I wonder if this counts towards your rate limiting quota?

I don’t. Personally, I don’t believe that AI assisted coding has a future, and I don’t like the quality of what it produces. Either we achieve AGI or whatever the finance bros are hyping up this week, or we don’t. If we do, then AI can write code without having a human in the loop, so “vibe coding” is dead. If we don’t, then AI code stays where its at right now, which is garbage quality. After a few years vibe coding disasters, demand for human coding will increase, and my skills will be much more valuable than even before all this craziness. In that case, letting those skills atrophy today would be the wrong move.

And if I’m wrong? Well, if AI code generation makes it so anyone who doesn’t know how to code can do it… then surely I’ll be able to figure it out? My existing skills wouldn’t hurt.

What is this a solution to? You’re going to pay high prices even if you don’t buy from Amazon, due to Amazon’s illegal price fixing. That’s what the OP is about.

Things are at a point where the only solution is in the courts.

Peter Thiel is a creepy weirdo who injects himself with the blood of young people in an attempt to reverse aging.

That means it’s very important that you find and spread unflattering photos that highlight the fact that he’s almost 60 years old.

Relevant

I think the real problem is that nobody cares about security because there are very little consequences for data leaks. I guess what little safeguards existed in the past have been obliterated by the sheer velocity of AI code generation.

What we need is laws to hold people criminally responsible for negligence in handling user data. It isn’t unprecedented, since we already have HIPPA. A watered-down version of that for ANY business that collects personal data would fix a lot of problems.

That’s probably pointless. You should only use it for piracy, bypassing content filters, regional blocking, and things like that. Otherwise you’re just wasting money/hurting your internet speed for zero benefit.

A VPN only offers marginal protection from tracking, since it only hides your IP address. Most tracking happens in the browser, via cookies and fingerprinting techniques. The only reliable way to protect yourself against that is Tor, and you should not use Tor with a VPN.

I like Mullvad and I am a happy customer, but this misleading advertising is kind of a bad look IMO. It’s good to raise awareness of this serious issue, but they’re clearly trying to profit off of consumers who don’t understand the product they’re selling.

Blue waffles are a lot more common than you might assume

“If people saw it and they immediately knew it was fake, then they would just scroll. The selling point of generative AI models is that they look real,” RadialB tells me over the phone. He refuses to share his real name but reveals he is in his 20s and from the north-west of England. He has never been to Croydon.

Social media was a mistake. The “creator economy” was a mistake. Everything was a mistake. We really fucked up.

Please explain yourself. I’m not going to judge you, I’m genuinely curious where you got this perception of Phil Spencer from?

From my perspective, he was in charge during the fall of Xbox. There may have been a few good decisions he made, like backwards compat or whatever, but on the whole he destroyed Xbox. I don’t understand how some people can simultaneously be pissed at all the terrible decisions that company has been making for over a decade while also glazing the guy in charge of making those decisions.

If Xbox wasn’t part of the monopolist that is Microsoft, they would’ve gone out of business after the Xbox One. Instead, as is usually the case for orgs/people like this, they’ve been able to fail upwards all while dragging the entire gaming industry through the dirt (eg the horrible Activision acquisition, among many others). It’s actually incredible how, despite not even needing to worry about competitive pressures, Xbox still failed so badly.

So again, what circumstances have lead you to see Phil Spencer as anything other than an incompetent moron?

I agree with you, but I get where the rabid fanboyism is coming from. The lack of competition in tech due to a variety of bullshit reasons (mostly corruption, look what Biden’s FTC was trying to do compared to Trump 2’s mask-off approach) have people pissed off and angry at the monopolists. Valve just so happens to be the least-bad monopolist in tech, so people like them.

People need to get competition-pilled, so they realize that Valve isn’t our savior, and are in fact part of the problem too. They might be considered “good” today, but that’s because our standards have never been so low.

Things can be, and should be better.

I disagree. Secretly recording someone with a phone is much easier than doing it with one of these. It’s the same issue people had with Google Glass back in the day.

