... your site. But I'm tired of being yelled at for turning on enhanced tracking protection. Not blocking adds. I see Retool in my sleep by now. Just asking "Please don't track me."

Like completion of the I-5 construction project through Seattle? No one will ever believe something that outlandish.

The traffic control ones installed at major intersections, for example. They have sufficient resolution for ALPR. They caught a guy using a home brew Opticom transmitter by checking the recorded video around the logged signal preemptions and getting his plate off the picture.

Content is king. I tend to agree with you. However, I think anyone can look clear eyed the situation and see that "users" are going to do pretty much exactly as you say shortcut the content-slog with an AI answer. So, I'm still thinking web models for advertising are going to struggle as well as the web, in general.

Here's where I go off the reservation though. See, I loved the internet in the late 1990's. Everyone was going to get their own IP space. It was going to be theirs (because hey, we have 4B addresses, more than we'll ever need!). Techies and hobbyists everywhere were throwing up websites about their favorite thing. Doers were doing and sharing. Then came the hordes. I took one look at what was happening and said in 1998 "They are going to turn this into a strip mall with on demand cable." That's what happened. I've been somewhat disgusted every since but tried to hang in there. The 1998 "information wants to be free" Phrack magazine contributor is still in there somewhere, I guess, hoping for a return to 1998. No way though, if you setup a free server or a free network you're either helping the terrorists or running CSAM. They'll forever use that successfully and we'll never build shit.

However, the realist knows that "they" will ruin anything good about AI, too. It'll probably enable more tyranny that the shit-eating global surveillance network has (Uh, I mean the Internet). Any search engines or honest brokers of information will get bought up by whales and then forced to do whatever local governments allow them to do. Free speech is endangered hugely and once the lefties get back into office they are going to vote hugely for censorship and communism. So, don't get me wrong. I know things are going to hell anyway. I'm just trying to enjoy for one minute some of the schadenfreude of "Yeah, fuck that version of the web anyway. Die you advertising scumbags. You don't deserve a fucking web."

Here's another. The guy mostly vibe coded it in an afternoon and he's mostly a newbie idiot. He refactored and the MAME SGI emulator and it's about 5x the speed of MAME when I tried it yesterday because of the AI speedups in the MIPS emulation code. https://github.com/techomancer...

You're stuck in a false dichotomy. Right now things aren't at the point where someone can create a viable software product that, for example, an big-bucks "enterprise" would pay for. The software people "vibe code" without a real engineer fail for all kinds of reasons: bad security, bad interfaces, bad design, no docs, etc... However, an experienced engineer will have all that stuff tested and covered with AI. A newbie will simply point an AI at a much-to-big problem and say "write me Oracle RDBMS" then it'll spit out an unusable product.

However, when you take someone like me who started on the Zilog Z80 and MOS 6501 CPUs in ASM, programmed everything known to god and man since then, and has written his own compilers, you have a different situation. The AI becomes a huge force multiplier. It's like I have 10-20 junior programmers that require very little interaction working at 90% efficiency all day long.

I suspect because you're always such an asshole that you've already fossilized into "I hate this and I'm against it" so no amount of argument or anecdotal evidence will convince you. However, just so you know, you're being left behind, grandpa, even by other grandpas.

I'd agree, but if someone else's compiler will give me 5% better performance they are toast. I'll jump ship on them in a heartbeat and won't give even half a shit that they were trying to be "stable" or whatever. I also won't care one tiny whit that they "eschewed" AI. For me it'll just be "you started to suck wind so I left." Heart has always been with BSD, not GNU and GPL pseudo-commies. Love you Stallman, but never going to agree on that part.

Yeah, but they were turning into assholes anyway. Did you see all the shit they kept complying with after C99? I mean they are basically slowly morphing C into C++. I'm not sad. GNU and the GPL has always struck me as a bit communist, which explains why they cannot ever finish Hurd. I've been using LLVM/CLANG for many years and much prefer it. I'm a fan of BSD and MIT licenses and poo-poo the viral clause in the GPL. I won't have big debates about it, I'll just vote with my feet and release MY software with BSD licenses.

Originaly, it was supposed to be a social network for making professional contacts. A noble endeavour, to be sure. But the forces of DEI and social credit just couldn't allow that to stand. It now has added the moderation features of the echo chamber type network. I.e., if you don't conform, you're outta here.

The A.I. slop arises from attempts by users to prepare reasonably sounding commentary without getting trapped in one of the many snares of "social acceptability". A.I. would seem to be pretty good at this, seeing it's in-built tendencies to maintain social engagement. Even if that just means re-hashing the bullshit that the influencer class loves to hear. Which is probably why it is disliked by them. The self-proclaimed social leaders don't want to be side tracked engaging with 'bots while real humans look for jobs.

... stick to sinking battleships.

They just don't get it. What's needed to push the accelerator to 11 is a dev like you or I with 30 years of experience of how to get code and algos to do what you want. We have good instincts. We have great experience. We know just the algo/tool to reach for. We know when the bot is going off the deep end and designing something stupid or ill-advised. They don't realize the quality jumps we are seeing between gens is HUGE, they don't realize just how badly in the dust those who use these tools are already leaving them. I was a hater at generation 4. I'm a builder now at generation 7. No looking back, no stopping, I've got projects to build. Whiners and purists stay your corners and whine and cry about copyright etc... Useless. Meanwhile, Jlowery and I'll are building real software at a speed AND QUALITY never seen before. BTW, I'm doing it all in C, Assembler, Shell script and old school goodness languages. I find LLMs have made Rust/Go/Swift/Spacey-lefty-language-X obsolete. BUBBYE NOW folks, back to my bots and my compilers.

You do realize:

* Very few are going to win the "AI stole my work" lawsuits. They are shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic
* Even if some do it won't help others who will stay away from those fields unless truly hardcore. You going to tell your kids to be web designers or graphic artists now? Musicians? Programmers? Goooooooooooood luck with that. Tell them to go into buggy whip manufacturing, too, while you are handing out advice.
* After the 6th gen of LLM bots they got better than most coders. Myself included. Much less useful at first, crazy helpful, now.
* While you guys are whining and grousing, others are building and striving. I'd advise you you to shut the fuck up and work on a project that's now possible where before you needed a whole team.

That last one will definitely be completely ignored, but anway, no time to chat much, gotta go work on my projects!

It's more economical to build Potemkin data centers out of wood. Easier to disassemble and move them as the investors tour the new sites.

So, a pie fee?

Don't they have a large backlog of arrest warrants to work through?