You know, I was initially dismissive of your comment but you have a point and I don't really. We're mostly here for the tech news and I actually agree with you.
Yes, and - it's not hypocritical to derive benefit from the results of activities that you disagree with, so long as you don't thereby meaningfully contribute to or legitimize those activities.
I fully expect that the average audience of my peers here will be _more_ "VC-pilled" than if I were on Mastodon or whatever, because this is in some respects "a VC space". That doesn't make it incorrect to express an anti-VC opinion here (or anywhere) - it just means I should expect less support for my objectively-correct ( ;) ) position.
Have you seen Reddit recently? Every single subreddit is full of AI posts with AI replies. I'm actually convinced a large majority of that is Reddit themselves artificially boosting their engagement metrics. The saddest part is that the engagement makes it obvious that the general population can't differentiate between AI and real humans even with the telltale signs.
> Every single subreddit is full of AI posts with AI replies.
This has really started getting to me.
I used to really enjoy answering technical questions on Reddit when it was clear the asker was invested in a solution. That would come across as demonstrated understanding and competence, and it would be reflected in their writing.
The last several posts I thought to answer though clearly originated through a process of, "Hi ChatGPT, I want to solve a problem and haven't gotten anywhere asking you to do it for me. Please write a reddit post I can copy and paste..."
One of the telltale signs is that the post title will have poor grammar, but the post itself will be spotless, and full of bolded text emphasizing exactly what they need to stick into the AI tool to drive it in the direction they need.
It’s not just technical content. Just the other day I was reading a post by an employed homes guy on r/seattle. The post was about his experience of being both newly employed but still homeless.
The post was full of “this is not a scheduling conflict problem, this is a structural issue with the city”, “this is not me asking for a handout, this is struggling to survive within the system”
While I get that he might have written a paragraph of his experience, and asked ChatGPT to clean it up or reword it, it was just… whatever.
This is exactly the type of thing I'm talking about and why I'm convinced it's about the metrics/engagement boosting. I don't believe for a second that real people are using chatgpt/others for rewording real thoughts even from another language because those phrases are not natural even in translation. You'll also notice in the original post that that it always ends with a question that encourage replies. If the original poster even bothers to reply it's always the "you're right" at the beginning and then rephrasing the reply. Once you've seen it you can't unsee it.
I just made an account on this site to tell you that after having a "extreme" epiphany about just how crazy the ai bots are on reddit, I've been constantly researching and trying to find some sort of conclusive answer. This is part theory, part public knowledge, and part auditing (which is fucking hilarious that I audited a module for this). I am absolutely and totally convinced that there is live and active collusion between major AI companies and Reddit, and I'm not talking about handing over old training data, I'm talking about allowing OAI and Googs (this is my bad attempt at hiding the names) to use Reddit as a real live testing cage ACTIVELY AND WITHOUT CONSENT OR KNOWLEDGE. I have reason to believe they are using contractors to hide or shift blame, I believe they have no oversight, and I believe they are using LIVE UPDATING OF MODULES with realtime engagement of users via comments. It is consistent and targeted, with any testing parameter under the sun being experimented live and on flesh (or keyboards used by flesh). I believe this is contractual with reddit via hidden means, and is mutual due to the increase in "engagement" which benefits Reddit's stock prices, which in turn increases cash flow, which in turn incentivizes increasing cash flow, which involves contractors, etc etc, in and out, in and out. It's egregious. And I'm quite frankly for the first time about this: scared and saddened. I miss the old Reddit. I miss randomness. I miss runescape chat in 2006. But I wanted you to know that I'm right fucking with you, and I'm glad people are smelling the same funk that I do. Don't really know what else to say. Keep on rockin'.
It's obvious now that you say it but I never thought about the AI companies themselves doing this for their own benefits like training purposes. It's a perfect testing ground to see what works for engagement and to see what real people want to hear back. The reason is pretty clear in that these AI/chat services have real people as users so logically it makes sense that the better sounding (not necessarily better) results make these users want to keep using. At the risk of sounding like AI... you're right... they may have been trained on old content but they are now using live data for fine tuning and quite frankly manipulation.
