Nope. I just actually actually spend time listening to trans women in my life....including hearing about their struggles and fears. I take the time to get to know them as a person instead of their identity. For me, it's not fear, but empathy...yet fully accept that my joke came off much uglier than expected and take ownership for the failing.

You know self-righteous sentences like yours really turned the tide in Trump's favor. Was the comment immature?...definitely. Insensitive?...absolutely. Classy?...not at all. Hateful?...not written with an ounce of hateful intention, nor any vitriol. I think the notion that a trans woman should tell someone she's dating is common sense. I think any trans woman would tell you the same. They want a romantic partner to accept them as they are. If someone can't handle that?...well, they should kick rocks.

Going over the top with self-righteousness really just turns off voters on the fence or people who aren't sure where they are politically. You think a comment is gross and immature? Respond with humor, put the person in their place with a witty response....the over the top dramatic self-rightousness is just as gross as my crudeness. Show that your cause is fun and thoughtful instead of sanctimonious....be the side people want to be a part of...no one wants to hang out with preachy folks...they're the only thing worse than rude and shitty jokes like mine.

If you go on a date with a woman and she has a penis, you have a right to know beforehand. Similarly, if a game is made from AI slop, you have the right to know. In my view, AI is a tool...a shitty overhyped one, but just a tool. It's neutral...just like a woman packing a tool. If you're into chicks with dicks?...great!...looks like fun, but it is something that should be disclosed both because you may not enjoy the sexual experience and you may want to start a family and not want to adopt.

Similarly, with games costing $70 now, am I paying for an artist's hard work?...or some shitty slop? Maybe that's your jam?...no shame in that...it's just I think we have a right to know when we're parting with our hard earned cash...was this built by a skilled professional studio?....or a merry band of vibe coders?

Imagine doing your job and as you're typing methods, a very confident moron shouts what he thinks the answer should be. That's what it's like coding with Claude. It breaks your concentration and the suggestions are usually reasonable guesses, but they're just guesses...and the interruptions happen on every method you write...and they're often wrong.

Simple answer: if you're skilled at your job, it slows you down. Best case scenario, it's an improved StackOverflow. If you're clueless and don't care if your code works correctly...or even works at all, it can help. I use Claude daily, mandated by work. For things I know how to do, like Java, it doesn't save any time. I wish it would. It's a perfect use case. Write a class...have it write a unit test. Well, the unit tests pass about 3/4 of the time. However, they're pretty much all garbage. In fairness, my team and I are sticklers about writing good tests, (don't assert bean methods, for example, it's a waste of time and makes your class unreadable). However, I'll frequently come across old code written in a for loop and want to convert it to a lambda or optimize something where I know it can be written more efficiently. For refactors? it gets the basic Java syntax correct about 50% of the time. It gets VERY confused when methods are chained, like a lambda. Overall, it's definitely less than 50% success rate, just on compilation.

However, my big problem is that LLMs just guess. I can fix syntax errors easily. They guess method names, despite having full access to the project structure, so they hallucinate methods that don't exist or pass in the wrong arguments. Normally, the compiler catches this, but sometimes it doesn't. It can send the wrong number and it gets very confusing to debug. The problem with guessing machines is it guessed that value for a reason...and eyeballing it, it looks correct! It makes common sense, based on common naming schemes...it just is wrong...and if it's swapping 2 numeric or string args, it would compile and then you wonder why things aren't giving the expected results.

This has lost me a lot of time, especially when I started using Claude. I had Claude generate code that really looks right, but then I get a wrong answer in my tests and spend hours thinking I made a mistake elsewhere. I assume I made the mistake or my inputs were wrong or my logic was wrong...half a day later, nope...claude just swapped a similarly named method in the Jackson lib that does something similar, is named similarly, has the same args, but not the same. I don't have the ObjectMapper API memorized, so I saw it, thought "hey, I thought that was named something else...oh well, maybe this is their new API, this method name is more intuitive anyway", it makes sense, the code compiles, even a shallow glance at the docs looked good. It was only until I carefully read the docs that I realized it was the wrong method.



Now, for things I suck at?...OK, it helped. I forgot how to do a simple RegEx...asked Claude, it got it right the first try. It was too complex and kinda stupid...but it worked and I was able to write a unit test and jog my memory on the right way to do it and correct it with something that wouldn't get me reprimanded at work.

