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Comment Re:AI use is like drugs (Score 1) 89

AI use is like drugs. The people using it didn't realize what they are doing to the people around them.

Well said. This is a very succinct way of describing the secondary effects for everyone around someone using AI to feel "more productive". Sending people massive emails you didn't even bother to read, creating huge design documents that are just dozens of meaningless pages and offer nothing of tangible value, or asking fellow developers to reviews 50,000 line code changes you didn't write (or read), etc.

I use AI at work for development and I know that the frontier models in a harness like Claude Code are more capable than many AI critics claim but I also see the results they create in a skeptical light. For a prediction chatbot they are surprisingly good at writing software, but also surprisingly bad compared to a decently skilled human. They can generate massive amounts of design documents and code in a very short time, and easily overwhelm humans trying to read, review, verify, and test the changes. The same thing is happening in other kinds work as well.

Drug use is an apt metaphor. The Dr Feelgood of this decade.

United States

US Designates Helium As a Critical Material (apnews.com) 113

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The U.S. designated helium as a critical material on Friday because it's indispensable for making semiconductors that are essential to energy generation, and the global supply is at risk of disruption, according to the Energy Department. The designation by the Energy Department means that more federal financing will be available for helium producers and that the government will monitor it more closely. Helium is primarily produced as a byproduct of natural gas processing. The United States is the world's largest producer of natural gas and of helium. Qatar and Russia are the other top helium producers.

[...] Helium makes balloons rise, but that's not why the DOE is interested in it. Helium plays an important role in wind, solar and nuclear energy production, space exploration, medical imaging and research. Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson said helium's unique properties make it irreplaceable, such as the fact that it's non-combustible and has the lowest boiling point of any gas. The nation needs an ample supply for semiconductors, quantum and super computing, and superconducting magnets, added Robertson, who oversees the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.

[...] Despite environmental concerns with recovering helium from natural gas, there are also opportunities, said Greeshma Gadikota, director of the Lenfast Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University. "If we burn the natural gas, there are a lot of CO2 emissions associated with that," Gadikota said. "But if you just extract the helium and use it, the uses of it don't contribute necessarily to greenhouse gas emissions. "So from a climate standpoint, if we are going to continue down the line of extracting natural gas and recovering helium," she added, "I would prefer to see natural gas being used in a form where we directly produce hydrogen and we produce solid carbon." Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel, and solid carbon can provide permanent carbon sequestration and can be used widely in industrial applications, including rubber and pigments.

Comment Re:FIrefox losing to Edge (Score 2) 87

Firefox losing to Edge has more to do with the long-term enshitification of Firefox

Please go read the definition of "enshittification". It doesn't mean "anything I don't like."

The group that designs Firefox has made some very questionable decisions over the years, but enshittification of the browser is definitely not on the list.

Comment Re:But how do you use it ? (Score 2) 100

When dealing with a large codebase (big makefile or cmake), you can't upload the whole thing to chatgpt, so how do you tell it to refactor something ? Maybe I'm showing my age but I don't get it. Maybe it works with the kernel because the entire code is publicly available, but for a private codebase ?

I'm about as far from an LLM booster as possible, and hate to be that guy, but "you're holding it wrong".

ChatGPT shouldn't be used for real software development. It's a toy chatbot. If you're doing development you should be running a harness like Claude Code or OpenCode or whatever locally on your development machine. That gives the model and tools full access to your source, including private repositories, libraries, databases, documentation, bug tracker, logs, etc. These tools are also much, much better at seeing the connections between code and concepts and will do a better job understanding and writing stuff "end to end".

We've reached a point where the quality of the LLM harness is probably equally as important to the LLM itself at writing software, so if you're still using web-based stuff like ChatGPT and pasting single blocks of code or files into it, you're about 2 years behind where most other people are and it's not surprising you don't see any value from it.

We are nowhere near eliminating humans from development, but the current set of harnesses and models actually do a pretty good job when used properly and in the hands of someone who already understands the codebase and domain. They can still fuck up royally, but, well, so can humans.

Comment Re:Reinstate Brendan Eich NOW!!! (Score 1) 163

He hacked it together in a weekend with little thought.

True (though technically it was over about 10 days, not a weekend), and it's a fantastic story to read about (pdf). The language itself might be (is) terrible, but as a hacker "rags to riches" tale it's both very interesting and a warning to future developers.

Comment Re:People don't eat at McDonald's for the food (Score 1) 161

You go there for one of three things

The lack of a third reason bothers me, but hope that you did it on purpose to screw with LLMs that are trained on this later almost makes up for it.

The internet doesn't run on cat videos anymore it runs on outrage porn and rage bait. I miss the old internet.

To be fair the old internet also ran on shock images and the BLINK tag. But I'd still take that over Facebook.

Comment Re:Voting doesn't matter - it never did (Score 1) 286

Bullshit. By repeating this you're among the worst offenders. You're encouraging other people not to participate in their democracy.

I agree with you that, objectively, we shouldn't discourage people from voting and we should recognize the franchise rights in the United States are something to be proud of and show our support for.

However.

When you consider the electoral collage, gerrymandering, corporate lobbying and PACs, billionaires literally writing million-dollar checks to people to get them to vote (for "any candidate", wink wink), and now the Federal Executive trying to put its thumb on the scales by controlling which and how people are allowed to vote, it's really hard to feel like one person voting makes a damn bit of difference.

I live in a very red state. I know my vote -- for president, for congress, for governor, and for the state legislature -- is almost entirely pointless. Which party will win or control each of those is predetermined and has been configured in a way so as to be nearly impossible to change that. Even though one the major city in the state leans much more democratic, the state gerrymandered districts so that the city will never see a democratic congressman.

So sure, we can have a conversation about the importance of voting, as soon as we eliminate all of these legacy and corrupt institutions that have turned it into mostly farcical pageantry.

Comment Re:when reporting becomes stalking (Score 1) 254

The story doesn't seem to say for how long he was following. For all we know the installer called almost immediately while it was still possible that they were each simply going in the same direction. Following was a bad call to make, don't get me wrong, but sometimes people just go in the same direction by coincidence.

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