I can really seen Gen V struggling. They wanted to make something shocking, dystopic, but as things develop, all they can do is be like: Oh, that thing, right, we got that too in our show!

I agree, but it is nearly impossible for a normal investor to be certain that the current stock price ISN’T the lowest it’ll ever be. The bullshitters have an incentive to keep up the lies a few years longer, just look at the housing bubble, and when it burst, it might burst down to the current level or even higher, if that happens in a couple of years.

I was right once when I sold my ETFs before the Ukraine crisis unfolded, but I realise now that I was stupid-lucky-right. Will never do that again.

Also, I fully expect that some AI usage will withstand a critical review, and will prevail, just like the dot-com.

Then, there is the risk that the unexpected breakthrough DOES come, and the ai-super-senior can fix all the vibe-coded nonsense. I don’t see it in the next 5 years, but both unexpected breakthroughs as well as unexpected plateaus have happened in the past.

I am generally a sceptic myself, especially in my own area, which is software development. But recently in a board game community, someone was scolded for asking ChatGPT about a rule dispute (and it was wrong). All upvotes to unhelpful “AI bad” comments. I pointed out that while this was true 3 months ago, ChatGPT 5 (and only that one) can very accurately answer such questions when asked the right way, showed how to ask the user question and the (now correct) response, and mentioned my 35 board game test questions and results with major LLM flagship models. (Almost all LLMs did horribly, under 70% even in yes/no questions, but ChatGPT 5 with specific instructions or “Thinking” model got 100%.)

Even as a sceptic, I can acknowledge that LLMs just jumped from completely useless to perfect in the past few months when it comes to this specific niche.

That’s completely true; it’s hard for me to judge on a small scale when I won’t (for good reasons) let it touch my customer’s production code.

I find it also saves a certain “mental energy”.

E. g. when I worked on a program to recover data from the old discontinued Windows photo app: I started 2 years ago and quickly had a proof-of-concept: Found out it’s just sqlite format, checked out the table structure, made a query to list the files from one album. So at that point, it was clear that it was doable, but the remaining 90 % would be boring.

So after 2 years on pause, I just gave Gemini 2.5Pro the general problem and the two queries I had. It 1-shot a working powershell script, no changes required. It reads directly from the sqlite (imagine the annoyance to research that when you never ever use powershell!) and put the files to folders named by the former albums. My solution would have been worse, would probably have gone with just hacking together some copy-commands from SELECT and run them all once.

That was pretty nice: I got to do the interesting part of building the SQL queries, and it did the boring, tiring things for me.

Overall, I remain sceptical as you do. There is definitely a massive bullshit-bubble, and it’s not clear yet where it ends. I keep it out of production code for now, but will keep experimenting on the side with an “it’s just code completion” approach, which I think might be viable.

Currently, I write all production code at work without any AI assistance. But to keep up with things, I do my own projects.

Main observation: When I use it (Claude Code + IDE-assistant) like a fancy code completion, it can save a lot of time. But: It must be in my own area of expertise, so I could do it myself just as well, only slower. It makes a mistake about 10 - 20 % of the time, most of them not obvious like compile errors, so it would turn the project into disaster over time. Still, seems like a senior developer could be about 50% - 100% more productive in the heat of the implementation phase. Most important job is to say “STOP” when it’s about to do nonsense. The resulting code is pretty much exactly how I would have done it, and it saved time.

I also tried “vibe coding” by using languages and technologies that I have no experience with. It resulted in seemingly working programs, e. g. to extract and sort photos from an outdated data file format, or to parse a nice statistics out of 1000 lines of annual private bank statements. Especially the latter resulted in 500 lines of unmaintainable Python-spaghetticode. Still nice for my private application, but nobody in the world can guarantee that there aren’t pennies missing, or income and outcome switched in the calculation. So unusable for the accounting of a company or anything like that.

I think it will remain code completion for the next 5 years. The bubble of trying more than next-gen code completion for seniors will burst. What happens then is hard to say, but it takes significant breakthroughs to replace a senior and work independently.

Yes, I had to delete lemmy, reddit, twitter, mastodon, all games etc.

But I see 0 harm in:

• 2FA authenticator apps (google authenticator, app for government ID, bank, …)
• DHL (unlocks packing station / parcel distributing machine here)
• calendar (with voice assistant)
• Pixel, iPhone, Samsung and some others are a fantastic camera! 10 years ago, it’d be a great deal just for that one feature. I used to pay USD/EUR 250 - 500 for a hobby-level camera that was worse
• read my mobile CO2 sensor
• not crucial, but occasionally show someone something in a video call
• send injured animal photo / video right to the wildlife rescue station for advice (~ 2x per year)
• plain old mp3 player
• some might read eBooks, which is a good use of it, but I still prefer a hardcopy

So yes, on my 2nd smartphone only (first in 2021), but I find that it’s worth it these days.

