They want to place all the blame for the problems in America on the shoulders of this one hapless clown because it spares them from reckoning with the deep systemic problems that led to us having this syphilis petri dish in the highest seat of power of the nation with the most powerful military in human history.

I assume you’re referring to the technicality that the thirteenth amendment allows unpaid labor to be legally compelled out of prisoners, and that’s a valid thing to be outraged about, but your statement is wildly misleading to anyone who isn’t already aware of that technicality.

The existence of the loophole is terrible and should be amended, but it’s nowhere near the humanitarian crisis that widespread chattel slavery was. Ironically that will probably make it that much harder to be fixed since it’s more difficult to draw pubic outage towards it.

Your description actually illustrates how terribly inaccurate the metaphor was. If enslaved people imitated the people who enslaved them, they’d be sitting in a rocking chair on a porch sipping lemonade.

The US has a unique and relatively recent relationship with chattel slavery so people are more sensitive to it now.

The earliest record of the master/slave terminology being used in engineering is 1904 by which point slavery was already outlawed in almost every country, including the US. You’re right to say that chattel slavery in the US was a uniquely grotesque form of slavery, but there is no system of slavery in history where slaves are primarily imitating their masters. No matter what anyone’s sensitivity to the topic is, it’s a bad fit for what’s being described.

Outside of my own specialty I can people in the software industry bogged down by managing excessive boilerplate. I think this happens most often in web dev and data science.

In my opinion this is an indication that the software tools for those ecosystems need improvement, but rather than putting in the design effort to improve the tools in the ecosystem, these Big Data companies see an opportunity to just throw LLMs at it and call it a commercial product.

As a senior dev I hate vibe coding. I can write code an order of magnitude faster than I can review it, because reviewing code forces you to piece together a mental model for something made by someone else, whereas when I write the code myself I get to start with the mental model already in my head.

Writing code is never the bottleneck for me. If I understand the problem well enough to write a prompt for an LLM, then I understand the problem well enough to write the code for it.

I don’t think this is a fair comparison because arithmetic is a very small and almost inconsequential skill to develop within the framework of mathematics. Any human that doesn’t have severe learning disabilities will be able to develop a sufficient baseline of arithmetic skills.

The really useful aspects of math are things like how to think quantitatively. How to formulate a problem mathematically. How to manipulate mathematical expressions in order to reach a solution. For the most part these are not things that calculators do for you. In some cases reaching for a calculator may actually be a distraction from making real progress on the problem. In other cases calculators can be a useful tool for learning and building your intuition - graphing calculators are especially useful for this.

The difference with LLMs is that we are being led to believe that LLMs are sufficient to solve your problems for you, from start to finish. In the past students who develop a reflex to reach for a calculator when they don’t know how to solve a problem were thwarted by the fact that the calculator won’t actually solve it for them. Nowadays students develop that reflex and reach for an LLM instead, and now they can walk away with the belief that the LLM is really solving their problems, which creates both a dependency and a misunderstanding of what LLMs are really suited to do for them.

I’d be a lot less bothered if LLMs were made to provide guidance to students, a la the Socratic method: posing leading questions to the students and helping them to think along the right tracks. That might also help mitigate the fact that LLMs don’t reliably know the answers: if the user is presented with a leading question instead of an answer then they’re still left with the responsibility of investigating and validating.

But that doesn’t leave users with a sense of immediate gratification which makes it less marketable and therefore less opportunity to profit…

Wise people plant trees whose shade they’ll never stand in.

If two characters are hurting your 260 character limit then you have other more serious problems to contend with.

Until people start applying the same logic everywhere for consistency, not just in file names.

Just you wait…

Did the software industry learn nothing from Y2K? Was it too long ago already for people to remember the mess we made for ourselves?

Saving two characters in a file name is not worth the hell you are leaving in your trail by shoving this nonsense in an obscure corner of production code that people are going to forget about until it’s too late.

I recently had an accountant file something for the IRS that was dated as expiring in 1940 when it should’ve been 2040. I had to catch it myself after reading through 70 pages of dense forms before it was sent off, and I could’ve easily missed it.

Digital records have existed long enough now that it’s downright irresponsible to leave off the century for anything where having an accurate date might even slightly matter.

Words mean nothing, except as a method to “win”.

This is literally how demons are in Frieren.

There’s a lot to be said for the scale of damage that can be done with something, especially relative to the effort needed to do that damage.

These days tech companies are doing enormous damage to people’s brains (saturating our dopamine receptors to the point that many people have depression and executive dysfunction) to turn us all into consumption machines that can only find happiness by consuming content and buying commercial products and services.

Imagine how much more harm they’ll do when they have direct access to our neurons, without even LED pixels as a buffer in between.

This is a very important concern. Tech companies already exert entirely too much power over society through smart phones and their accompanying apps. The damage they would do with direct access to your neurons is incalculable.

The only thing that comforts me is that I firmly expect that society as we know it will entirely collapse before this technology can really be capitalized. It’s not a very comforting expectation, but it somehow bothers me less than the idea of techno-fascist corporate feudal states taking control of everyone’s thoughts.

In many of those cases, the building/department security sided with DOGE and physically forced the government employees to comply. There wasn’t much they could do to resist without ending up assaulted and detained having accomplished nothing.

My biggest fear over the next few years is how many people who have chosen a career in “enforcement” are just salivating at the chance to be part of Team Nazi.

Of course I agree with you, but the sad reality is that they’re getting away with this stuff so far. I think Hegseth’s time will be up when they finally need someone to do jail time for the team. Until then they’ll probably keep him around because his incompetence is strategically advantageous for their puppet master’s goal of undermining the republic.

It’s not really up to me, it’s up to the judgment of Trump and whoever pulls his strings.

But looking at historical precedent, maybe something like the Iran-Contra affair that landed Oliver North in jail while sparing Reagan from any accountability.

I guess a good rule of thumb would be whether the scandal will involve jail time.

He’s a fall guy. They’ll get rid of him once they have a big enough scandal to pin on him that he’s otherwise lost his usefulness.

Social accountability (meaning being called out on social media, being fired from a job, or being boycotted) for unapologetically spewing hate speech or sexual harassment and whatever else “wokism” is against… is not the same as inflicting violence on people. Your failure to understand the difference between accountability and violent authoritarianism says a lot about your character.