For Java, the code it writes almost always sucks....even ignoring syntax errors and hallucinations. This is something you need to remember. Even if Sam Altman and every CEO touting this shit wasn't a fraud, it's only as good as it's training data. Java has been around since 1995. JavaScript and Python have been around for similar amounts of time. It was trained on old code. If a programmer did a coding test and wrote a C style for loop (for(int i=0....) to loop through a List on an coding interview, I'd reject them. It shows they haven't bothered to crack open a book or read an article in 11 years. Claude does Java 5 (2004) syntax by default...because it was trained on old code instead of Java 8 syntax (2014).

If you vibe coded Java at my place of work, myself and a dozen other programmers would fill your pull requests with all sorts of nastygrams, even if it was working, because as a professional, we'd expect you to know best practices and modern syntax.

LLMs are sold as being able to do many things. The one that I am concerned with is coding. It's one of their top use cases. Everyone says they can code. I run simple prompts in claude and it compiles slightly more than half the time. It fully works maybe 10% of the time? It's fun to play with, but doesn't do anything what Sam Altman or the folks at Anthropic, MS, or Google claim their products can. The improvements aren't tangible. I am sure there's some improvement, but when it can't make code compile...and has full access to the classpath, it's a huge issue. Claude regularly hallucinates methods that don't exist and never existed. It just kinda guessed on what others would name a method in the same class. That's a fundamental issue with LLMs. They only guess....better than one would expect, but a guessing machine is pointless for most work you'd pay someone to do.

...and coding in a compiled language is faar easier than writing prose or all the other things people say LLMs can do.

My frustration is we've been hearing for nearly 5 years of these amazing tools that can write code and will put people like me out of work and CEOs publicly stating they're laying people off due to AI efficiency...when it's clearly fraud for many reasons. If it actually worked as promised, the world would be a different place. Instead, little has changed and now the costs of GPUs, SSDs, RAM and electricity are going up to subsidize this ponzi scheme...and no one is charging these CEOs for frauding investors.

With each new generation, the cost per prompt goes up and the improvements don't even seem to be all that tangible. LLMs are not going to get us actual AI. Companies spend more and more and deliver the same crappy error-ridden responses. They can claim whatever they like on synthetic "trust me bro" benchmarks, but I've never noticed a difference in day to day from Claude versions. I shudder at the thought of someone using that to write real software. I find it useful from time to time, but it definitely has proven it doesn't know what it's doing...and it gets more expensive with each generation (from an electricity perspective alone)

This is the traditional economic model. If your engineers are 20-30% more efficient (which I don't believe, but that's irrelevant), nearly every company expands the scope of their ambition and missions. No publicly traded company wants the same volume, but 20% cheaper. They'd rather steal marketshare from their competitors or launch new offerings with this new productivity. Any CEO that blames laying off engineers on AI is lying and should be prosecuted for frauding investors.

If AI could actually code, the world would be a different place. It's a license to print money and every stupid whim you'd have could be turned into a product with a few prompts. You'd see the market flooded with new offerings from major players as well as a million AI clones of good existing software. Commercial software would be doomed. Oracle RDBMS, which retails at $47,500 per core would be doomed. One could clone the whole thing in a few days. All your favorite old video games would be ported to Unreal Engine 5. There would be billions of new levels on any game that was once popular. From my perspective, everything is just business as usual and that means AI can't code.

An AI that could code as they promise would create a massive market disruption like we've never seen before. Uber would be offering all sorts of new features and services if they had a magic coding tool that made engineers 30% more efficient. However, I will give the guy credit...at least he's being more honest than the piece of subhuman shit that Marc Beinhoff is...blaming his failures as a CEO with those layoffs as AI gains.

You're either unemployed or childless or your kids moved out long ago or you have access to the world's greatest meth supply or learned the secret to surviving without sleep. No...almost no one can do what you're saying if they have a demanding job and young kids, like I do. I'm the family cook because my wife is a WASP and cooks like one. When we're getting real food and not whatever I could throw in the air fryer because fucking kids suck about trying most foods...it's not a patient endeavor done with love. Everything is rushed and I am interrupted often. The kitchen is rarely fully clean because even when we clean it, a kid makes a mess shortly after.

I can't open a book, search through the pages, and place it carefully out of the way of splatter. I have a recipe manager (Paprika) with the recipes corrected for portions and allergies and tastes. I check my phone once or twice or maybe print it if it's confusing...so I don't give a shit what happens to the paper or if it gets splattered with something. For working parents who want to interact with our kids, we have to do whatever we can to be efficient with time...the recipe sites fail us...books are really inconvenient...We mostly need the ingredient ratios with a sentence or 2 explanation of what to do.

