Good lord. So glad my country has strict animal welfare standards for livestock. Uncomfortable that we still import and slaughter pigs from countries without those standards. (And yes, we import-and-slaughter because we don’t import pork itself. We do however, allow the import/export of live animals, so international trade buys our sheep for ‘breeding’, and sell us their pigs for ‘NZ-made pork’. I suppose it at least enforces abattoir health standards…?)

We probably don’t have enough user traffic to give people the specific help they need. Certainly not compared to something like StackOverflow, which is already what you’re describing.

The issues with generalised user-to-user programming help (esp re: StackOverflow) is that an increasing number of communities are doing this in closed-off areas like Slack and Discord, where their support is not indexed or searchable. Users running into the same problems are struggling to find each others’ answers. Creating yet another community that’s separated from the internet at large exacerbates this problem.

Man, I used to really like browsing the stuff at ThinkGeek. Even bought a few things. Now that it’s owned by… I wanna say GameStop?.. it’s ceased to be interesting to me. I liked things like the laundry basket that looked like a radioactive barrel, the shower gel that looks like a blood bag… that kind of light-hearted novelty stuff. But the new owner just gutted all the interesting content, and it’s just all IP collectables now.

It’s been long enough I forgot bout ThinkGeek. Damn. Wish something like it were still around.

• “progress on [1], fixed linting [2]”
• “[1] completed, setup for [2]”
• “[3] and [4] completed”
• “fixed formatting”
• “refactoring [1] and [2]”
• “fix variable typos”
• “update logic in [2]”
• “revert package.json and regenerate package-lock”

All my commits have comments. I generally commit after completing a ‘block’ objective, a describe what that was but in very simple terms mostly in regards to the file/section with the most significant logic changes. I don’t always specify the file if I did tiny typos/linting/annotation across a bunch of them, because the logic is unaffected I know that the differences will be visible in the commit history.

My weakness is that I don’t do it often enough. If I’m working on [2] for several hours, I’ll only commit when I consider it minimally-viable (completed 2), or when moving between machines ([further] progress on 2). And I have a bad habit of not pushing every time I commit, just at the end of the day or when moving between machines (though a messy rebase hopefully made that lesson stick), or if somebody else on the team wants to review an issue I’m having.

AI can code assist; it’s quite helpful for that. Predictive text, learning a less familiar language, converting pseudo, etc.

But it couldn’t possibly replace senior developers long-term. It just looks new and exciting, especially to people who don’t truly understand how it works. We still need to have human developers capable of writing their own new code.

1. AI is entirely derivative, it’s just copying the human devs of yester-year. If AI does the majority of coding then it becomes incapable of learning, thus necessitating human coders anyway. It also is only going to generate solutions to broad-strokes problems that it already has in its dataset, or convert pseudocode into functional code (which still requires a dev know enough to write pseudo).

2. It also currently has no way of validating what it writes. It’s trying to replicate what our writing looks like contextually, it doesn’t comprehend it. If it ever starts training on itself as it ages, it will stagnate and require human review, which means needing humans that understand code. And that’s not including the poor practices it will already have because so many devs are inconsistent about things like writing comments, documentation, or unit testing. AI doesn’t have its own bias but it inevitably learns to imitate ours.

3. And what about bug-testing? When the AI writes something that breaks, who do you ask for help? The AI doesn’t comprehend the context of the code its reading if you paste it back, it doesn’t remember writing it. You need people who understand how the code works to be able to recognise why it might be breaking.

AI devs are the fast food of coding. It will never be as good quality as something from an experienced professional. But if you’re an awful cook, it still makes it fast and easy to get a sad, flat cheeseburger.

I’ve worked with devs who are the equivalent of line cooks and are also producing sad, flat cheeseburgers: code of poor quality that still sees production because the client doesn’t know any better. IMO, those are the only devs that need to be concerned, because those are the ones that are easy to replace.

If AI coding causes any problems within the job market for devs, it will be that it replaces graduate/junior developers so well that fewer devs get the mentoring or experience to become seniors, and the demand for seniors will rack up significantly. It seems more likely that developers will split into two separate specialisations, not that our single track will be replaced.

These are essentially my thoughts. They’re helpful for indicating context (tone/expression/sentiment). The goal of language is communication; words alone can struggle with that. Well-placed emojis help improve communication. Numerous emojis breaking up sentences makes them harder to read; imo it impairs communication.

I also don’t like the idea of policing others’ use of a harmless sub-dialect of online communication just because one decides not to use it themselves. I personally don’t use or enjoy the ‘emojis’ that are just ‘fun graphics we like’ (most Discord custom emotes are this). Nor do I like that filter where 1-3 emojis are inserted after basically every single word. But that’s because it’s not my online dialect; it doesn’t mean people who use emojis that way are ‘wrong’.