Enshittification intensifies, but a Linux phone might become very viable in a few years, especially when LLM adapters become easier to use. Self-hosted alternatives to google/apple photos are already very advanced.

This is how it works: Push down, nuzzle points up!

Push up, nuzzle goes down!

How can anyone play differently?

Weird. In the 80s, there was this loner in my class who pretended to be a Nazi robot. He walked around and asked everybody in a robotic voice: “Are you an Arian?” … “But your father has black hair. Conclusion: Not an Arian.” etc.

Nobody got the joke. Must have been like the Comedian in Watchmen: Not a joke after all, just a reflection on the present, or future, in his case.

Hodor!

This is insane. We’ll end up with this white-washed, boring mediocrity.

Same with that MAGA-actress from The Mandalorian. What she said wasn’t even as radical, just bought into the whole election fraud conspiracy, iirc. Now we have a formerly good show where every new character AND their actor are basically PC-principal from South Park. The left failed to support her there because she was a bit of an ass, supporting a bigger ass, but no laws were broken and she fit the role perfectly: Not that smart, badass, hardly an ally when you have no other choice.

Enlightened centrists are left to create our art and literature. Well, at least the 1800s and 1900s produced a lifetime supply. But a contemporary reflection of our society, of our politics, like “1984”, like “Der Untertan”, like “Im Westen nichts Neues”, that used to be a huge part of it, and it’s slipping away.

Fiction is an actor we should not pull out of public discourse. It has been crucial to it, probably long before the first written word. Unless a crime is committed, let them write!

That’s roughly what I’m hoping for: Former top of the line 7th gen CPU ThinkPad, such as a P51 or P71, might become really cheap as soon as the small Linux used hardware market is satiated when Win10 support ends.

For me, that’d be a massive upgrade :-)

It was already quite doable in late 1990s Suse, although it took a day and you actually had to read the book it came with. The partitioning was annoying and confusing for a first-timer, and the default packages were also lacking. Now, not harder than Windows.

lol right, must sound like Treknobabble but for the 2000s. Heck, for kids these days, it’s probably as gibberish as original Treknobabble.

I bet distant future archaeologist, be they human or alien, will assemble the bits and pieces like this: Child worker programmers would work in these inflatable tiny castles on the soft floor with their laptops. That was the last attempt to revive feudalism. Why it didn’t catch on to other office jobs remains lost in the past.

An annoyance that came shortly after was that they were not allowed to ship the Java Runtime Environment / Development Kit with a javax.crypto library that allowed for algorithms stronger than DES (such as AES, Twofish, Blowfish, …), or long passwords, iirc.

There was some way to download something extra (Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files) and fiddle it in, but with regulation in the US, I think.

I was quite sad when I made one of my early programs based on that and it turned out to be useless to US citizens, and hard to use for everyone else. I think I made a bouncycastle-based version later, but it was basically a full rewrite.

Edit: I’m starting to remember more absurdities of the time: Even with the JCE, the best algorithm for symmetric encryption was 3DES, which was not a legal requirement, just laziness of Sun Microsystems. While it was somewhat safe, it was less than ideal and really slow.

For some reason I thought that a sandwich thrower is a device, like a sandwich maker.

It was essential and without alternative when it was new, and it’s stupid to ban it, as it’s still a great choice now, but for most people, non-mRNA alternatives are about as good.

A stupid move, yet possibly with few consequences. I got 2 % of my “fortune” in Moderna stocks though, lol.

Far worse is EU and its member states, which just delayed the release of the new adapted one just enough that everybody can meet in class for 3 weeks after returning from summer vacation before getting it. Although it was ready for shipping a long, long time ago. More madness than the US, for once.

That statement would make a lot more sense with a benchmark graph based on standardised tasks.

I wonder what happened:

• staged / fake to imply option 2?
• actually expecting a child from the guy on the left, and proudly announcing it to her husband (mid) with this gesture?
• option 2, but only the husband (mid) knew, and he is announcing it to both
• option 2, everybody knows, but the parents didn’t know that the husband knows, which he is announcing herewith (only option that explains ALL facial expressions)
• wanted pink smoke, but device malfunctioned / wrong device?
• both: the child is from the guy on the left, but it was supposed to be a secret to the grave, foiled by the chatterbox smoke device?

I honestly don’t know.