dachris

Early 2024 is probably still 99.99% handcrafted text.

Still, 2023-10 is probably the last pure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

they should point their AI swarm at quantum gravity now

(only half tongue-in-cheek)

Good point - in a way, if we get AGI, investors have financed the way to their potential undoing.

The term singularity is worn out, but the physics parallel is quite apt - a point where the known gears of economics stop working, and it's unknowable what's there until you get there.

C++ was complex already 15 years ago (template metaprogramming, anyone?).

Can't imagine what it must be nowadays.

It's even more important that time limit gives those in power a planned off-ramp.

The extreme case which you want to avoid is "politicians" (dictators) desperately clinging to power, because they did things that would get them killed if they ever lost their power, which is a vicious cycle.

On the same day, in Serbia, the long-term incumbent was defeated by a party/movement that has been founded only 2 years ago as a response to corruption issues. So change can happen.

On the one hand, yes. That's why possession of a starlink terminal can get you killed in Iran.

On the other hand, Ukrainians are finding out that someone else is in control of that starlink infra.

Seems like a false dichotomy, don't see how sacrificing jungle would get Brazil a top-tier semiconductor industry.

And I guess the native peoples living in the Amazon are not university leftists.

I'm not into Brazilian politics, the little I know seems to indicate that it's a choice between a rock and a hard place (both seem to have corruption allegations). The objective aspect I can judge is whom Trump strongly supports. US influence in South America is a pretty bloody chapter in history.

I offer my support for that theory. There's so many facets of reality, many of which no one will ever explore or understand.

If you take a look at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa , it can be seen from so many aspects

- art style - a doctor might see indications of a health issue that Lisa has - what it says about the society of that time - geology of the landscape - contemporary production of the color pigments - what the picture does with you when you look at it - and so on

Good Sci-Fi novels bring along some of these - aliens that have access to different concepts of reality, e.g. the dark forest hypothesis. The hard part is that you actually have to come up with that understanding for writing it, instead of just hand-waving it.

Kudos, that looks very good for a high school coding project (both visuals, and the code looks very well structured).

I feel like half of all software devs started out like this - coding their own game.

Crazy to imagine that no one will build their mental muscle like this anymore.

I sure learnt so much analytical thinking, debugging, problem solving and banging my head against a mental wall until the wall yielded through passion hobby projects like this. Wouldn't have been the same just saying "Claude, make [insert game here]".

I got into SWE because I like solving problems. I like solving problems using code. I also like solving problems using AI.

I have very mixed feelings.

- AI lets me plough through issues which previously would require debugging, troubleshooting, googling, stackoverflow

- my coding abilities are starting to atrophy

- not having to deal with low-level language quirks is nice (parameter differences of subString in C# vs Java).

- but I'm seeing the same as OP: when working on a team, the sense of ownership and community is gone. You have AI un-AI-speak for you to properly read the Jira ticket another dev created using AI. Pull requests are echo chambers between the AI used to create it, review bots, other devs using AI for PR reviews manually.

- there's little denying that we devs are feeding the very machine that will replace us

Doesn't bode well for all of us meatbags, actually. AI might now be better mathematicians (if that's even true for now). But if progress continues, it might be a better <your job here>, and even worse, wife, husband, parents. Black mirror territory.

Another pop culture reference: in the first book of the "The Three-Body Problem" trilogy by Liux Cixin, physicists get depressed by having their field of work blocked.

Pretty much the inverse situation, but also the same situation - having your field of expertise completely disrupted. Anyone would be troubled.

Expectations have also increased. Friend from a middle class family grew up with 4 siblings in a 75m2 apartment. You'd get raised eyebrows for that today.

Cheap food is still cheap. If some doomsday scenario ever comes along, I'll be forever sorry to not have stocked up on 6 years worth of calories that now cost less than a monthly salary. World market prices per metric ton: wheat like $300, rice $500.

But that's not mutually exclusive with absurd levels of wealth concentration.

Naively asked myself the same thing - how can the camera see through that clouded glass and the projector project through it?

I often say that everyone should be on a misery week once a year, where you live like our "ancestors".