I miss the organic conversations and real thoughts from real people. I'm the type of person to read the comments before I read the article etc. It always gives more nuanced but also wildly different takes which I find interesting.
Me too my friend. For the record and record's sake only, this is self-theorized and I have not the power, nor the ability, to prove these claims beyond my gut. But as you said, logically (double underline that in your head), from both my own recognition of patterned behavior, and to be honest, from fucking game theory and knowing that people (left unchecked) will naturally squeeze as much juice from the lemon as they can; If I were at a casino, logically and gastrointestinally (gut joke) I would remortgage my own home and drop the deed and keys on the table in order to stake my belief that this is happening. And I fucking hate casinos. Some journalist of much greater reach will hopefully be able to rip back the curtain, but those myopic fuckers have already destroyed trust. We had fun on the playground, we met friends, we learned rumors, we all felt free. But when you find out the jungle gym was greasing the bars on purpose to make us fall, just so they could learn about human bone strength, I doubt you'd visit one again.
And yes, I'd think the value of human to AI dialogue (ironically a single blind study, except the people are blind) is most likely massive. But fomenting? Plus (possible) financial fraud? Woooo boy, what an egregious mistake.
You're absolutely.... that's a tired joke at this point. Sorry.
Just brainstorming, but I suppose that account/karma farming is still useful for the people that do that sort of thing.
Engaging in a heavily on-topic way in larger niche subreddits is probably a really good way to get that done. There's always a motive and it's always money and it always idiotic.
I remember having a clear vision of how this tech was going to ruin communities on the internet. I really hate that it has mostly come to pass and there's no good way to fight it.
I’ve been wondering if ChatGPT is actually coming up with the idea of posting to Reddit when the user is asking a question and ChatGPT can’t find a good source to answer it. ChatGPT has never suggested this to me, but it wouldn’t be a completely crazy thing to do. A lot of ChatGPT answers are sourced from Reddit (via search, and also via training data). If everyone starts asking ChatGPT everything instead of Reddit, there won’t be as many new conversations happening. Promoting users to post questions to Reddit would help solve the user’s direct problem, and also make the ensuing answers available to ChatGPT to help with future conversations.
I understand that a lot of people would be very unhappy if this is true, but I can imagine from the perspective of a product person at OpenAI that it helps them in multiple ways.
FWIW I've been saying this since before Covid times. I stopped visiting Reddit when they killed 3rd party clients, but I was certain 50% of conversations there were machine generated _back then_. It's gotta be worse now
I upvoted you because you were unfairly downvoted. I don't even use a Mac any more after 20 years of exclusively using them but it's actually hilarious how bad magit is compared to this. It's all well and good making the most of limitations that are self imposed but people need to remember to look outside their own bubble.
It may be prettier looking. I've seen many Git GUIs that are prettier than Magit.
But none of them that I've tried have ever come close to the workflow.
I can stage and unstage individual hunks, do complex interactive rebases, squash commits, break apart commits, etc. much faster in Magit than I can in other Git GUIs.
Maybe you're hung up on the "G" part; perhaps I should have just said "UI" rather than "GUI".
So no, I haven't tried that one because it's Mac only, but I'm not really seeing from the screen recordings the kind of workflow that I find so powerful in Magit.
> I can stage and unstage individual hunks, do complex interactive rebases, squash commits, break apart commits, etc. much faster in Magit than I can in other Git GUIs.
I can do all that pretty fast in GitUp, too. Since most of the commands there have quick keyboard shortcuts.
My most common workflow besides staging anything is (to make sure history is clean):
- split up a commit (add/remove files or hunks if the commit contains stuff that should go into another commit)
- move new commit up/down the branch (doesn't require interactive rebase in GitUp)
- squash up/down
(undo/redo from time to time)
As far as I understand, Magit doesn't offer anything in that regard except the good old interactive rebase [1]. In GitUp moving commits is (u)p/(d)own and (s)quash with parent
> Maybe you're hung up on the "G" part; perhaps I should have just said "UI" rather than "GUI".
The distinction doesn't matter. The keyword in both GUI and UI is User. As a user I found GitUp to be a much better tool than Magit. Though Magit does probably allow for more very advanced usage most people don't do. [2]
However, actual useful usage like I described above? Ooh boy, no one does it except GitUp for some reason.
