TouchID is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. I have a Mac Mini and I have no way to get TouchID on this thing and it doesn't make it a bad computer with no security.

The extra storage is the REAL thing you want for MacOS. 256GB is almost unworkable, IMO. It's what I have on this Mac Mini and I've had to fight pretty hard to keep my disk space free, even with a bunch of external drives hanging off of it.

For a laptop, the chip is fine. The A18Pro is faster than the M1 Mac Mini that I'm typing this on, and the M1s are all still getting along just fine--I'd like a newer machine because I compile code now and then and it's punishing on this thing, but for day-to-day use, it's still going strong. The REAL limiting factor on these machines is storage. 256GB is *barely* enough. macOS is bad about allowing you to offload certain things to external drives without jumping through some hoops, and once the space starts to run out, the OS flips out pretty hard. So storage management is kind of always an ongoing thing.

But if you're mostly using it for a bit of schoolwork, web browsing, some spreadsheets, and you rely on the cloud for all your photos and music, it's probably fine.

Seriously, this is a very good deal. I do agree that they should have physically marked the USB 2.0 port SOMEHOW, but other than that, this was a decent set of compromises to make to drop the price.

It's making a comeback. It's WAY easier than painting, and the glues are better so it's easier to get the paper off afterwards if you want to take it down.

There are now THREE core types:
Super (previously 'Performance')
Performance (new)
Efficiency (same)

The M5 Pro and up chips have a mix of 'Super' and 'Performance'.
The base M5 chip has a mix of 'Super' and 'Efficiency', but has no (new) 'Performance' cores.

It's not straightforward, but it's not the same as Apple making the chips worse and renaming the cores so you don't notice.

(+1, Truth)

Of all the major streaming platforms, Paramount+ stands alone in how often it just doesn't work. It doesn't work reliably on state-of-the-art streaming boxes. It doesn't work reliably on desktop PCs. In fact, of all the devices we have in our household, it works reliably on a total of zero of them.

We have several of the other commercial streaming platforms plus the apps or online services for several of our main national TV channels as well and almost all of them work almost all of the time. It's bizarre how bad Paramount+ manages to be compared to literally everyone else. It must be hurting their bottom line to some degree or surely will do soon if they don't get a handle on it, because why pay for something you literally can't watch?

I have Apple Music and it's FINE, but I'm annoyed at how often I have to authenticate myself for my own goddamn music. Now, a lot of the music is stuff that I already own that I've uploaded to Apple to match for me, but I want to be able to say that I own my music, that I can take my ball and leave any time I want.

The main reason I still use Apple Music/iTunes is that there is STILL no music player with smart playlists as good. I still have playlists that are things like, "select 25 songs by least recently played from the compound list of other playlists that are selected by rating and play frequency". I've looked, and nothing else is remotely as powerful. But I want to be in control of that music so if one day I decide I'm gonna put it on an SD card and just play music only on a physical device hooked up to speakers and never use my phone again or whatever, I have that option.

And I love some of the artists whose albums are in my library as streaming only. I want them to get paid for the amount of enjoyment I derive, and I know that streaming rates are absolute garbage. Return me to the days of the iTunes Music Store and CD Baby and Bandcamp. (I still buy from Bandcamp quite a lot. More this year.)

It is the Microsoft way.

There's a difference between not using AI tools at all and not using code generated by AIs.

The latter involves a lot of risks that aren't well understood yet -- some technical, some legal, some ethical -- and it's entirely possibly that some of those risks are going to blow up in the face of the gung-ho adopters with existential consequences for their businesses.

I mostly work with clients in industries where quality matters. Think engineering applications where equipment going wrong destroys things or kills people and where security vulnerabilities are a proxy for equipment going wrong.

I know plenty of smart, capable people working in this part of the industry who are totally fine with blanket banning the use of AI-generated code on these jobs. A lot of that code simply isn't up to the required standards anyway, but even if it does produce something you could actually use, there are still all the same costs for review and certification that any other code incurs. That includes the need for at least one human reviewer to work out why the AI wrote what it did, which may or may not have any better answer than "statistically, it seemed like a good idea at the time".

The claims also seem a bit sus. "Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week." Is this the same statistic someone was debunking recently where anyone who had done something really basic (it might have been using the search facility?) was counted as "using Copilot"? A lot of organisations seem to be cautious about using code generated by AIs, or even imposing a blanket ban, so things must be very different in other parts of the industry if that 80% is also representative of professional developers using Copilot significantly for real work.

It's worth noting that the Canadian grant system is incredibly overloaded, and so it can be really hit or miss for artists who are at the beginning of their careers. I have friends in several theatre groups and they have to jump through a lot of hoops and ultimately get very little grant money.

The basic income plan is so much better just for its reliability.

Life is full of struggle and suffering without also heaping starvation on top of that. There have even been artists that continue to be great artists AFTER they're rich and no longer need the money to survive and are free to create whatever they want.

