I program now for fun, not professionally.

UID checks out.

Something changed late last year. It may just be that the shine is wearing off, but I find most of the AI products producing less quality results than they did previously.

Empirically, speaking around to a few people yeah something now somehow feels not quite as good as it used to be. I think the yes-man problem has got worse. If you're trying to find the API/argument/etc to do X it will always tell you what a great idea it is and give you the code, even if there is no way to do it. I think it's got more sycophantic and that makes it harder to break out of the doom loop to say that "tool X has no flag to do X" or whatever.

On the other hand my boss vibe coded an impressive demo last weekend. Basically a functional mockup (it was never destined to be production code). It's interesting though because he isn't non techincal, and does have some experience of web dev, enough to ask the right questions of the AI, I suppose. He was all "yeah I told it to use [list of frameworks I'd never heard of]". It does seem good at writing react components.

Well, plenty of blockchain proponents and companies do/did.

No need for lifetimes and stuff like that for "mortal" programmers...

You say there's no need, but why not? So far the known solutions are:

1. GC (large overheads, eliminates Rust from the spaces it's trying to occupy)
2. C-style #YOLO!!
3. C++ style: take the C model, automate away a lot of the complexity but with quite a few nasty holes around the edges remaining
4. That new C++ compiler that adds memory safety at the cost of overhead. Can't remember the name!
5. Rust: explicitly mark out everything that's implicit in 2 and 3
6. Ada/SPARK: you think Rust is pedantic? Your code won't compile if the compiler can't prove it meets the pre/post conditions (which include memory safety). They've started adding borrowing copied from Rust to expand what the theorem prover can prove.

What you can't have is something with the speed of C, the overhead of C and memory safety but without the hassle of Rust or SPARK. At least, no one has a damned clue how to make such a holy grail language.

If you're prepared to sacrifice full native performance with full natie memory performance, there's D with it's GC and I think it can be memory safe if the GC is there. There's the modified C++ compiler which will run slower and have some memory overhead. There's also go, which is natively compiled with a GC, but if you've come from a scripting language you might well find its facilities very weak compared to Ruby or Python.

is one of the biggest feats of mental gymnastics I've seen in a while.

Couldn't you tell from the formatting and use of dots that this guy is so high he's tethered somewhere in the stratosphere?

They elected Trump because the previous President suffering from dementia

So what you're saying is Americans love a president with dementia so much they decided to have another one? I suppose with Harris they couldn't get the dementia they so heartily craved so they had to vote Trump.

Or the other extreme, it gets colour graded for high end sets that can show a lot of detail in dark areas, and people complain that on their SDR LCD everything is black.

It seems to be the fashion now that TV is basically now unviewable unless you have a cinema grade setup, due to everything being muddy brown and grey in low lighting. But that's OK because they also make it impossible to tell what's going on by having mumbled, quiet speech with high levels of background noise.

I'm a bit younger also my parents had slight luddite tendencies, so we got a microwave in the 90s. It did come with its own cookbook. Mostly it was used as an adjunct, prepping parts like rice or veggies and so on.

I spent about as much relatively recently (inflation adjusted) as that one cost as best as I could find, and you get a heck of a lot of microwave for that amount of money now! The one downside is this model is a bit spotty for microwave mug cakes because the duty cycle is a little obnoxiously long (10 seconds). If they had it at 2s it would be the perfect machine. On the other hand they've since released the inverter version, so that probably is.

I have used it for a rapid roast: from 0 to roast dinner in 45 mintues, but with the aid of an oven too. Basically nuke the spuds, slam them in the oven, nuke the chicken and then do the same. I do find it subs in for a second oven for large cooking events like a big dinner party, but takes a fraction of the space and is much more versatile the rest of the year.

Because Altman already has Nadella by the short ones.

Microsoft has market cap of something like 3.5T

Microsoft got talked into something like a 30% stake in OpenAI that is worth about 140B.

All and all something in the area of 3-4% of Microsoft's value is the belief OpenAI is worth what its valued at and continues to be invest-able. If OpenAI were to implode, it will show up on Microsoft's balance sheet enough the board might actually start looking for a new CEO..

tariffs are more limited hands off form of taxation than the alternatives.

if you don't want to pay them; buy something domestic or just hold onto your money. Compare that income or property taxes...

The limited hands off government I think we ought to have would eliminate income and property taxes and implement a national sales tax. The America first government I think we ought to have would enact strong tariffs to ensure domestic industry is protected and domestic alternative goods and products are preferred, but leave you free to import French wine and Chinese e-waste if you really really want to and are willing to pay the taxes..

The fact there can be a 40% decline in an entire category and you don't see it on the streets, in the form of empty shelves, shuttered websites etc suggests to me that a lot of economists when the considered tariff impacts wild underestimated the gamification of shopping.

There are ton of people out there that just scroll and a click buy on things they don't need and if they thought about it for more than moment would realize they don't actually really want - they're just bored...They solve that by frequently ordering momentarily interesting crap for $30 because "its cheap."

I don't personally nor do I know anyone who says they miss TEMU or missing the extra few pages of junk to scroll thru first on Amazon one little bit.

I imagine the people who do, still having their needs for the instant gratification of opening a package, any package are met with trash from Dollar General

I think you underestimate how far the country has moved and how quickly. You underestimate the degree to which sexism is a thing of the past and you underestimate how accustomed to a total lack of professionalism in governance we BOTH the first Trump administration and the following Biden Clown show complete with its klepto-cross-dressers had made us.

In 2014 people did care about that stuff. In 2024, buffoonery from candidates and cabinet members is normalized. Heck look at Fetterman in one Senate term I honestly thing most of the country has gone from how did Pennsylvania elect that slob to, dang he is one few actually serious people around!

Norms and expectations are shifting very rapidly.

They are. The trouble is that something really shitty pushed hard by a dominant player can destroy something much much better. Enshittification in action :(

I look forwards to the posts where because Apple is not an absolute monopoly they are somehow immune to any accusations of anti-trust.

No one would ever sign up to such insane terms if Apple wasn't in such a powerful position that they could dictate such terms. In other words, their position and size in the market is such that they can enforce things that no one would be able to do without that kind of size, regardless of product quality.

Them demanding this is 100% confirmation that anti trust action is entirely warranted.