jrm4

This is a ridiculously oversimplified application of first year economic theory. No, we do not live in the textbook fantasy of "everyone is always free to make favorable trades and therefore no one is exploited."

Please don't bury the lede here of how the author completely and epically misses the point of the statement.

It's not about the math of the thing, it's about the arguably necessary exploitation that must occur to hit those kinds of numbers.

And in fact, IMHO, you don't even need to get to "exploitation" to criticize this mentality.

Any normal human would (and if not would, SHOULD) want to stop "earning" well before they hit those ridiculous numbers. Let's say -- at about 50 million, a normal person should realize, yes, that's enough. Time to pivot to something that doesn't cause so much accumulation. This does happen, we just don't hear about it enough.

Funny how perhaps "localized" this might be? Grew up an only child but now I have 2 kids, and "couch multiplayer" is now perhaps the majority of my game time.

This is where Steam shines;e.g. Speedrunners, Boomerang Fu, and the very deceptively deep Bopl Battle. Co-op too. Not a huge fan of the cooking games, but Bish Bash Bots is a fantastic co-op tower defense game.

This silly pretentiousness goes a long way to explain why it took so long for Wayland to even be usable.

I get that this is the way of the world, but I still think we'd have been be better off with, you know, real attention paid to classic free/open source ideas (like not breaking backward compatibility.)

Yes. LITERALLY THIS. I do this! Not hypothetical.

I'll write a detailed prompt for a function, hand it off to 5 or so models (all of which are on my local machine), wait about 5 min and then compare.

I mean, this is what I'm doing. I'm guessing my process is very different because I'm holding the hand of the project way more along the way, but even that to me probably makes for a more enjoyable.

Which is to say, I might use AI to do an outline/organizational , but I'm prompting every chunk of code "one-by-one," (e.g. at about the "function" level) which still feels lightyears ahead of what I used to do.

With you here. I'm using my cheapo 16gig vram card I picked up a year or so ago, and I'm like -- yes, I percieve that you can pay for way more tokens per second that I can do at home.

But that feels like measuring productivity in lines of code. For what I'm doing, I'm not seeing the benefit in any subscription.

Sure, I can't one-prompt a whole new boring CRUD app, but oh well.

I'm in Florida and am already using AC, so if not "free", definitely "negligible."

Is spending (metered money) even worth it? Perhaps for most I mean "beyond like a 30 bucks a month," but for me I'm literally not spending more money beyond my very cheapo 16gb video card.

No clue what y'all are doing, perhaps because I'm hobbying, and also I'm old and can perhaps do more of this by hand.

But I'm basically just doing what I did before, plus ollama self hosted and sometimes gemini and I feel like I'm going lightspeed beyond what I've ever done.

And I suppose this is still very fine-grained. I have it make a draft, then just have them fix/change it step by step?

I tried one of the bigger boys that can one-shot apps, which I guess is cool, but I'm finding it's just as hard to modify as if I just grabbed someone elses repo on github.

Not convinced this is clear at all? I'm typing a document in, lets say -- word.

I want it to say "Come to my awesome awesome awesome party."

If I type it out, it's not programming, but if I ctrl-c + then ctrl-v twice, it is?

This is so good, I wonder if op did it on purpose.

Orders of magnitude more people can now make an absolutely "Hollywood quality" movie, precisely due to their nice modern iPhone cameras.

The only question now is, how do we make it so more people can see the good ones?

I do a bit in my IT classes where I show a "spectrum" of computer activities, from "changing a screensaver" to "Assembly" and then challenge people to find the line where "using a computer" stops and "programming a computer" starts.

It was already very fuzzy (Excel?). Soon, this line be non-existent.

No. I don't know about the organization, but somewhere in this chain there is a flesh-and-blood human who deserves ridicule and or consequences, and furthermore -- discovering these people in situations like this is deeply important and must be done more.

And the majority of people I work with DON'T.

I've taught about 10 or 12 different courses. I only have one course in which I require a textbook, and it can be found for about 20 bucks.

The war on general purpose computing is real.

Higher ed instructor here and -- yeah, no. It's the publishers.

You're speaking as if we, as professors or administration love this system and strongly benefit from it. We don't. It's just inertia.

Put differently, re: your protest idea. Hey, go for it, lets see what happens.

I've always wondered why this case hasn't been made more obviously.

Like, the entire point of a library is not "to provide a limited number of books."

I have not read the article, but it's interesting to be at a point where the headline is so bad that it deserves commenting on its own; i.e. understanding that there is no way possible for the connotation (not denotation) of the headline to be "correct."

The connotation here being either "open source is dangerous" or "Microsoft's specific brand of open source is dangerous" -- which coincidentally provides good clickbait for both "pro-open source" and "anti open source" types.

Anyway, not reading. They should do better.

You're not. You're not bad at all. Please ignore the negatives here, they're certainly more a result of AI paranoia/fatigue than meaningful criticism.

Anyone reading this and who is complaining that it's too long and content-light? Respectfully, you really need to check yourselves, you're probably the one with the "internet brain" dopamine or whatever problem. This is NOT an unreasonable amount/style of words for what is said.

Yeah, but I didn't do that. I think I really did mean "little tool" here. This (likely) just isn't the right scale for a pay-to-play project. Obsidian kind of figured this out, but my gut is that this thing is too small.

Nah, this is a very good point; I've seen things similar to this in the past and it's a cool idea -- but "subscription modeling" every little tool is not a good path to keep going down.

Free and open source is important and it's perfectly fine to be critical here.

Most of my downvotes I'll take very proudly, but this one just confuses me

A good update. The next good question might be, okay, what happens next knowing all of this?

I ask because (yes as someone who has dabbled in crypto and also respects the generally valid views of the haters) this stuff isn't going away. For many use cases, love it or not, it works and will be used by some?

Okay, so another pro-tip for prep. I can promise it's not bad at all if you're already very regular.

So what you do is, schedule it for weeks or months out as you can and use that to develop good eating and fiber habits over that time. You have a deadline and real stakes in the game. You will literally hurt more unless you get that straight before then.

Win-win.

Again, try Ocenaudio. I'm old enough to have used Cool Edit/Adobe Audition. Similar flow to those.

Have you tried Ocenaudio (which is roughly the same as old school Cool Edit/Audition?)

Far more intuitive, I think. Keyboard shortcuts and cutting and pasting similar to what you'd get in e.g. Word.

Hehe ditto

I get flak for this, but Audacity is my "proof" that GIMP's name is why people don't use it, not the UI.

Like GIMP, Audacity's UI is awful, but people still use it. :)

As for point 3, I've found that the especially silly looking one that works so that the tube "points out of your forehead" eliminates that problem in an even better way.

That seems -- quite high actually?