The standard of originality is low, but it does exist. … [T]he Constitution mandates some minimal degree of creativity … and an author who claims infringement must prove “the existence of . . . intellectual production, of thought, and conception.” Burrow-Giles.

• Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion on the copyright infringement case Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)^[pdf].

Where I am, I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever see a blue sky again. Even when there are no clouds, it’s usually pretty gray. I’m thinking the cause is probably wildfire smoke. I’m lucky never to have faced any real risk of loss of life or property to flames themselves and don’t expect that to be a real possibility for me ever in the foreseeable future. But it’s sad to see the sky so gray. Maybe after wildfire season ends, it will be bluer again at least for part of the year.

The only AI usage pattern I’m interested in is the “not at all” pattern.

What’s “Lielbertarian” and why does searching for that give me zero results? Is it a typo?

If by “Lielbertarian” you mean the same thing I mean by “Libertarian with a capital L” (and what I mean by that is the U.S. Libertarian Party), then identifying as a “relatively centrist Geoist Minarchist Libertarian” explains why you’d say that “Libertarians are by definition anti authoritarian”.

To a left libertarian (with a lower case l), right-wing “libertarians” (in quotes on purpose) simply prefer to be subjugated by despotic CEOs and landlords employing privately-owned mercenary paramilitary/cop organizations (like the Pinkertons) over being subjugated by despotic tyrants wielding state police and military. They’re “libertarians” in name only. So long as my boss holds the authority to deny me access to the fulfillment of my basic needs and uses that authority to coerce me into creating surplus profit for them, nobody who thinks that’s ok qualifies in my book as “anti authoritarian”. (And no, the right to choose your own master by changing employers doesn’t change whether it’s authoritarian or not.)

There is no left-right. There is only auth-lib.

And no, Libertarians (with a capital L) and ancaps are not on the “lib” end.

Dexter fan?

I’ve got a work bestie like that. Helps keep us sane.

Lol. Was a joke. Aimed at trying not to be biased about modes of transport.

It’s weird to me how inconsistent people’s reported experience with AI coding tools can be. Someone else in this thread said it “feels like developing software with a cheat code enabled using claude code”.

I’m glad for my own sake to be able to say that I don’t have enough experience with LLMs to know which would be closer to my experience. (Though if I had to guess, I can’t imagine I’d ever feel subjectively like I was having a “good” experience with it.)

But I do wonder what the difference is between the different experiences. I suppose it could be some tools are “better” than others, but I doubt it. Maybe some people are more skilled at bending LLMs to their will. But if I had to bet, (and not to say this is necessarily the case about aesthelete specifically), there’s a certain amount of evidence that people who have “good experiences” with LLMs may be self-deluded. The existence of “AI psychosis” points that direction. But I’ve heard “self-delusion” used as an explanation for why GenAI tends to make a lot of people less productive while making them feel more productive.

I feel your pain. I’m hunting for another software engineering job myself, and I’m also having to weed through listings dripping with references to AI coding agents and such. :\

• Be Pinto, the Bean
• Visit /c/fuck_ai
• People there hate AI
• Pinto, the Bean:

Theia… is a hypothetical ancient planet in the early Solar System which, according to the giant-impact hypothesis, collided with the proto-Earth around 4.50 billion years ago…

• Wikipedia page on Theia

(Emphasas mine.)

all traces of carbon-14 would be long gone after 14 billion years.

I don’t think anyone would seriously say that Theia is 14 billion years old. The universe is about 14 billion years old. None of the planets of our solar system developed until about 4.6 billion years ago, and I wouldn’t think the upper limit for the development of the hypothetical planet Theia (if indeed it ever did exist) could be much more than that 4.6 billion years ago figure. That said, your point certainly stands that Theia would be far older than that up “to about 60,000 years ago” figure, so carbon dating is inapplicable to any discussion around evidence for/against the Theia hypothesis.

this is a disaster that can’t continue forever

I thought the same about blockchain. And to an extent, I was right. Nobody’s talking about Bitcoin or Etherium (let alone NFTs) any more except the major weirdos who are still stuck in their own weird echo chamber. But the price of Bitcoin is still alarmingly high for something with literally no value. Largely because it’s being propped up by despots.

But more than that, I think the AI bubble is basically just a continuation of the blockchain bubble. Several companies with warehouses full of graphics cards eventually found it unprofitable to mine cryptocurrencies. Needing a way to salvage their profits, they took stock of their assets (lots of graphics cards) and considered how to salvage their situation. A stupid scammy bubble worked the first time. Why not a second time? And thus the AI bubble was born. A bubble which made use of… lots of graphics cards.

