What the shit??? Fucking team Cherry, they always hit you out of nowhere…

You really never know until you’re in the moment.

I was once in a situation like that… When people started screaming I was already carrying my niece under one arm (who was a preteen no longer usually carried) and bringing her to my stepdad and telling him to get her out of here. I didn’t realize what I was doing, I didn’t hear her asking me what was happening until I was power walking towards the screaming and telling my mom (a nurse) who asked what to do that she should follow me to see if there was something to be done

Turns out a woman offed herself in a bathroom, there was nothing to be done. I snapped out of it, and I was more disturbed by how calm I was during the whole thing than anything else

But now I know. My mind will shut off and I’ll act…I have the memory of what I did, but not a single thought went through my head during the event. I was equally ready to fight someone with a gun barehanded or to cover my hands in blood to slow the bleeding. I probably would barely notice getting shot in that state

I guess I always thought I’d be the heroic type, but lots of people do. I’m shocked at how effective I was in the moment… My priorities were followed perfectly, I locked the fuck in, head empty, no thoughts, no hesitation

I think that’s always what it’s like. And that’s why you never really know… I’m not a leader, in fact my step dad is and I hate telling people what to do. But when the chips are down, I bark orders that people obey and run towards the danger automatically

And I’m pretty proud of that

I meant to delete the comment to keep things simple, but what I was going to say is something like

fine, but debt is like gambling. There’s situations where it makes sense, but it’s addictive. It’s mortgaging your own future, even when it maths out it’s a risk - shit happens

And if you over leverage and under perform, it’s over. If you can pay yourself and your employees, you’re better off never taking on debt again.

Like Wegmans. It’s the very best grocery store, everyone who goes there agrees. They grow slowly because they only open new locations when they have the cash to do so, and so they never have to compromise on quality in any way

Learning to read was a mistake

Kids don’t use file systems anymore, by the time they grow up they’ll be begging an AI to pretty please open the file… No, I know it’s there, I just downloaded it… I’m sorry, okay, just open the most recent download…

companies just can’t seem to know how to grow without line go up mentality.

That’s like saying “people just can’t seem to harness the advantages of cancer without dying”

If you never take money and get hooked by outside sources, you can just slowly grow, with no debt, beholden to no one

If you take the money with any strings attached at all, you basically have to grow like cancer or your company will be sold for parts. It’s inevitable at that point

Don’t take the money kids. If you have to take a business loan in the beginning - fine,

You really never know until the moment comes. If you’re that kind of person, your mind just blanks and you’re suddenly doing things

It’s not that cut and dry. Yes, it brings the ad industry ever so slightly closer to collapse…

But until then, you’re just helping Google sell ad buys faster and pumping up their metrics

Google has gotten fined for doing exactly this fraudulently multiple times to juice their numbers

True… Except there’s a big problem with that

There’s not many things I would want that I’m not aware of

So would they going to show me 2 ads a day, or would the same 4 things be plastered everywhere each week?

Any term we pick is going to be offensive. We’re gesturing at the concept of them being less human than us

But like… It’s kind of true. It’s like they don’t experience the world around them, they just adapt to it without comment like a Sim

They just seem like they’re missing the spark. NPC is probably a kinder term than what we’d come up with otherwise

I’m a huge fan of AI, but come on… It’s being used in the most reckless and insane ways. It’s so insanely destructive to society

Our experience so far has not been that AI is capable of or going to replace our labor. However, the threat of AI and the use of AI mandates has been used already to drive down wages, institute speedups, and generally degrade our working conditions.

Have you noticed how a lot of software has been getting worse, like way buggier? How three times now, huge swaths of the Internet have gone down?

It’s because tech companies keep laying people off. They’re already operating a skeleton crew, and now they’re trying to replace portions of that skeleton crew with AI

And already, it’s not working.

At this rate, remotely complicated software is going to become a lost technology

Think of it like this…a photon is both a wave, and the smallest discrete unit of energy

When the wave is absorbed by something, the energy must be transferred. But the smallest unit of energy is the full photon, and so the full amount of energy of the wave is absorbed at a single point, because there’s no such thing as partial photons

Or in other words, the wave doesn’t turn into a particle, the energy gets spent at a single point in space

Really, I think all of quantum physics works like this. Electrons don’t exist as a point in space, they exist in an area. They’re fields, they’re not necessarily moving fast, which is why atoms don’t randomly slip through each other and we can’t measure all the properties of it at once

Holy shit, you’re a fucking retard. Like of the “people look and laugh” scale. I’m unironically going to take your response to share with technical people in my life to laugh over

And no hate to the mentally ill, I’ve never laughed at them. I laugh with them, because they’re delightful and love joy to an extent that leaves me jealous

But you’re not a real person. You’re a joke, if your ego was two sizes smaller I’d be gently explaining to you how no number of code katas would result in Microsoft XP

I laughed at that way harder then I should’ve

So is semiconductor design, application of transistors to implement logic gates, etc. We still have people who can do that, not very many, but enough. Not many people work in assembly language anymore, either…

Yeah, that’s a lost tech. We still use the same decades, even century old, frameworks

They’re not perfect. But they are unchangeable. We no longer have the skills to adapt them to modern technology. Improvements are incremental, despite decades of effort you still can’t reliably run a system on something like RISK.

Okay, but if it’s writing 800 lines at once, it’s making design choices. Which is all well and good for a one off, but it will make those choices, make them a different way each time, and it will name everything in a very generic or very eccentric way

The AI can’t remember how it did it, or how it does things. You can do a lot… Even stuff that hasn’t entered commercial products like vectorized data stores to catalog and remind the LLM of key details when appropriate

2000 lines is nothing. My main project is well over a million lines, and the original author and I have to meet up to discuss how things flow through the system before changing it to meet the latest needs

But we can and do it to meet the needs of the customer, with high stakes, because we wrote it. These days we use AI to do grunt work, we have junior devs who do smaller tweaks.

If an AI is writing code a thousand lines at a time, no one knows how it works. The AI sure as hell doesn’t. If it’s 200 lines at a time, maybe we don’t know details, but the decisions and the flow were decided by a person who understands the full picture

I agree with this, but just because I was around people my age with lots of free time

Freedom doesn’t work when the people around you aren’t free

I don’t think we should be having the AI write the program in the first place. I think we’re barreling towards a place where remotely complicated software becomes a lost technology

I don’t mind if AI helps here and there, I certainly use it. But it’s not good at custom fit solutions, and the world currently runs on custom fit solutions

AI is like no code solutions. Yeah, it’s powerful, easier to learn and you can do a lot with it… But eventually you will hit a limit. You’ll need to do something the system can’t do, or something you can’t make the system do because no one properly understands what you’ve built

At the end of the day, coding is a skill. If no one is building the required experience to work with complex systems, we’re going to be swimming in a world of endless ocean of vibe coded legacy apps in a decade

I just don’t buy that AI will be able to take something like a set of State regulations and build a complaint outcome. Most of our base digital infrastructure is like that, or it uses obscure ancient systems that LLMs are basically allergic to working with

To me, we’re risking everything on achieving AGI (and using it responsibly) before we run out of skilled workers, and we’re several game changing breakthroughs from achieving that

Which is basically irrelevant, since you need to dope the recycled plastic with fresh plastic for most applications and no one is doing this at a meaningful scale

And even if we did scale it up, this just means the amount of plastic use will continue to increase. We’d have to find uses for the lower strength and quality plastic even

AI isn’t good at changing code, or really even understanding it… It’s good at writing it, ideally 50-250 lines at a time