Your comment about the docs is the real reason .NET/C#/F# isn't gaining any new users. The dotnet team should actually be embarrassed about this but it's clear they don't care so neither will anyone else. It's 100% quantity (slop) over quality for Microsoft. Their website and guides are terrible and irrelevant for both new and experienced devs.
Modern C# is probably the best general purpose language out there with the best tooling along with the dotnet framework. Too bad the guides and public information all align with the latest trends Microsoft are pushing to appear relevant. Blazor, MAUI, Aspire e.t.c. are all distractions to maintain the appearance of being modern. None of which are production ready or actually good for that matter.
Back to my original point. If you want to create a new web app then you're REALLY pushed to use Blazor, which is confusing, has many flaws, is basically alpha and is just a bad idea in general. For some reason you're shown a laughably simple guide spread over eight pages which could be a single page. You finish the "guide" and so you go to the "documentation". That documentation page is full of buzzwords that confuses new developers and belittles old developers. The end of this page links back to the pathetic guide. It's seriously like this for everything they do. There's tiny little nuggets of information scattered over thousands of useless pages.
I may sound blunt but it's a fantastic technology ruined by terrible management, poor communication and clearly the worst developer relations team any tech company has ever assembled. How can any company with this much money, this much recognition and this great of a technology fumble it so badly. Well... I actually do know why and it's obvious to anyone capable of critical thinking.
This really seems to be the problem - the developer relations seems to be comprised of non-developers.
The docs are clearly not written by engineers and it really shows.
It’s a shame too - MAUI should be excellent. Best-in-class even. They’ve had the most resources and best tech to throw at the problem and are a distant second at best to React Native. (It might see less use than Flutter these days I’ve no idea).
Also having the C# dev kit for VS Code be non-free is just insane. They’re actively giving the market over to node.
As I keep having to repeat here ad-nauseam, DevKit is optional, you only really need base C# extension which is what provides language server, debugger and code completion capabilities. For VSCodium and non VSC-based distrubutions there's also a fork that packages Samsung's NetCoreDbg component instead of vsdbg.
You'd be right to point out that confusing README of these two does not do .NET any justice however.
I run PowerToys Fancyzones with the following options:
- Disable the shift modifier so that the zones highlight when dragging any window by default
- Enable the second mouse button as a modifier (so you can disable snapping when using the mouse by tapping the right mouse button as you drag the window)
- Enable the option to allow for win+arrow keys to move windows between configured zones vs the default snapping options
Using this config, plus leveraging the default config which allows you to merge zones by holding the middle mouse button is hands down one of the best workflows I've found. It's one of the biggest things holding me back from migrating to Linux full time (outside of some special development workloads that make it easier to run windows + wsl than Linux + a Windows VM).
I run a 40" 4k with two 30" vertically oriented side screens. My side monitors are split into 1/3rds. My main monitor is split into 6 zones. Three of the zones are simply quarters (approximately 1080p per window). The top left I have split into two zones, but using the middle mouse trick I can quickly merge them into a "normal" quarter zone.
I think mouse centric and keyboard centric WMs both kind of suck. What I like about my setup is that it works with either option and works well
Not so! I'm sure they're great for a bunch of usecases but they don't fit mine, which tbf is probably not very common.
I've got an ultrawide monitor, 32:9 aspect ratio, and I like to have three columns, with the middle one being basically 16:9, and the right being fairly narrow, so that the left can be somewhere perhaps slightly wider than 4:3.
Regular tiling positions aren't flexible enough for that
It's honestly the best of the lot but slept on in these parts because of being Windows only. KDE started to clone this as a native feature but it seems to be abandoned. Story of linux I guess.
I really, really can't recommend PowerToys enough.
U.K. view here... and I'd guess this applies the the majority of the world too.
I was born in, grew up in and currently live in a location that the HN community never even thinks about. Most people in here have no idea of how the regular 99% live and then base their whole world view on expensive capital cities and hold the strangest views of housing.
