It was a shock, and my faith in the internet will be lost entirely if it turns out that your name is not actually Killgrind.

(Her supposed real name was Julia Goethe Gothe, in case anyone wants to know. Former Twitter handle @JuleStinkesocke.)

I’ve also fallen for and followed a fake account before. It was some neckbeard pretending to be a female disabled doctor. Apparently, he actually was some kind of advocate for the disabled, possibly started with the self-justification to “help”.

Oh wow, apparently it was a bigger deal than I thought back then: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jule_Stinkesocke

Is the one about Kirk unbelievable? Some parts, yes, such as the immediate registration as Republican (not shown in screenshots), but in general, there are favorable non-Republican responses, such as “Shoe on Head”. I’m also upset about quotes out of context, that part seems to be real, and so it builds a bridge from reality to fiction. It’s just that I wouldn’t turn full MAGA because Stephen King smeared a conservative.

The spam detection works, though!

(As intended - on the ones criticising these posts.)

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!

Sad thing is that in this day and age, they’d hardly need to lift a finger to have this rephrased 100 times. But they know they don’t have to. People eat up the garbage from their feed, people (often the same) know that a lot of it is Russian bots.

p. s: Still surprised how poorly ChatGPT-5 Thinking handled this. A lot of obvious bot content, such as “weeks of uncut videos and policy dives” by a Democrat, “attended a live event” etc.

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!

Aren’t these guys against VOLUNTARY lethal injection at the same time? There was a whole “That’s my Bush!”-episode about it and everything.

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.