This is such a fun and insightful piece. Unfortunately, the people who really need to read it never will.

I get notifications for calls (obviously), SMS messages (of which I receive an average of 1 per month) and IMs from my immediate family. Everything else I check up on when I actually feel like I have the time for it. This has dramatically reduced the number of emails and other things I forget to reply to/act on, because I see them when I want to and when I have the time to actually deal with them; not when some random notification pops up when I’m doing something else, gets half-noticed and swiped away because I’ll deal with it later.

Cloud Saves may be difficult to deal with, depending on what games you play.

The headline is supposedly CISA urging users to either update or delete Chrome — it’s not Chrome/Google itself. However, I’m having trouble finding the actual CISA alert. It’s not linked in the article as far as I can tell.

Fair enough, and thanks for the offer. I found a demo on YouTube. It does indeed look a lot more reasonable than having an LLM actually write the code.

I’m one of the people that don’t use IntelliSense, so it’s probably not for me, but I can definitely see why people find that particular implementation useful. Thanks for catching and correcting my misunderstanding. :)

I’m closing in on 30 years too, started just around '95, and I have yet to see an LLM spit out anything useful that I would actually feel comfortable committing to a project. Usually you end up having to spend as much time—if not more—double-checking and correcting the LLM’s output as you would writing the code yourself. (Full disclosure: I haven’t tried Copilot, so it’s possible that it’s different from Bard/Gemini, ChatGPT and what-have-you, but I’d be surprised if it was that different.)

Here’s a good example of how an LLM doesn’t really understand code in context and thus finds a “bug” that’s literally mitigated in the line before the one where it spots the potential bug: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/ (see “Exhibit B”, which links to: https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307, which is the actual HackerOne report).

LLMs don’t understand code. It’s literally your “helpful”, non-programmer friend—on stereoids—cobbling together bits and pieces from searches on SO, Reddit, DevShed, etc. and hoping the answer will make you impressed with him. Reading the study from TFA (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3613904.3642596, §§5.1-5.2 in particular) only cements this position further for me.

And that’s not even touching upon the other issues (like copyright, licensing, etc.) with LLM-generated code that led to NetBSD simply forbidding it in their commit guidelines: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/112446618914747900

Edit: Spelling

I wouldn’t trust an LLM to produce any kind of programming answer. If you’re skilled enough to know it’s wrong, then you should do it yourself, if you’re not, then you shouldn’t be using it.

I’ve seen plenty of examples of specific, clear, simple prompts that an LLM absolutely butchered by using libraries, functions, classes, and APIs that don’t exist. Likewise with code analysis where it invented bugs that literally did not exist in the actual code.

LLMs don’t have a holistic understanding of anything—they’re your non-programming, but over-confident, friend that’s trying to convey the results of a Google search on low-level memory management in C++.

Nowhere does he say that he doesn’t believe in Wunterslash, so I’m cool with him.

That’s great. Don’t get why they’re not announcing it, but whatever, I’m glad it’s gone.

Couldn’t you just program it to start (and stop) at a given time, or make a note of how long it says on the display that it’ll take?

It seems (to me) like a very, very minor improvement for a huge cost, namely that your washing machine is on your network and is internet connected.

It’s not Mozilla’s CEO that’s doing anything shady here, it’s a partner company, OneRep.

Edit: And Mozilla is breaking up with OneRep because of it. (Just in case someone had missed that part.)

What are you missing on Linux?

Edit: Kinda weird to downvote for asking an honest question, but sure, knock yourselves out.

It’s not an Android phone tho. It’s a feature phone, so it’ll probably be running KaiOS like the other Nokia feature phones.

Why can’t you use ±aliases in Git, Mastodon, etc.?

Edit: git config --local user.email "something+someotherstuff@example.com" shouldn’t cause any issues.

LibreWolf is a very decent Firefox fork. Open Source is great because bad CEOs can’t really threaten the source code.

Not saying this one is bad though — I have no idea. The last one was raking in $7 million/year which is less than ideal for an open source project.

I pretty much stopped reading at:

Genre terms exist to prime expectations for players.

What a ridiculously self-centered claim. Genre terms (and other categorizations) exist because language users use them to make things easier to communicate about. I can only imagine the author of the article going: “Well, actually a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable” when talking to a chef about gazpacho, or “a penguin is not technically a bird because it doesn’t fly” when someone says that a penguin is their favorite bird.

MFer needs to learn about cognitive categorization, prototype theory, etc. It doesn’t need to be 100% the same within a category — then the category is too specific and is absolutely useless — it just needs to be similar enough that most people (that aren’t necessarily experts in the subject) understand what you’re getting at.

Did you read the article? She’s not saying that she didn’t know that measles are dangerous, she’s saying that she thinks people would vaccinate more and sooner if they knew the potential delayed effects of measles. Her son died 4 years after catching it and he wasn’t vaccinated at 2 because he was on a delayed vaccination program (it doesn’t say why). It’s a super tragic story really and it doesn’t seem like she’s anti-vax or anything like it, quite the opposite.

That opening run of Tunic was great! It’s such a great game — nice to see it get some more exposure.

Edit: Spelling

I played Everything today. That was both hilarious and wonderful. Like Proteus and Mountain it’s definitely not a game for everyone, but if some silliness and philosophy doesn’t scare you away, you’re probably going to enjoy it.

Edit: If you’d rather just watch it as a short film, then that’s possible too: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/SrNsE3Jo-dYsrOfVj or you can let the game play itself for you if you’d rather just lean back and take it all in. Just leave the game unattended for a while and it will start playing itself. Settings for autoplay can be edited in the game’s settings menu.

Intro screens and the like can usually be dealt with easily in many games. Look up the game on PCGamingWiki — it’s usually much easier (and less malware prone) than pirating.