I bought my current house in the 2010s, my mortgage is still half the price of renting and I could manage to pay for everything by myself even if I were on a minimum wage. The problem isn't anything to do with housing it's to do with your own warped view on the world.
I don't say this to be contrarian or to necessarily make a point. I want you to look up the minimum wage of your country and think about how literally everyone else happily lives without thinking twice about these things. You all live a massively privileged life yet these things concern you more than they should.
You bought your house in 2010, if today in 2024 you had no house and had to buy one, could you? Haven't the mortgages and house prices increased a lot more than most salaries even in the remote countryside? (Just like the article says)
Also, remote countryside is cheap in most countries, but unless you can do 100% remote, they are very few jobs there.
Maybe for your location, but not in Canada. I live in a rural town in Canada that is several hours of travel away from any big city. You will typically pay at least $1200 USD a month for rent. A mortgage for a cheap house will cost around $2000 USD a month. For reference, minimum wage after tax is around $1700 USD. Home ownership here is simply out of reach for many people now, and even renting is a struggle.
I think many people are missing your point, but I agree with you. I lived in London for 6 years after university. I am a Software Engineer, my wife is a Lawyer. Whilst we could afford to just about rent in the city, we couldn't buy towards the lifestyle we wanted to lead. So we moved to Leeds, 2hrs north by train.
Suddenly, the 1.5 bed flat we could afford in a good area of London became a 5 bed detached in the best area of Leeds - 15 minutes from the centre. We have huge parks, cinemas, waterfalls, cafes, public transport, swimming pools, yoga studios etc. all within 10 minutes of our house. This is the exact same stuff that I would crave and pay a premium for in London (or any other world city). However, I also have neighbours who are on minimum wage, also affording houses a few roads away from mine, getting to live that amazing lifestyle too. I would arguably say they are living better lifestyles than the majority of my peers in London who are finance bros, consultants, techies but stuck in flats or house shares in Peckham or wherever. This was a massive eye opening realisation for me, and I've recently come across the term 'Deano' to describe it.
Anyway - the answer in my opinion to the housing crisis is decentralisation. Make it feasible to continue to achieve at high levels, but in regional areas. Improve public transport to increase the effective population of these cities so businesses have larger talent pools to choose from, and thus it is more viable for them to relocate. STOP centring so much of global media/films/tv/culture on these fantasy worlds set in New York and help people build fantasy imagines of nice lives by setting them in LCOL areas.
Take the pressure off the big cities, share the wealth, the opportunities, and everyone will be better off for it.
Hot take: already own a house and live somewhere with a livable minimum wage. You are the one who sounds like you are completely unaware of your own privilege.
You just said that where you live, if you were on minimum wage, you could "manage to" pay for half the price of renting. Think hard about what you just said here. You are saying that someone on minimum wage can't nearly afford to rent. But their problem is their own warped view of the world. The warped view that someone working full time should not be forced into homelessness? How warped!
I think the warped view is that renting is always cheaper than owning. You jumped straight there yourself, only arguing about cost of renting and not even touching ownership.
For example in Chicago in the US, at least in the early 2010s, it was also flipped like in GP's area: My monthly mortgage payment was around a third of the rent I had been paying, for a far far better place.
It's quite ironic, or rather unfortunate, that recently we're seeing the opposite problem in the Elixir community.
A lot of the big famous companies used in case studies about how Elixir and Phoenix are amazing, save money, save resources, save development time etc. are starting to abandon the stack for technically worse solutions. And for no good reason other than coming from management it seems.
I agree that it's a great platform for rewrites in that once you have a working solution, and you know the bottlenecks, then you understand how to break it up to make it concurrent, parallel and distributed with minimal effort.
I also think that it's a great prototype language too, though. You can get up and running just as fast as Ruby on Rails for like 99% of projects. Or at least used to be able to. I have a rant about the last five years of Phoenix churn being responsible for the low adoption of Elixir but that's for another day.
I'm not going to pretend to know a lot about networking but I use Netgear's Orbi routers and receivers. I've tried MANY different router and powerline adapter brands and nothing even comes close. I know it has something to do with using a proprietary communication protocol but it honestly works so well that I just accept it as magic and live my life.