And no, we can rarely cook in season. You're talking foodie level stuff...I'm happy for you that you can experience that.

Many, if not most, of us are just trying to nourish our families in a way that doesn't make us feel ashamed of ourselves. TBH, there's so many things in life I prefer to eating. I'd rather cook and eat something nutritious as quickly as I can and get on with the day. For many of us, food is fuel. We can't avoid cooking, but we can do all we can to ensure everyone is eating healthy as efficiently as we can get by with.

Perhaps it's my software engineering bubble, but I have to simplify my communication style for people who speak English as a second language. So many speak English as a second language. I would have guessed that would discourage odd phrasing. Additionally, texting on a phone is painful, so one would assume that would encourage simplification across all languages. I write 10x as often as I speak...to coworkers, extended family, etc. Even with my wife, I am texting her as many sentences as we say to each other...mostly because we're often at different locations due to work or us separating for kid activities (one is with the oldest while the other is taking the youngest somewhere or vice versa).

The points about Robux is fair. The microtransactions are very tacky, but not heinous. It's a "free" site...thus they have to pay their bill somehow and they don't presently advertise...so yeah, they sell you pointless outfits as well as game hacks. I've never spent a penny, but my kids have. IMO, paying for access to content is a fair way to pay the bills...and for optional costumes? that's honestly even better because I am smart enough to never pay for them. However, as adults, we have to realize that services cost money. You can't have free stuff without monetization. It's either fees, ads, or optional purchases. For some reason, that infuriates much of /.

I think you're overstating the addiction. Children are disappointed all the time at the smallest of things...you change their favorite flavor of chocolate milk and a child will have a meltdown. They're fucking children. Even so, I challenge your label of addiction and "fun game". Even if I am not an addict, I'd be annoyed you destroyed my saves or block access to my content. Liking something and being upset it's lost is not addiction.

I've worked in a few hospitals, 2 on the South Side of Chicago...in the 90's crime epidemic. I've seen addicts. I've helped people treat them. I've seen people with severe crack, cocaine, heroin, and meth addictions. I have alcoholics and pill addicts in my extended family. If you think an 8yo acting like a brat after you destroy their digital property is anything like addiction....fuck....I wish I had your life. I wish I could say something so fucking stupid with a straight face. I wish I could conflate the 2 unrelated things. I envy your life that you're so sheltered you think the 2 are similar in any way.

However, I am confident Putin isn't concerned about digital addiction of their children. He doesn't give a shit about his people. I don't know that any Russian leader has.

As someone who has spent way more time than I'd like in both Minecraft and Roblox, no...it's no more risky. It's probably a lot less risky because Roblox is the first platform I've seen that's really popular with young girls and girls like to tattle. So the jackassery that goes on in Fortnite, Halo, or any other shooter gets reported faster in Roblox.

I think the noise is based on 2 things:

1. Old people like to ban things they don't understand because conservative media needs a demon. If you're 75yo and watch Fox News every night, you're never going to understand Roblox. The games are weird. We've heard this before: Heavy Metal is satanic, Rap is making our children criminals, Mortal Kombat makes them serial killers. Marilyn Manson will make them school shooters. No one thinks to ban action movies that are just gun porn. Why? Because old people understand those and enjoy them. So John Wick is OK...but Roblox? No...that's Hillary Clinton's Pizzagate pedophile ring ran out of the basement of a pizza parlor in DC that doesn't even have a basement.

2. Gender: People are always more concerned about their daughters getting molested than their sons. I'd imagine Call of Duty or World of Warcraft or Halo or Arc Raiders or whatever are eve more of a threat, but those games are popular with males primarily. And the Roblox games are very kid friendly, like Adopt Me.

Popular online games have always been boys' turf. Now that girls are in, people are getting weird about it...not in a misogynistic way...just a protective of their daughters way.

Yeah, somewhere in the world, someone has been mauled or killed by a shark or bear....very scary, very rare. We still go into the woods and go into the beach. Every year, someone near me gets bitten by a shark once or twice in the summer. That same year, there were easily a billion (non-unique) swimmers in that area.

Either you understand probability or you don't. Life is risk. There's no way to avoid all risk beyond killing yourself now. You're like those people that think their plane is going to crash on every takeoff. You don't understand math.

If you actually tried it and are a sane person, you'd see your fears are unfounded. If you did the research of how many active users vs reports they have, you'd see your fears are unfounded.

Sentence 1: They have AI moderation and boot players for inappropriate conduct, when it's reported. My kid have been booted for swearing.

