I would like to thank you for this comment, which I enjoyed a great deal.

.ml is blocked in China? Wild.

Are you the legendary Poem for your sprog of yore?!

They may have come to this decision through experience.

Having used it a bit, I find it’s like someone a bit stupid with a lot of time on their hands, but no knowledge, saying “I’ll learn everything you need to know from Google and write you an answer”, just speeded up a lot. And just as frustrating.

And you have to wade through so much to find the right one. Or type in AI wait a minute and get the answer.

Uhhh, type in AI, wait a minute and get an answer. How are you checking it? rm - f / isn’t the only filesystem footgun.

I’m finding AI to be right roughly only 60% of the time, and it’s as bad and hallucinatory about shell scripts as it is about everything else.

It will happily admit its mistakes and give you another answer when you call it out, but it’s no more likely to be right that time.

It’s fair to say that the environmental and ethical concerns are significant and I wouldn’t look down in anyone refusing to use AI for those reasons. I don’t look down on vegetarians or vegans either - I don’t have to agree with someone’s moral stance or choices to respect them.

But you’re right, LLMs are full of crap.

For me, it’s all about the maintenance now. If it encourages you to write messy code, you will come to loathe your codebase. If it gives you clean, easy to navigate code you will love it more and more.

When I was a young programmer I couldn’t abide any boilerplate at all and loved clever magic that made it disappear. Now I don’t mind a bit of boilerplate and hate non-obvious machinery.

When I was young I bought the promise that object oriented programming would solve the software complexity problem, but now I think that at best it’s neutral and sometimes it makes it worse.

What’s revanced? I’m not especially keen to give Google my money either. They fall into the category of businesses that have way too much money and power already.

I don’t pay for music unless I buy the track or album.

All depends what your trade offs are. “Milliseconds of run time versus months of debugging.” I know one team that were died in the wool C programmers but their baby had one too many security issues and their CTO said they had to reimplement it all in rust. One of them resigned but the others spent ages on it. They hated the borrow checker with a passion, almost as much as they hated the CTO, but after a bit they admitted it had some benefits and in the end they have a love/hate relationship with it. They hate the process still, but they love the result. The Milliseconds vs months quote is from my friend on that team. He said one subsystem had a seriously massive speed boost because they turned off the logging they used to do to recover from some infrequent intermittent bug that simply doesn’t happen any more. They’re proud of what they did.

YouTube music won’t play in the background though, so it’s a pain whilst driving and navigating traffic or routes. Some of my friends make playlists on there and share them, so I do use it sometimes.

But absolutely use the service that brings you joy, not the ones that I prefer!

Are you sure about this? Do you have proof?

When Google explains in their privacy policy that their Fonts API collects your browsing data, I believe them. Without proof.

https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq/privacy

When I embed Google Fonts in my website via the Google Fonts Web API, what data does Google receive from my website visitors?

When end users visit a website that embeds Google Fonts, their browsers send HTTP requests to the Google Fonts Web API. The Google Fonts Web API serves the Google Fonts Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and subsequently the font files specified in the CSS to the users. Such HTTP requests include
(1) the IP address used by the respective user to access the Internet,
(2) the requested URL on the Google server, and
(3) HTTP headers including the user agent describing the website visitors’ Internet browser and operating system versions as well as the referer (i.e. the webpage on which the Google font is to be displayed).

Soundcloud lets you play any song you want at any time, even on the free tier, and when you ask it to play a playlist, it only plays songs on the playlist.

You can have recommendations from an algorithm if you choose, but it’s encouraged rather than enforced.

There are a lot more independent artists on it, and fewer big labels, or at least it feels that way because it doesn’t seem to prioritise big labels over some person I’ve never heard of.

Spotify has an annoy-users-until-they-pay model. If you deliberately piss me off, you’re not getting any of my money. Soundcloud just has ads.

Dark. Very dark.

Consent is key. And not at the shops, remember.

No need to start a campaign, just remember mannequins have feelings too.

Be kind to your mannequins. Ask yourself "If it were me stood here all day and all night in public, how would I feel about that outfit?

Nope nope nope! Not like this!

Of course, educate your mannequin children sensibly and calmly and before they learn it in the playground or online, but absolutely no physical demonstrations whatsoever!

Can you not see how pissed off little mannequin kid is? -“Stupid horny big brother getting frisky in public again.” Poor mannequin kid is scarred for life.

Ah, true, yes.

I don’t care how horny you are for butt stuff with your stripey-clothed friend, not in public, not in the store and definitely NOT, in any circumstances, anywhere near mannequin children, FFS!