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I enjoyed the story and yay for him then read after the end, "Robert Kingett is a Blind, and gay..."!?!?! What does what the author does in the bedroom have to do with the story I just read? Nothing. I don't give a damn what the author does in their bedroom.

People love to talk about themselves. The internet and social media accelerated the narcissistic character of our society.

I’m being partly facetious, but I have started to hear some theories from likely heterodox psychologists about new scute forms of personality disorder developing, particularly among younger generations. Not sure how much there is to the theory.


> Why would anyone have an extra layer of friction too where things could go wrong

It sounds like you're excusing AI, what other systems is AI not suitable for?


When I read that sentence I thought of travel booking sites. The kind that are unavailable to help you when you arrive at a hotel that has no record of your reservation. The kind I avoid precisely because I’ve had enough problems like that where it’s not worth saving 10% and I’d rather just book direct and avoid the headaches.

When the hotel, airline, car rental, etc. can’t even talk to me because of the channel I purchased from that’s a problem. So I’d expect similar issues from buying through a AI interface. Walmart will say something about “we can’t see your order details” when your delivery driver forgot the milk.


> like with apt/brew + 20 handwritten bash scripts

I just use apt, been doing it for 20 years, it works great. I've never in my time, heard of or knew anyone who wrote 20 (or any) bash script wrappers around apt. The one year I was painfully forced to use a Mac for work, brew worked similarly to apt, just used it, no need to wrap it with shell scripts.

Comparing highly functional and capable systems like apt and brew to neanderthal technology sounds like hype.

> It's also great for the AI era

That also sounds like more hype, similar to the pro-nix other comments so far which tout AI and similar to the article which I did read, also sounds like hype.


I've been using apt for 20 years too and was never a fan of it, canonical repos are never up-to-date and managing ppas is a pain. Yes I'm very hype about nixOS (and that's a rare thing for me), but it is just really really good.

I understand that "just check it out" is not the best advice because the setup cost to using nixOS is really high, and the learning curve is really steep, so it's not like you can give it a whirl for a few hours to experience the workflow. But believe me, once you are used to it, it just so so much more convenient. I'm currently managing my dev laptop, home PC, a WSL, and a hetzner server all in the same repository (allowing for a lot of code reuse). Everything is super orderly and split into modules, everything is declarative, I can roll back to a previous build of my system if I mess up installing nvidia drivers or iwd or bluetooth etc.

It's also not like installing software is harder than with apt (oftentimes it is easer, `programs.firefox.enable = true`) so after you've paid the setup cost there is just no downside. It's a bit like react vs jQuery, or Kubernetes vs hand-written deployment scripts.


How will people be able to afford to pay for blue collar labor though, when AI will potentially have decimated all white collar and many blue collar jobs; that's what I worry about.

For example, if someone decides to stop being a software engineer and become an automobile mechanic, but few people can afford an automobile; they demand for their services will also greatly diminish.


Either AI causes a collapse in aggerate demand, or it doesn't.

If it doesn't, you still have your blue collar career.

If it it does, you still have your skills at things that are hard to automate, and don't seem to be any worse of than anyone else, even if collectively, we are all worse off.

At an individual level, this still seems worth pursuing. You don't get to control your macro environment.

Of course, one could still use the political and persuasive tools you have towards the aim of ensuring the benefits of AI are broadly shared. It's reasonable to fear that is hard and uncertain work, but you don't get do decide if you live in hard and uncertain times or not.


Affordability is a combination of individual productivity and the economy’s productivity. A substantial increase in the economy’s productivity through AI and robotics should result in greater overall production, which should tend to result in abundance, and thus a lower cost of living, which can even overwhelm a decline in your individual productivity.

But cars will be 50% of their current cost, once all those useless managers and c-suite folks are replaced by ai. Right? Right??

OK, I'll stick with git.

I started using Meld years ago and continue to find people who've never heard of it. It's a pretty good tool.

> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation

It may have reduced the time to an implementation, based on my experiences I sincerely doubt the veracity of applying the adjective "working".


As a software developer over 30 years, AI is not a tool, it is not deterministic, it is an aide.


Don't have it do things for you. Have it do things with you.


It can't do things with me like a human, it's not human, it's not intelligent, it's not thinking, it's not aware. It's an aide I use, not a tool I rely on.

When I see the word "score", it reminds me of the CCP social scoring system.


Weird... when I see something done by US-Based capitalist and attributed to communists half a world away, it makes me think of the Powell Memo.


That is weird, the US didn't ask the CCP to invent social scoring.


I mean -also- weird to claim that the CCP invented scoring folks, but even if they did, it'd be hella weird to think that somehow they helped a US local power company implement it...

Look, I get that "CCP Bad". It's just always wild to see folks try and make that case when something has literally nothing to do with it, especially while there are plenty of pretty horrific and material mechanisms in play without pretending that the big-O Other is to blame.


> I think this is missing the reason why these APIs are designed like this: because they're convenient and intuitive

Agreed. In my view, the method the author figured out is far from intuitive for the general population, including me.


I guess the point is: How often do we really need actual angles in the code? Probably only at the very ends: input from users and output to users. Everywhere else, we should just be treating them as sin/cos pairs or dot/cross pairs. So when the user inputs an angle, immediately convert it to what the computer actually needs, store it that way throughout the computation, and then only if/when the user needs to see an actual angle would you need to convert it back.


This is how most physics/graphics engines work.


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