can sometimes be a painful step.
But with learning to write effective prompts will get you a lot further, a lot quicker and with less friction.
So there’s definitely an element of learning a “prompt-lang” to effective use of LLMs.
> Sure, but now I need to be fluent in prompt-lang and the underlying programming language if you want me to be confident in the output (and you probably do, right?)
Using a formal language makes the problem space unambiguous. That is just as much a benefit as it is a barrier to entry. Once you learn this formal language, the ability to read code and see the surface area of the problem is absolutely empowering. Using english to express this is an exercise in frustration (or, occasionally, genius—but genius is not necessary with the formal language).
> Something not selling well? Change the game rules to make that it more powerful
It probably didn't sell because it wasn't very good. So you re-balance it later and now it doesn't suck. Like, fundamentally keeping the "best" and "worst" models/armies/strategies from stagnating keeps the game interesting (and drives more sales... so depends how you look at it).
I don't think they've every been super good at balancing though, and that at least is a fair criticism - albeit a hard task given how time consuming playtesting is to get data.
I agree completely, the game would get boring if things didn't constantly change. It was more-so the way they'd go about it, not the general sales strategy. Perhaps I should have said overpowered, typically they'd intentionally overcorrect so a unit would go from too weak to way too strong.
It didn't help they had 2 very different philosophies in the creative/design department. For example if an army was getting a revamp, competitive players would pray Gav Thorpe wasn't in charge of it. Whereas other people loved how he made the game more fun and goofy.
It was definitely not just balancing rules patches for gameplay purposes - there was a clear deliberate intent to force people to buy new models. Complete with arbitrary changes to the game lore itself that accompany those updates: when I first started playing Warhammer Fantasy only the smaller lizardmen could ride the dinosaurs, and in the next edition only the larger ones (with entirely different new models) could.
By way of comparison, Games Workshop updates their Warhammer rules about twice as often as Wizards of the Coast updates Dungeons and Dragons.
Which is harder, writing 200 lines of code or reading 200 lines of code someone else wrote.
I pretty firmly find the latter harder, which means for me AI is most useful for finessing a roughly correct PR rather than writing the actual logic from scratch.
This is not true for me at least. All group chats are default muted. I rarely get phone calls and maybe a handful people text me on a given day. My email is actively curated, almost no business has perms to email me and standard outlook spam filters seem to work well enough.
I don't think any other apps have perms to make notifications. None of it is important.
> I've spent hours and hours unsubscribing, deleting, uninstalling, toggling settings, but then I find myself reinstalling, resubscribing
why do you find yourself re-connecting to the notification spam? The real root of your problem is there, not anywhere else.
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