I am basically a script kiddie and Anthropic Claude helped me design a small app for myself that was way beyond my own capabilities and it even went as far as documenting in comments what each bit of the program did for me, to help me understand the logic.

This is the good shit, right here!

AI does shit tier work, but it provides access to new skills.

If you learned anything from the experience, you’re a programmer, now.

Welcome to the crew.

Don’t be afraid to toss out the training wheels (AI) when it gets in your way, and try to enjoy the ride.

Certainly less time than it would take someone to write it themselves.

I mean, sure - for you and I, who aren’t qualified to write that specific code, maybe we can promot the electronic idiot to get there. Of course, neither we nor the electroic idiot knows where there is, and at best we will copy in exisitng better code that we should have imported from a library. So we gave up automated updates to avoid reading the manual pages.

In contrast, for domains I’m an expert in, babysitting the electric idiot is always a complete waste of time. I can just call the correct library, the correct way, on the first attempt.

Today’s AI really highlights exisitng technical debt. If there’s already a mountain of it, I can see how the learning model may help wrangle it, and how it may be hard to see the added costs.

The problem for me personally, is that AI has worked exactly 0% of the time when I try to use it.

Your mistake is knowing that you’re doing, so you catch AI’s mistakes.

Try using it for stuff you’re not remotely qualified to do in the first place, then it can look useful!

like with bullets! When some of you don’t do what I want! Why are you booing my commencememt speech?

– average tech CEO

The ones who scream the loudest about this never have a solution for Apple devices and it’s annoying.

We saw Apple’s closed ecosystem as the trap that it is, and avoided it. Can’t really help you if you’re still inside the cage.

You’re also missing out on a bunch of other cool shit, honestly.

But I get it, it is convenient. I’m not mad. I just also can’t help you fly free until you leave the cage.

Yes. And it’s extra dumb, because Nintendo is already the only ones not selling the console at close to cost in order to move more games.

In hindsight, the breaking joycons look less like an accident and more like a plan.

But what if it goes wrong, and the parasites vacate our area, leaving room for vibrant innovative new companies to thrive?!

Thanks!

Hmmm. Good for them.

Of course, I dumped the S&P 500 awhile back, to eliminate my exposure to the rest of the tech bubble (Amazon, Microsoft and friends betting hard on enshittification), anyway.

So this was both too little and too late, for me.

Yes. I can’t forget. Those fuckers at Sony fucked my Windows install so badly I had to wipe and rebuild.

Can we stop treating people as mentally challenged toddlers?

Yes, but let’s wait until the lead-poisoned generation have been cared for first. And also until those harmed by whatever the brainworm-in-chief FDA is up to have been cared for. After that, let’s expect everyone to be able to think things through.

Thats like expecting humans to know how blood works

Ah, but I’ve mastered knowledge of the various humors!

Pros - My hardware is mine. If I don’t like something that shipped with Debian or Mint, I can just remove it. If I’m on Mint but miss something from Debian, there’s usually a one line command that will add it back.

Also, most versions of Desktop Linux are free. I don’t mind paying for software, but keeping track of Windows license keys was a pain in the ass.

Cons - I mean, it’s still a computer. Computers are dumb. Installing it - while way simpler than a Windows upgrade, still took me a few minutes of clicking “next”.

I intend for my next computer to ship with Linux Mint pre-installed, because I’m that lazy.

What do I miss from Windows?

Nothing.

I used to dual boot Windows for gaming, but now there’s only 5 games in my Steam Library that don’t run on Linux.

Five.

I gave up five games, to kick Windows out of my life.

I would tell you which ones, but I haven’t actually run across which ones. I only know it’s five because I can subtract the numbers before anand after I click the “only show me Linux compatible games” filter button.

This particular community loves to play the paranoid victim, which is unfortunate.

I agree, but Sony literally helped invent DRM. Sony went all-in on “fuck you” to their customers back when we all adored them for the Walkman.

And it feels like they have only rarely done better, since then, after exhausting all other options.

So I agree - we do jump there too quick.

But when we are discussing Sony, the ire is valid anyway.

Everyone at Sony can go fuck themselves - today, yesterday and just generally.

Yes. This is the way.

I’m the VP’s ally. Practically their beat friends. It’s all these pesky regulations, lawyers, audits and extreme personal liability that is slowing both of us down from doing things the sociopath way…at least until I find a gig with a less sociopathic boss.

Yes! Shout out to The Maximum Fun network - they just added ad-free feeds as a perk for supporters this year.

I call it a “perk” because it’s at the $120/year donor level, though. I guess it’s really just a nice perk for people already willing to donate that much, more than a rational paid feature.

But it’s still nice to see the option.

Oh! Yeah, I rarely watch along with video links. I thought I had successfully found a way to read along. Oh well. Still neat.

Neat. From https://github.com/kaansenol5/VibeOS

For those keeping score:

What Works on Pi

• Full desktop GUI at 1920x1080
• USB keyboard and mouse (including through hubs)
• SD card filesystem
• All userspace programs
• DOOM at 2x scale

What’s Missing on Pi

• Networking (no driver for Pi’s WiFi/Ethernet)
• Audio (no driver for Pi’s audio)

My own comment:

It’s cool that we can remix code this rapidly. It is also telling that things that were already working reliably on Pi work (Doom), and things that were hard on Pi do not (sound has been difficult lately).

AI is getting better and better at remixing in mostly (but not entirely) non-harmful ways. (Notice that networking was lost, in spite of being a solved problem on Raspberry Pi hardware.)

Once again, this AI output is both impressive as all heck, while simultaneously objectively worse than searching for “Raspberry Pi OS” and downloading the first thing I find. (Edit: Until there’s enough of these Vibe OSes to poison my search results, anyway!)

Edit: Sounds like I may have discovered a completely separate developer that live streamed creation of their vibe coded OS!

If I had a nickel for every time someone did that…well I wound have ten cents.

But you have to admit it’s weird that it has happened twice.

Yes. Zuckerberg is at the helm of a company that got caught shipping illegal bonus spyware to track all three people who block their massive amount of tracking through regular somehow legal spyware.

Anything that fool (Zuckerberg) says about privacy should be treated as a lie until proven otherwise with detailed forensic evidence. And then once proven, we should all go over the forensic evidence again to figure out how he fooled the forensics.

Fuck. There’s a real good chance this one just gets more real, over time.

Getting paged every night at 1 am, because someone has been coddling the AI…