Something amusing I've noticed in every one of these discussions both in the public spaces and in my discussions at work, is whenever anyone brings up any criticism of the current AI/LLMs, there are always two responses that come up before or in lieu of any nuanced discussion: (1) you're just a hater/luddite/obsolete or (2) you haven't tried the newest models!

This rhetoric hasn't changed in the five or so years I've been paying attention to this space.

Don't forget to add "don't make mistakes" to the prompt so it knows not to make any mistakes.

Sadly, I don't think this is the case. Certainly it will be for those of us *here*, because we're generally old enough to remember life before these hyper-centralized services, and savvy enough to use alternatives.

However, Discord has critical mass. It'll be hard to any individual user to leave because unless they can migrate their entire friend group, they'll be missing out on everything that group does. And given how tech illiterate or plain lazy most users are, they'll likely just take the path of least resistance and that is going to be submitting to this bullshittery.

lol they're not supposed to. You're supposed to make *them* more productive through training, knowledge sharing, and generally shaping them into what you want to see of the next generation.

Mentoring takes time and effort, and no one starts as a senior.

> if it makes the junior programmers redundant
> don't need their help anymore.

A true senior developer never "needed" the help of a junior dev to begin with. A junior developer's role is not to be some senior's personal secretary to take mundane boilerplate tasks the senior doesn't want to do. The goal is to eventually grow them into a dev capable of taking their own complex, senior-level tasks so that more work can actually be done or the senior can move on to other projects/jobs/retire.

If you see junior devs as some kind of burden to be replaced by AI, or whatever other automation or tooling, you're doing it wrong.

Even that area is getting overtaken by the smartz. As an example, last I looked at Samsung's signage TVs, the current gen offerings all had their TizenOS for at least the management smarts and some digital distribution junk.

I didn't have any NVME SSD failures until after 9/11!!!1!!

Orders of magnitude more data available for training, and natural language itself is fuzzy and leaves plenty of room for interpretation and correction on the side of the consumer.

That's one of the big reasons current "AI" is so sketch in the sciences -- precision and correctness are very important if not outright required. In art and language, errors can be tolerated or sometimes even preferred.

If this is satire and I didn't pick that up, forgive me.

But, if not... no? We have entire platforms for programming-oriented knowledge sharing that have been scraped to make the current gen of LLM tooling possible. Open source repos like github, or sourceforge; stackoverflow; the accidental meme expertsexchange; and before the more "structured" or centralized sites, we had open forums, mailing lists, and newsgroups.

Every group has its gatekeepers and assholes, but from where I stand and looking back on my experience, programming has not been one where the barrier of entry has been high. If anything, I've watched it get lower and become more welcoming as the years went on. We are not at all here because of the normies being gatekept.

> Before PornHub people actually had to pay for their pornography.

lol what? Porn has been very easy to come by without paying a dime for *at least* 30 years. Even before the mainstreaming of the internet it wasn't that hard to come by at no cost.

This law will not change that, it'll just add extra steps to the process for those ... dedicated? desperate? determined? enough.

I've hit it with the streaming sites (HBOMax and Amazon Prime straight up refused to work in LW, and Amazon only fed 720p to vanilla FF) and with one of our bank's utilities for signing/transferring documents. I imagine it'll be better or worse depending on what sites the user visits regularly, and I would also guess at this point using FF at all has a self-isolating effect by way of the user probably being more tech savvy and therefore more likely to be on sites that have devs that would care enough to make sure they follows standards and verify it works everywhere.

In my case, I just opened Edge and dealt with it, but it's still slightly annoying that I even had to switch browsers to begin with.

There are a handful of sites that I've come across that simply don't work properly in FF and are even worse in the privacy-focused variants like LibreWolf. It's basically the same issue we saw back in the late 90s/early 2000s with some sites effectively requiring IE because the web devs didn't bother following standards and/or checking if things worked in other browsers.

I, personally, would still be on 7 if it weren't for hardware support forcing me to 10 (Specifically, my CPU). The amount of fighting I have to do with Windows to get it to stop trying to update, gather and send off telemetry, or reconfigure itself out from under me in a way I don't like is exceedingly annoying. For every nice-to-have that gets added, something else I care about and/or use more becomes a holy war against the OS itself.

I'm sure I'll eventually be forced to either the latest Windows or a non-VM'd Linux install on my next upgrade; but it won't be because I've somehow been convinced Windows N+1 is finally better than what I'm already handcuffed to. Maybe someday the games I enjoy won't be tethered to Windows.

The problem here is that we're returning to the IE4 era of websites only being designed to work in specific browsers. Even as it is today, there are lots of sites that just plain don't work if you don't have a Chrome-like browser and a chunk of the scripts on the site permitted. Hell, just today on one of the sites linked from Slashdot on the article about the Switch 2, it won't load images unless you accept non-required cookies. I imagine the bar will just be moved from cookies to whatever this new data store is.

As a side concern, I wonder where this fits in with the EU rules about data privacy that led to all the cookie popups. Does it side step those in a way that let these sites and ad companies start silently tracking again?