the finance bros "ai can't replace my bloomberg terminal" has some serious techbro "ai can't replace coders" vibes

Maybe I'm out-of-date or a control freak, but I don't want my codebases to contain custom code that I need to rely on but that I didn't write myself.

Apparently you're just a person who never worked in a team. Working in a team requires accepting other people's code. Code that you may not have written the same way but it works, and it's efficient. It's just not "your way".

If you're working in a team, I hope you're not making your coworker's lives miserable by dissecting every PR with 80+ comments and dragging it for days on end, because what you really want is that they will rewrite it the way you solved it in your head.

It's a tool. You need to know how to use it. But before all, you need to know what you want it to do.

I don't "vibe code". I explicitly tell an LLM what's the output I want. This works great. It's also helped me take care of long-standing low-priority tickets.

For example, I had it rewrite a backend function that reads from DB/returns JSON. But I had it do it "streaming" from the database instead of buffering-and-stringifying the database response. This has been long in my to-do list. I knew how to implement it (as I had done it in the past). I just didn't want to do it because it was a "nice to have" but not a must for our use case. And it's honestly boring to write.

The LLM did it for me in a few minutes.

I also tried "Vibe coding an app" to see how that would work. It didn't. It shows awesome progress at the beginning and then it starts failing. It deletes entire files, rewrites unnecessary parts, keeps looping and burning through tokens so, I honestly don't know what the "vibe coders" are really doing. It just didn't give me any results when I tried it.

don't worry, you will live at the company town and get paid in company scrip

also: FUCK SLASHDOT ADS.

You can stare at the full moon all night if you like, because the albedo of the moon has filtered most of the light including the UV band that naturally passes through our own atmosphere. The three mile circle illuminated by a mirror would bounce a significantly higher amount of UV than the moon's albedo. If you treat the 60ft reflector as an analog to a pinhole in a pinhole camera, the circular area on the Earth surface would be a rough projection of the image of the sun.

(1) I wonder how they calculate the UV exposure for the observer on the surface within the illumination area.

(2) I wonder if you'd be able to detect places in a coherent projection where sunspots or coronal ejections are reflected through the "pinhole" effect of this arrangement.

in a world of "age verification laws" and governments pushing for "cashless", and precedents like Canada freezing protesters bank accounts, yes.

governments are turning ultra fascist everywhere. doesn't matter if they say they're left wing progressive. they're after your internet anonymity and want you to keep your money in banks, mostly to avoid tax evasion.

(cue in europeans saying they're not fascist and i'm a dumb american etc and canadians justifying the bank account freezing because it was aligned with the party's interest)

and pay for it

actually, Javascript IS a stable language. they have maintained compatibility with every quirk in the language.

It's the "ecosystem" built around it that has a completely different philosophy

Because an alarmingly high number of developers believe that, if code isn't being changed, it's dead. And dead code is "VuLNeRaBle".

Have you ever tried anything in Python or JS? Breaking changes are the norm. And if the app broke, it's YOUR FAULT for not reading the changelog, not their fault for changing the API for no good reason (so many changes in JS for "consistency", like, someone developed something and spelled it "colour" and 3 versions later some dev is incredibly irritated that the rest of the spelling of the app is in american english, so they "fix" it for consistency. Yes, they broke thousands of apps out there that had been running for years, but, isn't it nice how the code is now all consistent?

And don't let me get started on shit like React Router, which, last time i checked was in V6 and every version was a full rewrite, completely incompatible with the previous version - because of conceptually different behavior. Imagine doing this SIX TIMES in less than a decade.

toxic loser.

believing AI is not here to stay is just delusional. and universities better start adjusting accordingly.

I'm tired of hearing that this is just "a bubble that's going to burst anytime soon". You know what was also a bubble, that also burst? The fucking internet.

And now we can't even imagine our lives without the internet.

they are telling us that AI is going to replace us all, the future is 'agentic' and there's no stopping progress

also corporate: we want you back in the office 100%.

they are psychopaths.

I still use my dad's Hi-Fi and record player. I bought kilos and kilos of vinyl records in my trips to japan.

For "smart anything", I stick with "Home Assistant" and "ESPHome". The latter is an open source platform to build your own smart devices. You can DIY light switches, remote buttons, remote sensors, even build a security camera for $10 (ESP32CAM). Runs great on Raspberry Pi.

For "good behaving" smart things you can buy, you need to look for the "Matter" standard. Devices are required to always have an open, local API so even if the manufacturer disappears, your smart hardware is still smart even though it can't phone home anymore.

I still stick to ESPHome

It's the same argument every single time IPv6 is mentioned. "I prefer NAT because it gives me security". People just don't understand the difference between a stateful firewall and a NAT.

I stopped trying to explain this. You'd think that the slashdot crowd would understand some basic networking concepts, but nope.

I started PC programming in 1982, had to teach myself asm almost immediately in order to write a hardware interrupt handler for the serial port.
Back in those days code size was important, and for any driver/TSR type program it was simply crucial. Here in Norway we needed to load the KEYBNO.COM program which took over the keyboard interrupt and provided the official Norwegian layout, including the 'æÃÃ¥ÃÃÃ...' keys for our 3 extra letters in the alphabet.
Over the years, Microsoft/IBM had many version of this driver, the final one which also did text more font layout changes (at least for the default 25x80 mode) was up to 60 kB. This was large enough that lots of US-developed engineering/DB applications simply didn't fit, so I wrote a replacement:

All keys (including Ctrl- and Alt- modified combos) were handled, along with font remapping for 25x80, 43x80 (EGA only) and 50x80 (VGA only) screen layouts, using a total of 704 bytes. It became so popular that Compaq/HP stole it to give to their customers, then when we caught them red-handed (they had not figured out how to get rid of my startup Copyright message) they refused to pay but promised to not do it again.

Half a year later we caught them again, they had started telling customers that they had to keep it a secret.

Terje Mathisen