Despite the way online conversation goes, we haven’t really seen historically low voter participation rates. In fact, looking at the data for recent years we have actually seen fairly consistently higher percentage than historic rates by a little bit.

So it’s easy, which path did you like, giving anyone with access to a prop wheelchair however much they are trying to get out of you, or denying aid to anyone that ever managed to get up out of a wheelchair, however briefly?

I’ve so far defied conventional wisdom by just saying flat out when I don’t want to deal with off-hours ‘fun’ time. Which has pretty much been every time. During work hours? Sure no problem. No I’m not going to a team dinner or evening movie.

Most egregious one was a couple decades back when the team was arranging a nice holiday dinner. This was early in my career so I hadn’t yet developed the comfort to reject, but the event was “pay your own way” and the restauraunt was a $120 a person, and that is not an inflation adjusted figure. I had barely enough to make rent at the time so there’s no way I was going to piss away $120 just to eat with coworkers that I get to see every day anyway. I was so nervous declining, but it got a bit easier when they acted offended I wouldn’t do it and said $120 wasn’t really a lot of money.

They barely win: Obviously they carefully crafted their rigging to barely win

Landslide: it’s all the more suspicious that they will by a landslide.

There is no winning on that front.

It’s a tricky line to walk.

On the one hand, you are absolutely right that ability to hobble over a few feet from your chair does not mean the chair is obviously not needed.

On the other, wheelchairs are a very popular prop for grifting folks.

It’s pretty damn near impossible to make an informed judgement on such a matter in an instant, and lots of people do exploit that.

In terms of whether the ‘clean room’ approach is as critical in Europe or not, I can’t be sure. It might be more permissable for someone to use a decompile as a reference and also directly work on a replacement. However I’m pretty sure starting with a decompile of proprietary software as a direct codebase would run afoul of issues.

Otherwise, imagine you have an HEVC encoded rip of a 4K blu ray. You transcode it to AV1. The bytes are totally different, and even the resultant frames are likely not even pixel for pixel identical. I don’t think copyright law would deem that not a violation, regardless of jurisdiction.

One key ingredient to being in that class is thinking you are just so smart.

In my career, everyone who takes a careful and humble method never gets too far. They tend to have some staying power if they are good.

People who blindly say stuff they don’t know get advanced more quickly. A lot of them have had to look for an exit real quick when their blind BS happens to go wrong, but they manage to grift some other company soon enough.

The picture of success in my company is to become some talking head that never actually does anything or even leads or even say anything specific. One guy has basically spent the last few months repeatedly saying “we need to make sure we adopt AI as it makes sense and everyone has to decide for themselves what that means in their job”. Nothing vaguely actionable. Two of them just read prepared statements from marketing in customer meetings, and then just blindly email any questions to “all” to see if anyone has answers. Often for very basic questions on the product, but they have never used or designed a product in years, so they don’t even know who to ask anymore. But it’s cool, they are pulling probably about 400k/year on the low end.

Every single business leader I’ve met where I’ve thought “ok, someone who actually knows how to be a business leader” ends up retiring or getting otherwise pushed out.

Well, depends.

Software is subject to copyright. Yes you can implement the same APIs, but when you get into the visual presentation, things can get copyright related even if the code isn’t being ripped off.

If you decompile rather than clone, well then the code is copyrighted even if transformed into plausible source code.

Of course then there are patents…

Possibilities include the current companies surviving, but after financial catastrophes, some falling completely, and getting absorbed or superseded by big players (e.g. if Anthropic ended up somehow financially vulnerable, Microsoft might slurp them up, or Microsoft decides to do their own initiatives in earnest).

Yeah, random stuff happens and normal people don’t assume something like a pregnant mistress.

One time someone left a few roses under my windshield at work on valentine’s day. I assume someone mistook my car for someone else’s, not that I had some secret admirer who wanted to do a pointlessly anonymous gesture.

One time someone let out the air from one of my tires overnight in my driveway, for no apparent reason and it caused me mild annoyance.

Anyway, fake internet story for fake internet points.

This may be the reality, but in theory the answer is for people to say “fuck working for these asshats if we are stuck at the mercy of caprcious users tipping”.

I would argue there is no ethical way to use them.