You’re right that the AI bubble can’t exist forever in its current form. But who knows what’s next? Quantum computers? (That’s already kindof happening.) Human brain cells in a jar used for computing? (Wired just had an article about that.) Dark factories? Some bullshit yet to be pulled from someone’s ass? (Not that all of these things are entirely bullshit. Some of them probably have more potential to be genuinely profitable than GenAI. But they also definitely have the potential to be sold in half-baked (or less-than-half-baked) forms atop a mountain of unjustified hype. And to be made the new cornerstone of an even more precarious economy.)

Blockchain was a bubble. And it’s… less influential than it was. (Not dead, but fizzling out.) But it didn’t really “pop” the way you’d expect a bubble to pop. It turned into another bubble. My worry is that the AI bubble won’t pop. It’ll pivot. And it won’t be the same. (I don’t really fear that I’m going to be forced by my employer to start supporting Bitcoin payments on our e-commerce site.) But it probably won’t be better in any real sense.

I fear we may be living in a “bubble bubble”. As in, the commodity that is being greatly overvalued and propped up by despotic governments is no longer a specific niche industry, but rather the production of bubbles themselves. It’s gone meta. (And I don’t mean Zuck. Well, yes I do. But you know what I mean.)

(Sometimes when I comment in this thread, folks ask me “is this just you speaking or is it the official opinion of /c/fuck_ai?” Just to head that question off, this is just me talking on my own behalf. Not on behalf of the community.)

You’d get better answers if you shared where you got the idea that we’ve found remnants of Theia. (I doubt most folks who would read this have heard of any such Theia-related developments. For that matter, I was completely unfamiliar with Theia until I googled it just now. But if you shared where you got the idea that we’d found “remnants of Theia”, even folks who hadn’t been familiar with that development could probably read/watch that and maybe provide some insight.)

Apparently Hy-vee is employee-owned

From what I’ve heard from former employees of employee-owned grocery stores, it sounds like “employee-owned” can often be an “on paper”, kind of technicality that bolsters their image marketing-wise/PR-wise while not actually being true in practice.

A former employee of the Price Cutter location I was talking about, when I asked about Price Cutter being worker-owned (it says so in a sign on the door as you walk in), told me that the union there was completely captured/controlled by the upper management. Like, the vice president had full veto power over what the union decided. (And why TF would a truly “employee-owned” company have/need a union. So you can collectively bargain with yourselves, the collective owners?) In practice, the union was kindof just to give employees some degree of illusion that they weren’t just wage slaves. And maybe to make creating a real union seem less feasible to employees. And maybe there are meetings that employees can attend and theoretically vote on things or whatever, but in practice, the attendees who vote don’t actually have any sway over the direction of the company or conditions for workers or anything.

Not to say I’m not filing a complaint. It probably can’t hurt to do so. But I don’t think “it’s employee-owned” is actually necessarily any reason to think results might be better than if it didn’t say “employee-owned” on the website, unfortunately.

Ah. I didn’t even realize they were. I’ve blocked all the pro-GenAI communities I’ve run across, so it may be that it’s been so long since I had enough exposure to any of the pro-GenAI content on programming.dev that I’ve forgotten about programming.dev being all pro-GenAI.

Yeah, my current job isn’t pressuring people on my team to use GenAI (yet), but unfortunately I’m going to have to change jobs soon-ish and I definitely worry about being pressured or forced into using it. :(

Also, another dev team at my company that my team works pretty closely with has been relegated basically entirely to the role of code reviewing slop committed by a third party contractor company. :( :(

Trumplandia. :\

old stuff needs to be pulled to the front

Yeah, the stuff I’m talking about is always the front unit on the shelf. I can’t always be arsed to search behind the front one for fresher units, but when I do, usually the entire stock on the shelf of that particular product is expired all the way to the back of the shelf. So I don’t really think that’s the issue in my case. I might be more vigilant about searching behind the frontmost unit in the future, though.

every major retail store in the country is cutting staff to save money

Yeah, this store clearly has huge turnover as well. Probably not uncommon to see in grocery stores in general, but I think it’s worse here than other stores. The checkout clerks, for instance, often times have to ask for help for things like “how do I ring up the gallon drinking water refills” or whatever. (Which, of course, isn’t the clerk’s fault at all.)