Sentence 2: I was on last night playing 99 nights in the forest with both of my pre-teen children and several times in the last month. I've been playing various games with them for nearly 5 years. Again, teenagers act like teenager and they're fucking obnoxious...but no different than Halo or Call of Duty or games I've actually played online extensively, like Fortnite and Borderlands.

Cut the Fox News bullshit. Saying Roblox is a "pedo smorgasboard!" is idiotic. It's a public place and where there are people, there's crime, but if you ever actually used it, you'd find it's a gaming platform. Saying a gaming platform is a pedo smorgasboard is like saying WalMart or Target is. Yeah...there were some lawsuits filed from parents....a tiny handful...and none have actually won (anyone can file a suit, you need merit to win)...and yeah, the rate of sexual abuse in Roblox is lower than WalMart, Target, your mall's Apple Store, Chick-Fil-A, your local park, your grocery store, etc.

Spend 15 min on it and you'll see it's just a gaming platform.

You've never used it. The Roblox FUD has to stop. It's a simple gaming platform that makes it very easy for amateurs to clone and customize existing games. Most of the games suck, a few are fun, but it's mostly mindless fun teens and pre-teens. This was a simple power move to cut off American soft power. American teenagers make fun low-effort games that you get to play for free because you're Russian and broke. It's no more social media than Halo, Fortnite, or Steam. You can see your friends online and chat with them, but it's focused on simple games.

I think a difference between Roblox and everything else is 2-fold:

1. It's popular among girls and boys, whereas Fortnite, Call of Duty and Halo are sausagefests.
2. It's not designed to be a social media site, like Twitter or Facebook. It's not designed for politics, just playing obbys and various clones of about 5 game types. Most of the games the kids go nuts for have absolutely not point...I don't get it, but I'm old.

It's common sense when your dictator leader bans news and sharing platforms. When he goes after mindless children's games, it's kinda shitty and rubs you the wrong way. Yeah, you know you can't go on a site that bashes him...but one that lets you adopt pets and survive 99 nights in a deer infested forest? WTF? What are the rules now? You can get why Twitter is banned, but not why "Steal a Brainrot" is.

Twitter isn't fun. It's not entertainment. Roblox is. Part of a successful dictatorship is your subjects knowing the rules and being able to follow them. Most can tolerate an authoritarian if they know how to avoid his wrath....especially Russians who are very used to authoritarianism. But when your dictator is unpredictable, it's very scary.

Tariffs create uncertainty and hesitation to invest....especially since they're applied unpredictably. Nearly all programming jobs are investments in future growth. When the economy is in the shitter and the president of the world's largest economy is unreliable and unpredictable, it makes businesses and investors hold off on major investments. Even if you love the guy, if you can't predict the cost of materials for a 2 year project, it makes it very hard to find financing. The same with software...if you need 50 professionals and you don't know if 20 of them are going to get their green card revoked, it makes you nervous. Even without Trump's chaos, we have a LOT of economic headwinds: deglobalization, COVID aftermath, wars in Europe/Middle-East....as well as no real growth opportunity in the tech sector.

We got really lucky in the past. As soon as one technology was introduced, another arrived shortly afterwards to give the illusion that endless growth is possible with innovation. However, we created multiple new markets back-to-back: In the late 90s, everyone had to get connected to the internet. In the early 2000s, all business process had to be moved from client/server to web-based applications. Then the iPhone was introduced and now every business needed a mobile presence. Afterwards, we had economic expansion from the big data craze as well as some crypto jackassery....then we had ML and AI. OK...well now we don't have anything new and exciting for businesses to spend money on beyond LLMs which aren't really providing the return on investment promised. Once we find the next useful business innovation, we'll see more familiar growth patterns. However, now...everything is on the web, architecture is largely web-scale, if a mobile app is needed, it's written already, if ML is useful, it has been applied...big data systems are now in production.

I've said it here many times before, but historically, no business wants to do just do the same amount of volume at slightly less cost. Nearly all of them want to crush their rivals and expand their market share. Wall Street loves growth MUCH more than cost savings. It's just bullshit to say we've stopped hiring because of AI. If AI was really helping, they'd keep the headcount the same and increase workload/volume....and lay everyone off much later after they've grown as much as they can.

Look the economy is shitty, it's harder to predict costs than it has been in modern history.largely due to the stupidity going on in the US gov right now. A CEO can either say "we overestimated our demand and need in previous years and need to correct our headcount"....or "hey, we're going all in on the future...AI, baby!!!!!"