Not the first time.

Remember that time he included a state erroneously in a warning about a hurricane and got corrected? No one would have remembered or cared, except he just had to double down and sharpie in a false storm track to try to prove himself right.

He didn’t mean to question the premise that the consumer market is being starved, he was highlighting the reality of that and connecting it as being motivated by a fear of local models.

Admittedly, the question was ambiguous and could be taken either way, but the comment didn’t mention that consumer market was starved, his question brought it into the discussion.

Note that I don’t think that it is fear of local models personally, I think it’s fear of each other. I think cloud infrastructure providers already proved that even when people can locally host stuff, they mostly don’t. So many consumer electronics could meet their promises all locally, but still force the users to connect to their internet services. The tech market has already proven time and time again they are suckers for subscription eshitification, no need to panic over it being different for AI.

A bubble burst is not necessarily ‘the end’ of a tech. The internet bubble burst back in 2000, and here we are.

A lot of the financial burden is offloaded to SPVs that may well be allowed to fail, as the AI companies don’t directly carry the liabilities. They certainly carry enough of them, but they have done a lot to manage to leave other entitites holding the bag. Government may happily let Anthropic fold if it came to it, because Trump is all pissy with them. SpaceX would depend on whether Trump is pissed or loving Elon in the moment of decision. Hell if Trump decided that ‘TrumpAI’ was a possible concept he’d probably let them all burn for the chance of his grift picking up the pieces.

Yeah, Biden-era inflation was supply chain shock from onset and recovery from COVID (which I can’t imagine any government doing well), the COVID stimulus (technically on Trump’s watch, but I’m not going to blame that government since it’s hard to say what the better approach would have been if there even were a better approach), avian flu (narrowly on egg prices, but GOP milked the election year avian flu for all it was worth), and Russia’s invasion (which Trump asserted that Putin would have obeyed him and that he could negotiate that away in a day, and Trump proved him wrong).

Trump-era inflation is ongoing Russian invasion (not Trump’s fault), AI bullshittery (in the ways that would matter, not Trump’s fault), terrorizing laborers (100% Trump’s fault), tarriffs (obviously his fault), and the Iran war (again, totally his fault).

Yeah, there are scenarios that it can ‘one shot’, either very straightforward variations of common themes or a use case that is comprehensively instrumented in a way to “know” if it is correct or not automatically, and having the solution iterate against that criteria evaluation until all criteria pass (though in the latter case, I have seen it change the criteria deciding the criteria was a mistake instead of fixing a problem).

If you spend enough tokens, let it rebuild and test on its own, and let it churn and churn, then I’m not too surprised it could make this launch and be superficially intact. The real pain starts when trying to close the gaps the project has in this sort of scenario.

I will say that GenAI makes golang a lot less tedious. Lot’s of obvious but required boilerplate to force the developer to abide by consistent structure. Though I still prefer reading python code since I don’t have to peruse a ton of boilerplate there.

Enjoy

At least my experience is that a vibe coded app gets to ‘early alpha’ then stays there. If AI is augmenting a developer who is otherwise competent and they don’t let it get ahead of their own understanding, it can work out though not as ‘miraculously fast’ as this. If AI can oneshot an application then it can also work out. If a project vibes itself in a week or two to ‘looks like what it should be but isn’t good enough’, then thus far every one I see is doomed to sit there, because the AI can’t finish it and if you let the GenAI produce that much code, it’s generally not serviceable even for very capable developers.

I spent a lot of time last week basically peeling back an overly vibed attempt at an application by a colleague. It was too flaky and incomplete and deleting large sections of it was frankly more practical than trying to rework it. It had gotten to the point where every attempt to try to have GenAI fix it one way would just break something else. That project was, essentially a fairly small command line utility, I fear to think what something the level of a Photoshop knockoff would be like.

Read a review by someone, this vibed up solution isn’t going to win anyone over either because it evidently sucks. It may imitate the UI more closely for what works, but not much works adequately.

It was the height of long cutscene JRPGs.

But I recommend them wholeheartedly. Don’t expect super involved gameplay mechanics, but a solid turn based JRPG with lengthy cutscenes.

Also be sure not to skip out on Xenogears.