Cthulhu_

I can't speak for the commenter, but many people (arguably, most?) manage to work around their differences to fit into society, if not make a relationship work for at least a while (see also "masking").

But anecdotal (friends, family, colleagues, myself), these coping mechanisms aren't permanent; masking constantly once you're living with someone else is pretty much impossible, fatigue/burnout kicks in often in people's 30s, and a lot of coping mechanisms people learn as kids are no longer effective or desirable as adults (often known as neuroses). Then there's attachment issues, also picked up as children. These may apply to everyone, but they're exacerbated for people with personality disorders, mental health issues and/or neurodiversity.

Figuring out what are "built in" / genetic / medical conditions, unhealthy coping mechanisms or trauma responses is a long journey that a lot of people are going through.

^ Exactly; every game, and especially every new IP, is a risk. There's some checklists they will pass over but those are no guarantee.

Mass Effect or Dragon Age could've flopped like Anthem did and we would never hear from them again. In fact the first Mass Effect was pretty rough in terms of gameplay, as was the first Witcher game (and arguably the later ones and Cyberpunk because they all needed serious rework and bugfixing after release). Yet they're still popular because something else compensated for their technical issues.

Especially with the recent slew of layoffs in the gaming industry. One anecdotal report from a local small time game dev said they'd get hundreds, if not thousands of responses to an open position, both domestic and international from recently fired game developers.

It's a really weird market, it's both one of the biggest industries in the world (bigger than music and movies combined), yet also high unemployment and poor working conditions / work/life balance, with AI throwing another spanner in the works. Meanwhile a lot of people that want to work in it aren't just in it for the money, they have genuine passion for the craft / industry - which is actually rare in most IT jobs, most enterprise jobs aren't exactly exciting material.

> It’s a fantastic hobby though

And this is where things get... a bit weird - game developers that want to make a living out of what they do are competing with people who'd do it for free and who have no risk if their thing fails. It's the same in most creative fields - why would my employer pay for a band or dj at corporate events if we have some hobbyists working for us that will play for free / for fun?

Or what the indie space is complaining about recently: copycats as soon as they show anything of their ostensibly original idea, vibe coded and released with a similar name as soon as possible.

Which isn't a new problem, it's just a lot faster and more prevalent. I really hope Valve (the premier marketplace for PC and indie games, alongside Itch) cracks down on it and hands out things like a "seal of quality" to separate slop from serious attempts at making games.

(because they earn money from everything and they have no real competition they don't actually crack down on slop, just like the various app stores don't care much about shovelware as long as it earns them money).

This is already happening though, to a point; recently, local GPs have been subsumed into larger health care provider companies, and they have set up systems so that before you can make an appointment, you need to go through a wizard and / or chat interface. Likewise, people are encouraged to go to a website and do some self-diagnosis before calling a doctor - things like "if you have a fever, how high is it and for how long have you had it?"

It's indirectly related to health insurance cost, as we have a GP shortage and they (I presume?) realized a lot of people are making appointments and wasting a GP's time for trivialties like a cough or cold.

I'm pretty sure they already have, or are experimenting with having people go through an AI chatbot first. This is already very much a thing with any kind of customer support. It's not a new development though, the preceding generation was conversational interfaces.

Not OP and not "good" in the literary sense but I've enjoyed reading Warhammer books since about last year. They're brainless and depressing dystopian, possibly YA level novels but at least it's self-aware and leans into it.

Man this reminds me of this website I used to frequent.

Brainstorming here; monitoring, logging, etc. The fact the store managers were called out of bed when there was an issue indicates it works. If a cooler broke down overnight or its temperature was too high for X amount of time, they have to discard the products. Without monitoring they likely wouldn't know until customers got sick.

I wish commenters (in general) would do a bit more "steelmanning" before asking questions about why something is (in this case) connected to the internet.

The store managers don't manage the IT security of the chain though.

I don't think this is exactly true; adding holes only happens when adding features, and while LLMs can add features fast, deciding what features are actually wanted and needed is still a human factor.

So the amount of new code added is limited by processes and product management. Add to that that newly added code can get a lot more checks on it now, and new code will be more secure too.

I also don't think your main premise (adding holes faster than we can find them) holds up, but that's another matter. TL;DR I think we're in a high intensity period right now, but this time next year it'll be quiet in comparison - possibly quieter than before AI code scanners were a thing.

I don't think it'll be that bad:

1. The cost of running AI is dropping down to "free" - there's open weight models, open source tools, and guides on running your own if the long list of suppliers isn't good enough for your use cases.

2. Vulnerabilities have always been a risk; AI is not a panacea. The pre-AI best practices still apply. Furthermore, a huge percentage of vulnerabilities are in 3rd party tools and systems, which are systematically being scanned and fixed and/or exploited, then fixed.

You mention "the free software community" in your last sentence though - this implies the code in question is open source, so it's able to receive plenty of improvements from anyone with access to these tools.

I don't think many people consider working as a McD's cashier to be their career though - besides managers, do they employ anyone over 25? Do any cashiers stay in that role for more than a few years or do they get promoted?