I think the reason it feels creepier is because, if you’re talking with someone that’s wearing them, it feels like they’re sticking a camera in your face.

But like I could turn on my phone camera, leave it sticking out of my pocket, and record everyone taking a piss in a public restroom with nobody noticing. If I tried to do that with glasses, I’d have to turn my head towards everyone’s cock, one at a time. The neck pain alone makes it not worth the effort.

But to be clear, fuck Meta. These glasses should be banned for many other reasons.

It has been a very long time since I’ve worked with PHP, so I can’t help you with specific runtime stuff, like what the cost of module imports is.

But not using classes is a perfectly valid approach. The only issue is ofc that you need to hardcode column names, but it sounds like that’s at a manageable place for you right now.

Organizing things into classes makes things easier once the operations you’re doing on data get more complex. There are no good rules for this, you kinda have to develop a feel for it on your own as you gain experience.

For the specific case of SQL results, you’ll typically be better off using what’s known as an ORM library. Here’s a random one I found on GH as an example. But for your small project, what you’re doing right now is fine.

As awful as this project might be against “the real world” use

All those patterns and frameworks and things people use are meant to make a codebase more manageable or flexible. ORMs are a good example: they have a lot of benefits, but they are by no means required.

With that said, your zero guardrails approach is likely to end up an unmaintainable spaghetti mess as you add more and more features. There is a point at which you really should sit down and learn about those more advanced techniques and practices. They actually do have value, especially if you ever want to build something bigger than what you have now.

I feel weirdly proud of what I’m achieving. Is there a name for this feeling, of pride for something you know is subpar?

You should feel proud. You accomplished something 99% of the population hasn’t. You leveled up. You’re a real motherfucking software engineer. You’ve used your brain in ways those AI slop coders never will. There is no “subpar”. When you break your 1RM record at the gym, is it “subpar” just because the guy next to you can do twice the weight?

Fuck no, because you’re fighting your fights, he’s fighting his. All that matters is that you’re winning.

And you are winning.

You’re a winner.

You’re my winner.

I love you.

I’m curious what usage secnario you have in mind where that’s a serious concern?

But besides that, you could run it in a podman container and use the secrets feature. That will not only store the password slightly safer, it will sandbox the executable from the rest of your system.

Both C++ and Objective-C aimed to be “C with classes”. C++ does it by hijacking existing syntax (struct), Objective-C does it by adding new syntax, while leaving the original minimalism of C untouched.

In fact, it’s a strict superset of C, which means it doesn’t change anything at all in C, it only appends. So every valid C program is a valid Objective C program (which is not true for C++).

You know how some C programs are valid C++ programs though? Well, those same programs can use Objective C features too, meaning you’re able to use them in C++… Meaning you’re able to code in “Objective C++” (which is very common for interop purposes)

I still get sad when I think about Objective C and how it didn’t take off vs C++ just because it had ugly syntax (which becomes beautiful once you understand why it is the way it is)

sieze(worker, ObjectFactory.meansOfProduction);

Idk, I definitely have days where I’m highly productive for more than 4 hours, but I also have days where I work even longer and accomplish nothing. I don’t think a number like that is particularly useful for anything, and only good for micromanagers who need to feel like they can hyper-optimize every single thing.

Interruptions definitely fuck me up though, without fail. Maybe it’s the type of work I tend to do, which generally requires me to keep a lot of context in mind. An analogy I’ve heard that I think works well: It’s like fixing a car, but you have to disassemble the entire dashboard and steering column just to reach the part you need to work on. As you’re doing that, someone asks you pick them up so now you have to reassemble everything to be able to drive the car to pick them up, and then disassemble it all again just to get back to work.

Look into “Oh My Zsh” or similar plugin managers. OMZ is bloated as fuuuck and you’ll probably want to replace it with your own custom configs at some point, but it’s the easiest way to see what a decked out zsh feels like. It’s a good starting point for sure.

Personally I’m down to just 4 plugins with minor config tweaks on top of a bare zsh install. I’ve read good things about Starship but I’m happy with my current setup.

Thank fuck I switched to Zsh