Anamon

I don't think humanity will run into any capacity problems because of that, due to how grotesquely overpopulated it currently is. As far as I see it, every country in the world should be well below replacement rate, for the long run. Setting aside some problematic side effects stemming from our current social system setups. A small fraction of the current world population would probably enable everyone to have a much higher quality of life, if organised properly. We probably don't need to worry about who builds our cars when there are close to 10 billion of us. Where we'll get our food from, on the other hand -- I think that's where the real crisis lies.

Digital effects also look a lot worse (as in, less believable) than real special effects, pyrotechnics, etc., and I think the quick editing also has to do with that. You have to make a lot of cuts and shaky shots in order to not let viewers' eyes rest on the CGI's uncanny valley for too long and realise how wrong it looks.

I watched the first Rambo very late, only about two years ago, and I was amazed at how much better the explosions look than in any movie I've seen in the past two decades. You can afford to actually show what's happening when it looks that good.

I've noticed a similar thing in martial arts movies. You can save a lot of effort and money with the quick, frantic editing. The alternative is that the choreography and cinematography have to be really on point. If you just shake the camera around a lot and do a cut every second, you can get away with amateurish fighters doing whatever, nobody will really notice.

I'm not sure I see the benefit. Everyone can make up their own what-ifs in their mind. But isn't the joy and value in movies as mass media the fact that it's a shared experience, that everybody saw the same thing that they can talk about, interpret, and discuss?

Talking about a movie after having seen it, or reading online discussions with different viewpoints on it, like this thread, is my favourite part post-movie-watching. There'd be none of that if everybody makes up and watches their own version.

It's very close to the truth in any case. Poor service providers can take comfort in the fact that there's usually no considerably better provider that people could switch to. The race to the bottom is at peak speed.

That may be true for the relative amount, but it doesn't negate the assumption that since at least around the turn of the millennium, a lot of our knowledge, culture, and communication happened purely digitally and is at severe risk of being lost. The thought that nobody apart from one person considered it worthwhile to archive the public web (or at least did something about it) still seems crazy to me.

Also, keep in mind that humans are historically very bad at predicting what of their times might be of interest to future generations. As a representation of the times, even some slop content has its place.

ID3 is hell...

The answer to every question about how to use/write it is the counter question: well, which software or player do you want it to work with? Here are your 8 mutually incompatible options.

> Even if it didn't, it would still be the easy part because you're just building computer algorithms that are like specified and defined and testable.

I'd challenge that. Have you looked at the specifications of any reasonably current compression standards? The AVC one is some 900 pages, I think.

Entire communities exist around discussing the strengths and shortcomings of different codec implementations.

The most bewildering thing about the redesign is that the button to visit an application's website -- arguably the most important one since one would assume people are on the site to try out alternatives -- is now hidden somewhere far below the fold.

Can you explain what you think makes today's LLMs more than glorified Markov chains?

I know they're not technically Markov chains, but conceptually, it's still close enough. There's nothing revolutionarily new. No amount of loops and harness tricks is going to change that fact.

That's a problem of visibility, though. No one in management currently cares much that the delegator is actually the one 5 times less efficient in the long run (or just the one leaving the rest of the team with years of technical debt).

The exact same thing was the case with the outsourcing hype. Of course, nobody learned their lesson because those managers who messed everything up were long gone by the time the bills came due and everything broke down.

It was routine for preteen and teenage me to put any game CD or game magazine coverdisc in the Hi-Fi CD player at some point, and see if the track number indicator would show anything higher than 01. It was definitely quite common. Some that I remember are Grand Theft Auto, Carmageddon, Alone in the Dark 2, Rayman, Little Big Adventure 2, Tunnel B1, 7th Guest, The Dark Eye...

The music was made interesting by the sheer novelty of being able to listen to it that way, and get a bit of the game to enjoy even after the parents decided computer time is over =D

Corel once gave a German magazine a time-limited version of their graphics suite to put on the cover CD. You could overwrite a few .EXE files with their .BAK copies to turn it into the full version.

That issue of the magazine sold out pretty quickly once it became public knowledge. Corel issue a statement that replacing the files doesn't make it a legally licensed copy. I'm sure many people cared.

Edit: here's an article about it from that time. It was PC Direkt issue 5/2001. https://www.golem.de/0104/13530.html

Yes, our first family PC was a 386 that we could slow down from 33 to 16 MHz with the Turbo button. It even had the segment display to show the current clock rate.

I knew what it was for and had some old games that ran too fast, but from what I remember, in most cases 16 MHz was still much too fast, so I didn't use the button much.

I think it was no problem to switch Turbo mode on and off in the middle of running software.

Just a regular reminder that cookie banners are not mandatory. In most cases, they are a case of malicious compliance. The choice is between (a) not doing shady stuff with people's information, or (b) having to tell people about the shady stuff you do with their information. That almost every website chose to go with (b) seems to be a problem that goes beyond the EU regulation.