Lots of people keep working at things that they enjoy even without remuneration.

What I'd like to know is why they didn't just say for every $1 invested, $1.38 comes back. Do Irish folks pay in $1.20 increments?

But all of it is work that I never would have done in the first place.

I had Gemini write. me some elisp so that I can bring up a buffer with all my CLs in it. I wanted something I could use inside emacs rather than moving 2 virtual desktops over to p4v.

Clearly, this work is not critically important. But it does make my life marginally better. But it's so low priority that it wouldn't have been worth my time to figure out how to interact with p4 and dump everything into an org buffer.

I greatly suspect it's work like that (or work of that calibre, which is often what some devs are hired to do) that's actually getting done, with a few outliers here and there getting actually good, important work done.

I've been a game dev for 25 years, and I'm not so full of hubris to say that no LLM will ever be as good at coding as me.

But most game code isn't public domain, so there's not going to be a lot of training on it. There's a lot of weird stuff that we do at the behest of designers that nobody would ever think to do (whether that's because it's a terrible idea or a brilliant idea is really only knowable after people play the game).

The devil has always been in the details, and so much of good game development is about good human communication and understanding what makes a fun game. Sometimes you just don't know. You're 3 years into a game and there's all this tech and it still isn't fun, and you're trying to figure out the special sauce that will engage people and it's hard. And the way we usually get through it is we play a lot of games and all of us come in with our own idea of fun and we take chances based on things that we personally enjoy. Every professional designer I know plays games as homework. (Some companies help defray the cost, some just demand that they do it as a condition of their employment; it doesn't much matter, designers are gonna play games no matter what anyone tells them.)

And so I'm relatively confident that games will mostly be a collaborative effort because programmers ALSO play games and ALSO bring that experience to the table. As much as designers and programmers will complain about one another, we really do feed off of the contention. Programmers provide infrastructure, but also BOUNDARIES. We know what's slow and what's fast and what shortcuts we can take. And hey, maybe that will all be possible with an AI in the future too, but I have my doubts.

But I had Gemini fix a bunch of garbage problems with some elisp that have been plaguing me for a few years that I never would've bothered to look into because my setup was good enough. I listened to one programmer talk about how he tackled a problem of (human language) translation that he never would have attempted because the task was too large and too tedious.

I actually don't think that LLMs will be making programmers meaningfully more productive for a long while. I don't write enough so-called boilerplate code for it to save me any time there. But I'll definitely take on some tasks that never would have gotten done at all. I think we might see more small websites pop up, for instance. I've never bothered to learn anything about web dev after the HTML/Geocities/webring days, but maybe I'll do something now that LLMs can walk me through it. Small automation tasks, writing scripts. Hobbyist stuff for people that don't want another hobby.

There's already a lot of human-generated slop code out there, and maybe the folks that write that stuff are going to be replaced. I think there are really technical or esoteric or experiential programming jobs out there that won't be, though. I just have more time to do my actual work because all of the dumb little distracting tasks that I used to spend a half day on are now 10 minute LLM chats.

Actually, a second comment to expound a little:

Few people commit crimes knowing that they'll get caught. I would daresay that nearly 100% of criminals believe that they'll get away with it.

If you think you're going to get away with a crime, you're not going to consider the potential consequences. Alternately, some people commit certain kinds of crimes because they believe they've got a moral cause to do so (some kinds of protests, refusing the draft, etc.)

Given that, the severity of the penalty probably doesn't enter into their minds much. Those 11 people thought they could get away with their crimes long enough that the death penalty (which they surely knew was on the table) wouldn't matter.

Indeed, if you actually go and look up the research on it, it doesn't appear to have a meaningful deterrent effect over and above life imprisonment.

So again, to reiterate: you don't know what a deterrent is.

You don't know what is.

The death penalty isn't a meaningful deterrent--we still have a lot of crime. We still have these 11 people perpetrating crime until they're caught and killed by the state. This assumes that they're actually the guilty parties and not some fall-guys for the real criminals.

Punishment is the *worst* way to *prevent* crime because it relies on:
a) someone actually committing the crime (that is, the harm is done)
b) someone caring enough to solve the crime
c) the system prosecuting the crime

The reason the whole carceral system sucks is because harm is done to victims and the only "justice" they get is the perpetrator maybe not doing more crimes. They don't get compensation or therapy or anything. The state fails them utterly. I'm sure these 11 people being dead (assuming, again, that they were the actually guilty parties) gives the victims some measure of comfort, but it sounds like their lives were still pretty much ruined, so I dunno.

Compare to Scandinavian countries where they're closing prisons down because they don't have prisoners to put in them because they simply have less crime, and when someone DOES commit a crime, they rehabilitate them.

I don't trust the criminal justice system to do the right thing in MOST cases. It's shown itself to be subject to corruption and the worst aspects of crony capitalism the same as every other industry. I suppose these days we need to be worried about governments executing people in the streets with no trial, but I'm not convinced that the show of a trial is much help either.