Anybody else around here long enough to remember the good ol' days when Slashdot would post (exclusively?) fake articles on April Fool's Day every year?

I notice your UID is pretty low, . . .

1418697 is pretty low? I've been around so long I actually know what ring 0 is, and why it's pertinent to this topic (crashes, not UIs).

I suggest "Layoff Phone".

To be clear, this was true over 20 years ago. (In light of which, the word "now" probably doesn't belong in the above phrase, since it implies recentness.)

Reminds me of an episode of Futurama where Fry runs into the room and breathlessly exclaims, "I got here as quickly as I could once I found out what happened a thousand years ago!"

... was pretending that Windows has value.

They were first to market, but I don't think of them as having invented the product.. The emergence of chatbots seems inevitable once the paper in 2017 was authored by several google engineers (titled "Attention is all you need")... it was just a question of exactly who and when. If OpenAI hadn't gone first, someone would have shortly after.

And, in a lot of ways even that google paper's "breakthrough" wasn't so much the tech (neural nets) but the precise adaptation of it that made it highly parallelizable.

And a necessary ingredient was tons of data, and processing power. So this couldn't have happened in a garage operation like the innovators of yore. And the biz models they're all coming up with are all cloud based -- not that I don't see the profit motivation, but so utterly to the exclusion of any offering that could guarantee privacy; all we "know" about chatbot conversation privacy is what each vendor claims at the moment,, which isn't much, wouldn't be verifiable if it was, and could change on a whim tomorrow.

For these reasons, I don't attach much "early innovator" romanticism to the players here.

:) I'm sure he puts on his pedants one leg at a time just like we do.

... and they'll smoke those long pipes while they dwell in their rooms which are slightly underground...

Whoa, we get it! Ads can be soooooo annoying. And speaking of 'lick my balls,' have you heard about The Lick-Ballz Ultimate Relaxation Kit? It’s the perfect way to tell stress and ads to just well, you know, buzz off. With soothing aromatherapy, stress balls (ironically), and a playlist that screams 'don’t bother me,' it’s everything you need to reclaim your peace. And because we really understand your pain, we’re offering a special deal—50% off your first kit if you use the code ‘F***IT’ at checkout! Hurry, reclaim your peace now!

:) What I had in mind was the tune "Mama said knock you out", by LL Cool J.
The very first line of it is "Don't call it a comeback", which came to mind when I read the slashdot title ending in "Don't call it a failure".

Don't call it a failure! I've been here for years
Rocking my subnets, putting v4 in tears
Making the packets rain down like a monsoon
Listen to the router go BOOM!
Explosions, overpowering the limit
128-bit towering throughput in it
Reach the summit, watch the NAT tables plummet
I'm gonna take the stack by storm and I’m just gettin' warm!

Perhaps to make it more obvious which one is in use? String and &String look a lot more alike than String and &str.

I suspect it's the same reason Java has Integer and int - so that it's very obvious whether you're working with an Object or a primitive.

Fourth decade here. Up until a few months ago I would have agreed with virtually all of the negative comments in here, but after a re-org I am now on a team supporting multiple AI products, and have become immersed in anything AI, including vibe coding.

For vibe coding, I've had mixed results, but I want to make a couple of important points. First, the whole vibe-coding landscape is evolving very quickly. New IDEs and CLI tools are being announced almost daily. Second, the backend architecture of these tools is also evolving very quickly. Support for MCPs (which, for example, the LLM can use to retrieve info it doesn't have internally) can eliminate a lot of hallucinations and result in higher quality results. Many of the tools now have backends that get a request, analyze it, and then delegate to an appropriate specialist LLM that is faster and provides better results than having one giant monolithic LLM that tries to do everything, i.e., Jack of all trades, master of none.

From what I've seen so far, the keys to successful vibe coding are learning the tool you're using and understanding its strengths and weaknesses, and learning how to write good prompts. Since each tool has its own strengths and weaknesses, it's good to understand when to use one vs. another for a given task. You may find that one tool is great for producing a one-shot throwaway utility, while another is best for building a website with an attractive and easy-to-use UI.

Let's not forget that GPT 3.5, the model used when openai first released chatgpt, only came out 3 years ago. We're still very early in the evolution of generative AI.

You bought an Aztek? What was your previous car, a Pacer?