I.e. like my grandparents, who grew up in the 1920s on a farm, only 1 heated room, privy outside, no running water, limited food options, hard work each day. As my granny used to say to anyone with nostalgia: no, things were definitely not better back then.

Misery week would greatly increase happiness for the rest of the year, add humility, and empathy with the less privileged.

Fully agree that programming for me brings along "a kind of brain rot". Hard to describe, but working deep in code just shifts the mind to a state that's ... less open, more focused, more obsessive ... and seeps into daily life.

Vernor Vinge's concept of "focus" in "A deepness in the sky" really clicked with me and put into words what I'd always had at the back of my mind. A highly recommended read.

True, and here's an interesting twist: as you wrote, this is mainly happening due to "I think", so it's primarily on a memetic level. Humans also pass on lots of thought/behavioral aspects to their children (memes). Therefore I'd expect that selection on the behavioral level is happening much faster than on a genetic level.

Idiocracy's "stupid genes win" likely won't happen, my theory is that selection will remove memes (behavioral/thought/cultural patterns) that cause childlessness from the meme pool much faster.

Could also well be that natural selection will rear it's ugly head again first. I previously thought that people rejecting the evolutionary theory (creationists etc) were just backwards and anti-science. But I've realized since that this is a too simple judgement. The ethical implications of evolution are dark. Humans have had a word for selection since the dawn of language - "death".

A bit sad that paraphrasing Paul Watzlawick in this context fits very well: one cannot not participate in evolution.

If you've accidentally become a persona non grata, then obviously because you've not exercised sufficient self-censorship.

This is real already. Recently saw a petition for EU to rein in big tech (there are several initiatives advocating this). Had this nagging voice at the back of my head ... what if signing that gets your Google Account terminated.

I'll leave it open to you whether I signed it.

For developers relying on any type of Google services, you'd be in for lots of pain.

Pretty much the same here. A happy Ubuntu user for 4 years now. Here and there, there's still minor issues, but nothing a quick search or AI can't help you with. And we're hackers here after all.

For me that was already with the original DALL-e. It was utterly mindblowing, I was like "oh shit, AI is here".

"Draw a picture of a unicorn on the moon". And it did that. The model really "understood" what you told it.

After that, it was "oh, AI improved, again".

The farewell to Stack Overflow is not welcome. So many kind people shared their knowledge there. I answered a few questions as well, so not just a lurker.

It's a prelude of what's has already begun - the collapse of human-to-human communication.

Veracrypt e.g. has had this for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability

I'm considering using a second phone for increased security. As you say, only put banking apps on them, leave it at home.

The larger population is getting pushed towards banking on the phone, and on top of that, many people don't own a PC/Laptop anymore.

In Western Europe this is also quite pronounced.

In Białystok, Poland, solar noon is at 11:39. In Vigo, Spain, it's at 13:46, .

Being in favor of all-year DST (more sun in the evening is just nice), nice to see that those lucky Spaniards already have it and then some.

Whatever the preference for the permanent time, abandoning the switching should be advocated by the software industry. I've yet to work at a company where there are no bugs related to switching the clock. Those bugs have ranged from harmless to pretty severe.

Started the Visual Basic dev env, added a button to the form, MsgBox "Hello World", and it worked.

So simple, so easy. Those were the days.

It looks like the difference between the Boston Dynamics robots 2016 vs 2021

The Spot dog (which inspired the Black Mirror "Metalhead" episode) in 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7IEVTDjng

Atlas doing backflips in 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FByY3tSx2Ak

So 5 years of progress within a year.

The good thing is, with AI scraping everything today, it will be incorporated into the AI - so your content will continue to exist in the weights.

In that way, your thoughts will live on ...

My favorite: near the Bering strait you can see the distortion of the map - obviously ships go in straight lines on a sphere but in a curve on the map.

As you say, in moderation. That also applies to red meat, considering the adverse effects listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_meat

The compression is nice, you can fit very long (low-entropy ;-) messages in there - this one is 9k characters:

https://textarea.my/#7cGBAAAAAMMgzfmTHORVAQAAAAAAAADAuwE=

Very nice, the introduction to recursion in university (which was around that time of the year) was drawing a fractal Christmas tree