That's exactly how I see it. And 99% of LLM-generated comments are just that: annoyingly wordy repetitions of what's already in the code. Just redundant noise that is a waste of time to read. Usually because the LLM has no concept of the information that might actually be helpful in a comment.

The same goes for LLM PR descriptions and documentation. Those spaces were meant for additional information not already in the code, not superfluous prose.

Depends on the corporate environment. Refusing to look at oversized PRs makes good business sense, there's an argument to be made that working like this sabotages the quality of the product.

Neither were. They're also broken on Firefox for Android, because they're both displayed immediately and permanently.

Not tongue in cheek, but called that to distinguish it from ROM BASIC. AFAIK, Advanced BASIC had to be loaded from the DOS disk and mostly added disk management and graphics features.

Hidden side channel inputs for compilation? You lost me there.

It's vibecoders all the way down. I'm sure Anthropic et al. would like to reduce their resource waste if they could, seeing the insane amounts of money they're bleeding. But I had to come to the conclusion that these LLM companies have not a single developer good enough to implement a decent scraper. Their tools produce garbage code and they don't know enough about programming to realise it, or do anything about it.

One of the problems with this is that documentation is increasingly also written with LLMs by the vendors, and now is often so vague and riddled with errors to be basically unusable, if not counterproductive by sending you the wrong way.

Microsoft has a great racket going on there. Vibecode shitty, unreliable services, offer wrong information in the slop documentation, then charge an arm and a leg for premium support which, in many cases, will just be an employee regurgitating more wrong AI slop information to you.

A more benevolent interpretation might be that they, too, see that this AI bubble will crash on the near future, and they'd be sitting on expensively built-out capacity that they don't need.

My guess is that most of these ads are run from hacked accounts and/or paid for with stolen credit cards.

"I just know it gives you really, really bad diarrhea." -- "As opposed to really, really good diarrhea?"

(Bob's Burgers)

Did the goalposts move? I thought the discussion was about restaurants being required to declare allergens, not that they have to be able to accomodate every allergy under the sun and be able to offer a meal for everyone. I don't think that's the law anywhere, either. It's a perfectly fine response to say, sorry, all our ice cream is made with milk so I can't offer you an alternative. It's only about requiring them to be able to answer the question.

I don't see how it's such a big barrier to business for a food place to have to make sure their staff can answer the question "do you use ingredient X in dish Y?", which, at least in Europe, is sufficient. It's barely a step above asking them to know if the ingredients they use are even safe for consumption, and I'm all for that barrier being held up.

> People aren’t dropping dead from not being catered for their allergies.

They literally are, though.

Restaurants have a choice of refusing service to people with allergies (not allowed in many places; not a great idea anywhere), allowing those with restrictions to bring their own food, or just putting the bloody 2-minute effort of writing on the menu which ingredients they use.

Yes, people have died from restaurants doing the last option improperly.

You mention further down that you're in academia, and with that knowledge this post makes some kind of sense to me. I used to do academic research. Like you, I almost only worked on my own code and nobody else worked on mine. I also knew I wouldn't have to maintain, usually not even expand it, so I worked accordingly.

None if this holds for programming in business, and this is why you keep hearing people saying that the output of coding agents suck. It does! I won't accept the insinuation that people just dismissed it. I use frontier models daily and try to keep up with best practices. Even under the best circumstances, it still sucks, but you learn to apply it only in places where the suckiness matters less and you can mitigate it.

It's been disclaimed so many times that it's a tired trope already, but no, this is in no way comparable to compilers! Compilers relieve you of a tedious layer of deterministic (!) machine translation. It's offloading drudgery and busywork. What agentic coding is offloading is concept and understanding. Not even remotely the same ballpark! One is using a calculator when doing the maths for the structural engineering of a new bridge. Saves time, is more reliable, gives deterministic results based on the inputs of the engineers. The other is having an intern look up some numbers of how it was done for other bridges. It's unreliable, risks missing context, has an unacceptable error rate, nobody knows how to check the numbers because nobody knows how the heck they were jumbled together, and nobody wants to be responsible when the bridge inevitably collapses. How can anyone get the idea to even try to equate the two?

LLMs don't understand a damn thing. They can't. They're not built to.

An LLM doesn't "understand" its own slop. It can use that slop as further input for generating more slop on top of it, but at no point of the process does anything like a concept or understanding come in.

It's not just about the digital readiness. I assume it's the same in Germany, but in Switzerland there are many smaller stores that very proudly only accept cash, or even used to accept cards and stopped. Some shops around where I live even put signs like "cash only, always and forever", to get people to stop asking. It's an interesting divide happening, some going cashless only for speed, safety and convenience, others going cash only for fairness and sovereignty.