The optimistic "another" way is that anyone whose job is now obsolete finds a new job. Ideally within the same company.

(if you live in places with healthy worker protections, a company can't just fire someone, they need reasonable grounds; bar that, they need to first try and place them somewhere else in the company, and if that doesn't work, firing involves paying a severance fee. In an ideal and morally correct situation anyway, in practice they'll use dodgy corporate structures to bankrupt companies before paying or retraining anyone)

> This is the only way we can possibly deal with mass unemployment.

No it's not, but look at other countries with high unemployment and no UBI to see what the result is. Ranging from protests to migration.

I dunno, it could be evocative like something like "petrichor" is in English.

I would've assumed text based games (MUDs and text adventures) would be a perfect fit for LLM agents to play. But it wouldn't be as visual I suppose.

Possibly because it's blurry your brain is trying to do stuff?

On the other hand, they don't know what their models do or can do and nothing is safe ever, so ???

Part of me wants a pure writing device, something that is dedicated to writing and / or maintaining a blog. They exist, but they're a bit expensive for what they are and they don't look very ergonomic. May need to build a Linux boot for a raspberry pi or something.

This'll likely get worse - LLMs and the tools built around them are getting better at inferring what you need / want.

I had Claude build me a map tool to calculate travel times from one or two points to every street in the city; not only did it do that, it added various scenarios, speed limits, usage of bus lane toggles, different visualizations based on thresholds, and a tool to scan for optimal starting points based on a configurable grid size. etc.

This overcompleteness is a mixed blessing though, in this case it was great and convenient, but if it was e.g. documentation intended for human consumption then it wouldn't be so great, and if it was a letter written to the county that they should consider another location for a fire station it'd actually be pretty ineffective.

Arguable; reports may be legal requirements or important for handover. Can't have a functional legal system without police reports, for example, or a functional medical system without health care providers sharing information.

Boring reports are also important for historians, although granted, not everything is actually important in the long run.

It's (at least) two things I think; one is that thanks to the internet, the ability to focus on things for long is shot - I struggle to read long form content on the internet, generally speaking. I also did my whole career with Google and skim reading documentation looking for solutions for an immediate problem more than getting a wholesale end-to-end understanding.

(this isn't a new observation / thing, see https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/ originally from somewhere in the 2000s)

But now with AI it's easy to generate a lot of prose. I'm thinking for example of the merge request descriptions my colleague submits. And here's the thing, it's not even bad or incorrect - I read it thinking, if I were to really sit down for it, get into The Zone etc, I could crank this out myself.

But I don't because honestly the MR is relatively trivial and can be described in just a sentence or two. Style and accuracy aside, my current take is that LLMs write things that humans wouldn't bother with, because it's too much effort and there's not enough value.

I mean it's an MR for an enterprise library project, the chances that anyone will ever read that MR description again once it's merged is close to zero.

That said: LLMs themselves don't get that, they will read everything you tell them to with the same amount of attention. Granted, their context windows are limited (and performance declines the more you put in it), so they too will use some tools to skim and pick out the important parts, but I think that's a temporary thing. The huge amount of LLM prose will end up being consumed by other LLMs. I don't know enough about the subject whether that's a good or a bad thing though, right now I think it just adds to the noise until it becomes noise in, noise out.

Probably the better option instead of relying on a password manager.

Nope, that engineer had far too much access. I'm confident this is the case in pretty much all organizations to some degree, but a lot of engineers are also the only ones that can deny themselves the access so in a roundabout way it's their fault anyway.

But a lot (generalizing here) don't like giving up access "in case they need it". I haven't worked backend in ages, but years ago there was one developer that went to the ops guys and said "can I just ssh to production I need to check some env vars to debug my software" (or something to that degree). Ops team was good and it was a hard no - "just add some logging, you can deploy a new release quickly enough".

Yeah but what if I hacked that money fair and square? Why should anyone have the right to block my hard earned not-cash?

Well sure, but the average consumer needs and/or wants some protections, safeguards and insurances. If my bank gets hacked or even if I get skimmed it's considered their fault and I'll get my money back.

I'm not sure if terrorism is the right word (how can you do bad things to software?), but I am sure that sabotage on datacenters will become a thing. But that's not a direct response to AI, but one to building more datacenters, using power (and potable water, but I'm not convinced that's as big of a thing as people make it out to be compared to other industries / wastes), and corporate greed which does not improve the lives of the common people.

> Why can't we finally have a good container orchestrator that's not kubernetes for example?

What's the market demand? I'm confident there are plenty of alternatives being churned out today but nobody's looking or asking for any. If only because they settled on k8s, they have it on their CV, they have certifications, and switching is a huge investment and risk.

Right now to me it feels like the innovation is in using LLMs to (finally?) clean up existing code, find vulnerabilities, do maintenance, optimize, and if necessary rewrite.

What unique selling point do individuals operating AI still have if it's AI doing the heavy lifting and specialized work? I mean I don't believe that people in general will need to work less (no automation has done that), but I'm convinced many people will need to find new employment at lower wages in a society where cost of living only increases.

I can't afford a pay cut, and AI isn't making my job worth more.