Different platforms have different ‘accents’, and emojis are only one example of that. I find the numerous dialects of online English to be a fascinating topic that isn’t often considered.

Sometimes I’d feel sad that a trait of say, Tumblr’s dialect didn’t have a Reddit equivalent: Tumblr uses punctuation, capitalisation, and even typos as a tone indicator. A Redditor doesn’t know the different tones implied amongst these, even though most Tumblr users do:

• no. stop
• no stop
• noo staaaaahp
• noolkjaflakud STOP
• No. Stop.
• NO STOP

I can tell which of these are vaguely upset, genuinely upset, or pretending to be upset in a few different ways. Reddit doesn’t have that, because it expects everybody to write with formal grammar all the time, including not ‘allowing’ emojis as tone indicators. I suspect that formal writing style probably contributes to why so many comments are read in bad faith as smug/adversarial. 😢

Metaverse was such a weird pitch to me. It seemed to think the way we are living our lives in the way we want to live them, and just offered that in a sterile, miserable package of digital ennui.

Like I get it, our lives right now are built around work and material consumption. But we don’t enjoy work and material consumption! It doesn’t make us happy; it’s not what we’re excited about! We just can’t meet basic survival needs without money (work), and the stress kills us so much that we look to any shallow escape to recover juuuuust enough to keep doing it.

Why on earth would a working human - which is >90% of us - want to move into a space that has all the drudgery, tracking, oversight, micromanagement, and shallow pandering of the current world… and lose all the socialisation, birdsong, walking past a busker playing blues, the smell of a nearby cafe, the sound of passers-by laughing; life?

I want to wake up in the morning in a comfortable bed and open my curtains to clear skies without traffic smoke; you think waking up to traffic noise and grey skies and shuffling over to my laptop to do my economy-mandated 8 hours labour with a blue-skies backdrop is somehow appealing? If anything, it highlights just how incredibly dystopic the waking world is becoming in the name of productivity and efficiency. It makes the ennui even more visible than before, to see what life could have been and know most of us will never afford it.

How little does MZ understand about humanity, to think we want an existence devoid of nothing more than existing in a closed economy and 3D storefronts?

I’m not aware of what Discord has been doing that is causing people’s concern. What are people currently concerned about re: Discord?

I accepted that it would have to start doing something eventually - it can’t operate for free forever. But the only news I’ve heard recently is giving servers optional tools to monetise, and free users can continue to not use servers that do that. The few servers I’ve been in that do it are doing it ironically - donate to the sub to gain access to a channel with a giant 🍆 emoji and nothing else! Comments disabled! etc.

I wouldn’t blame Patreon for somebody moving all their content behind a $20/m sub, I just wouldn’t subscribe to them… so I’m not concerned with Discord until it enshittifies for users.

Curated communities would likely choose to defederate from instances like that since they have no barrier for entry, and may be bots, spam, or bad actors. If you’re joining an established instance, then you’ll at least get a local community.

Only if you define mods winning as ‘things go back to what they were’.

The CEO is only ‘winning’ in the sense that things will never return to what they are. He will undermine the protest at every turn, and then he will release his changes as intended.

His contributing users however, are leaving in droves. His ‘victory’ will be pyrrhic at beast.

Users were working for free in mutual trust; now they are expected to produce and moderate for free, and then buy back their own product. Moderators are booted because they’re locking subs as private, and then subs stay private anyway because nobody wants to moderate for free. Even those who would see moderating as a grab for power (the expected scabs) are less inclined to moderate while admins are proving they actually have little power at all (just unpaid labour).

We are his livestock. We thought we were meeting in a community hall to socialise, and then Huffman revealed we were congregated in his barn. The content we produced is to be sold off for his gain; it’s not ours. The space isn’t in any way ours, it merely shelters us while we produce his product: content.

Well, what’s happening right now is that the people who produce the content are leaving. Reddit will still have a ton of users, but they’ll mostly be the 90% lurkers and low-effort users that went there to consume that content contributing users aggregated for them.

Contributors are readily welcomed in almost any community; they don’t need to stay. It is the consuming users that are addicted, that Huffman (correctly) predicts will accept it.

Huffman will still have most of Reddit’s chickens, and that’s why he thinks it’s worth it. But the hens are leaving the barn, and Huffman will be left with the confused roosters who’ll produce nothing for him other than noise.

Mods are losing… but so is he.

This… is dumb. Reddit gets traffic from people using it as a secondary search engine to get relevant answers.

Most people on the Internet view it from mobile. Reddit already makes their mobile experience genuinely awful despite this. Blocking it entirely?

The herding to their mobile app is so transparent (and DEFINITELY through stick, not carrot) I’m morbidly curious to see what horrible things they planning to put in their app that they know users will loathe, that requires their alternatives to be zero.