Yeah it’s like that recent adage isn’t it: I want AI to automate all my drudgery so I can spend more time being creative, but Silicon Valley is automating all my creativity so I can spend more time doing drudgery.

I’m not sure it’s so black and white, LLMs (even frontier ones) are total spaghetti merchants if you let them anywhere near the architecture but I get zero fulfillment from manually solving merge conflicts, setting up someone’s fragile idea of a config, or other tedious stuff like that.

I do dislike how many people seem to want the profession to change into being the meatshield between Claude and prod though.

On one hand I agree, on the other hand try making that argument to management at the majority of software firms and see where it gets you. There’s little commercial incentive for ‘artisinal code’ outside of niche sectors in my view, and commercial incentives overrule all else at the end of the day. I don’t think this is morally right but this is the wider problem of which overreliance on AI is merely one expression I think

‽ is a sublime punctuation mark.

Medical AI is usually more along the lines of ‘we’ve created a proprietary model for computer aided diagnostics specific to x disease being scanned with y modality and we’ve taken this through the regulatory process in z jurisdiction’ than ‘put your symptoms into an LLM lol’.

I’ve faced this situation at work, we deployed a dedicated windows VM that all the devs shared for the one tedious task. Eventually got replaced with a saner system and we had no Windows dependencies at all.

Windows-free since 2014 in my case! Hated Windows 8’s user experience enough that I decided KDE was a better windows than windows and never looked back.

In 2026 Plasma 6 is genuinely in the conversation for the best graphical environment for the desktop platform in general, partly because it’s very good and partly because Apple and Microsoft have let standards slip a lot in my view.

What worries me is people using it for safety-critical things without appreciating the danger, for a test some of my friends who sail for a living asked various chatbots some questions like ‘how would you approach a berth under sail when the wind is against the tide?’ and every single one but Claude got it dangerously wrong, and Claude wasn’t 100% either it just refrained from suggesting a sail plan that would lead to you crashing into the pontoon.

Will give a shout out to Mistral which got the sailing element of the question very wrong but did sensibly suggest ‘turn your engine on and perform the manoeuvre under power’ which of course is what you should do if you can.

Discontent over how Poland got thrown under the bus after the Second World War?

A pain in the arse to drive from modern video sources is what it is! Bought a CRT recently with a thought to using it as a cool secondary monitor but HDMI to composite adaptors are all crap!

What I ended up doing was using HDMI to VGA, then VGA to composite. This let me set a proper 4:3 resolution and the picture improved a lot. What I should have done is not bother with composite at all and gone VGA to RGB to SCART as this would improve the colour a lot, but couldn’t find the adaptors for that. Not sure how widespread SCART was, might have only been a European thing but when I was a kid most TVs could either take a composite RCA input or SCART, and SCART could carry composite or RGB.

Definitely given me the bug for old TVs though, I’m going to have to write an ActivityPub to Teletext software adaptor so I can have Lemmy on a ‘90s TV or something. HackTV looks like a lot of fun as well.

I agree, and I’d add it’s not even a specifically left wing impulse either. The Roman Republic of all institutions was deeply concerned with the idea that republics shouldn’t have private princes as well as kings. The fact the Roman Republic failed to contain its oligarchy to the point of fundamental destabilisation into arbitrary power is evidence people ought to pay attention to left wingers when they say the same thing about billionaires and the concentration of wealth.

Very well said! Privacy protects the innocent far more than it protects the guilty, and no false positive rate other than zero is acceptable when ‘van bursts in to take your career away over an AI detecting wrongdoing’ in my view.

If a false positive rate of zero is not possible then not building it is the only ethical option.

You’ve managed to nerd snipe me with the colourblind friendly Pride flag, the second one somehow looks really good!

Why is stirring up conflict here beneficial though? I’m intensely critical of the current US government but me and the average American still have more in common with each-other than either of us have with our respective ruling elites in terms of material interest and daily life.

Yes their crowing about being the most democratic country on Earth is a bit silly but that doesn’t mean they deserve to become an outright plutocracy, nobody deserves that. You can object to Washington’s lofty perch in the global pecking order and to Americentrism in general without wishing ill on a whole nationality the vast majority of whom have done nothing to wrong you personally. The only thing I wish for the Americans is for them to fix their backsliding democratic institutions and to adopt a more realistic view of their country’s place in the geopolitical landscape; I don’t doubt these are goals many Americans support at this point.

Yeah it’s a bit of a stereotype but I feel privileged to live where I do on an essentially invasion-proof island with no major tectonic hazards, cheap but decent grocery prices by international standards, and I can get on a train, plane, or ferry and be in one of dozens of other countries in under a day. Brexit did screw up a lot (like importing obscure fresh food on a whim…) but it can’t actually unanchor us from Europe.

There’s a lot of structural issues and we hardly live in a utopia, in fact there’s massive own goals on housing and energy which probably won’t be fixed until NIMBY homeowners are no longer an electoral majority, but we’re too pessimistic to realise what a good hand we have geographically speaking.

I was really looking forward to my luxury German nuclear-powered car as well >:(

So this sent me down a rabbit hole and it turns out they’re basically not available in the UK full stop as a fresh fruit, even via the European importer I found thanks to Brexit. I can import it dried, or otherwise I have to make a long weekend of it in France to try it!

Reddit is a cesspool but unfortunately so is the wider media ecosystem for the most part.

Yeah age of sail lookouts had incredible eyesight, they had to since every minute you lost determining friend or foe was a minute you’d delay beating to quarters and running out your guns.

Remember that the fossil fuel industry knew what was going to happen in the 1970s and lied to governments around the world to ensure our future of maximal fossil fuel burning and damn the consequences came to pass.

We have words for people who betray their country, we have words for people who betray their family, we even have words for people who betray the firm they work for every day, but we have no words for people who betray their entire species.