Yeah, I think every generation thinks this.

But honestly, if you haven't found anything full of human spirit and culture, that's probably on you. There's still tonnes of original music made by indie bands out there. Go looking for modern punk/reggae/ska bands that are writing protest songs. Maybe explore some of the culture of other continents--I've heard that French African music is undergoing a bit of a renaissance (and there are plenty of European french people lowkey mad about it because they never like slang coming in from outside the country).

But even the pop stuff--yeah, it's generic. It always has been. That's what makes it pop music. But they've still picked up on the last 20 or 30 years of musical trends and integrated them into their songs. The tone and musicality of the songs has shifted slightly. It's not for me either, but it's not meaningfully better or worse than the pop of the past, tbh, it's just not MY music.

AI slop is so much worse, because in general, it's ONLY copying music from a single genre. Remember that musicians today probably listened to a bunch of stuff when they were young. If they're kids of GenX, they would've heard their parents' music growing up and then integrated some of that into their own work. You get weird crossings over of genres and sometimes something interesting pops out.

Anyway, AI slop can only ever be as interesting as the average of the current corpus of human music. It has no feelings, no experiences, no struggles. It will probably never write anything as hilariously bad as 'Friday' by Rebecca Black, which came back around and accidentally became the zeitgeist for a brief period, and now is actually weirdly nostalgic for a lot of people that experienced it at the time.

C++ is also largely changed by a committee. Honestly, the best thing that's happened to C++ in its whole lifetime is that the committee started ripping features off from other languages.

Gone are the days where a language can be designed, written and MAINTAINED by a single person. I don't know why we'd even want that, to be honest. Committees are fine as long as they get the job done.

AGI can remain intransigent longer than you can remain solvent.

Winter is coming, Mark.

The problem here is that people cannot seem to understand that "private" and "privacy" are related but not the same thing. Private is what happens in my house that nobody outside should be privy to. Privacy is the illusion that everything we do is private. I liken this to being photographed and filmed in public and the Karen's crying "don't video me". No Karen, I can and WILL video you in public and there is nothing you can do to stop me.

One has no expectation of privacy in public. None. Social Media IS public. Everything on the internet is public. Some things offer more privacy than others, but if its on the internet, it can and likely WILL BE exposed.

Act accordingly.

Bonnie Blue it is!!!!!

Privacy is an illusion at best. Your data is already public. Already exposed.

That nobody cares about you enough to DOX you ... yet isn't "privacy" it is obscurity.

That belongs in a MUSEUM!

Didn't Australia lose a war against Emus?
Moas are even bigger.

On the one hand, this isn't in the job description, so...no.

On the other hand, I actually think it's useful for people that are programming systems that other people use to actually use the systems themselves in a production environment to see how they function. If you're a programmer writing software that people at the warehouse have to use, it SHOULD be part of your description to do that job for a few days a year to understand what the biggest problems are.

And also: no volunteering. If you spend any time doing this, they pay you whatever your hourly wage is + overtime. If you're a high-paid programmer and you do this, they pay you your programmer wage and compensate you for your time. It's such a drop in the bucket for them, there's literally no reason but greed not to.

Lastly: fuck Amazon and their shitty labour practices and horrendous (reportedly) work environment. I wouldn't work there on a bet.

In Canada, literally everything with a tap-to-pay terminal supports Apple Pay. I pay with my watch at the farmer's market if they're set up to take credit cards.

So I did my CS degree 25 years ago now.

Programming was always a means to an end. I had a couple programming courses, but almost all my classes were things like graph theory or compiler fundamentals or graphics or similar things. We learned algorithms and complexity and the history of computing that brought us to the point where we were at. I did a class on hardware where we used and/or/not/etc. gates with physical wires and solved simple logic problems. I learned the optimal rasterization of a line. I learned how lisp was designed and what left-hand recursion was. I've forgotten most of it and much of it was not useful to my career, but that's fine. When I left university, I had a deeper understanding of how computers and computing worked, the class of problems that were or weren't solvable and so many other things.

So if CS has been about teaching people how to program since I left university, it should stop being that. University is not a trade school (not that there's anything wrong with trade schools--we need more people doing those things).

Programming is a tool--a means to an end, and usually that end is learning computing science and understanding the problems that exist in the space. You're expected to learn how to use your tools almost entirely on your own time, you should not spend an entire semester on learning how your hammer works (unless you're also spending the entire semester designing a new hammer).

And look, the PROFESSORS don't need the correct answers that you hand in. Tests and assignments are also just a means to an end--you're not teaching the professor anything, you're merely demonstrating that you've been learning. Plugging things into a chatbot to get the right answer is fundamentally not the point of the class. If you don't want to learn, fine, go do something else.

Stop making university degrees mandatory for every garbage job out there, first of all. If there needs to be 4 more years of education to get a basic job, the state should make public school curricula last 4 years longer.

Second, only let people in that are interested in the topics they're studying. The ultimate goal of university should be to gain knowledge so you can CREATE knowledge yourself one day. Universities are not job training centres, they're institutions of higher learning. I get that capitalism has ruined everything, but this is what you get when it does.

I love this way of putting it. "I subscribed to the dev team."

Rand Paul isn't particularly conservative, like most Republicans. He's for small government except when he's not. But to be fair to him, he's for slightly smaller government than most of his colleagues, and he does actually vote that way. I think he's wrong about most things, but he's MOSTLY honest and up front about what he thinks.

But yeah, that's a pretty dismal headcount for a party that consistently runs on fiscal responsibility. But again, to be fair, they also consistently fail at it.

This isn't cheating. If a fucking journal is garbage enough to let AI review papers, then the whole thing is suspect and this is actually the best thing to happen.

The slop infects everything. Neither journals that allow AI reviews nor those papers should exist at all. One scammer was trying to play another and I don't feel bad for any of them.

What's Randy Quaid been up to lately? For a few years there he was making good progress transforming into a real-life Russell Casse.