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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 11th, 2024

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  • In all seriousness using AI for codegen is at best shortsighted negligence. You know that problem huge long running software projects have where it becomes a nightmare to change anything? That’s some proportion of poor architectural design, lack of cleanup or refactor time, and poor understanding of the code by developers. Poor architectutal design can be repaired by cleanup and refactoring, so both of those issues end up being management/planning failures more than anything. Not understanding the codebase is much more complex. It can be caused by attrition causing loss of institutional knowledge, the code base growing faster than anyone can keep track of, the team being so large no one can stay on top of things, too much time passing since anyone has looked at or changed parts, lots of reasons. The only solution is doing a long audit and associated cleanup and refactoring. If you don’t it just takes forever to change anything because of all the knock on effects that no one can predict, meaning delays and bugs. When you use AI tools the code base grows very quickly, too quick to really comprehend, and you get shitty architecture to go along with it. You’re just speedrunning enterprise software or spending all your time reviewing slop code. It’s like a drug, the first time it does something fast and well you feel it’s so great, but it will never live up to that because it secretly sucks and can only ever suck. Best case it slows you down and you get good software at the end. Worst case you spend all your time wrestling with it and never get a finished product.




  • One thing they never really get into in Star Trek is how the body modification scene evolved in a future with medical replicators and “Doc will shine a light on it” levels of medical technology. I’m sure they could easily perform a gender transition, including changing reproductive organs to whatever combo a person wanted, in an afternoon, to say nothing of the possibility of cosmetic and functional structural changes. We see them perform highly complex and detailed biological modifications so crew members can pass as aliens like it’s nothing, so why not make people taller/shorter, wider/narrower hips, bigger/smaller boobs, more feminine/masculine face, horns, pointed or alien ears, new sense organs, extra arms, etc. What kind of wild piercings are people getting? What new methods and styles of tattoos have they come up with? The possibilities are incredible. That would be a fun world to explore, even within the Federation’s taboo against genetic alteration.












  • Religion. For most of my life I’ve seen media both implicitly and explicitly claiming that religion is a fundamental human social need, and that people who aren’t religious are the weird immoral outliers. What I’ve found is true though, is that religion is a primer for believing things contrary to evidence or reason. Faith is often promoted as a virtue in religion, and many aspects of religious thought are fundamentally unverifiable. Once someone starts down the path of believing things without evidence or critical thought, it gets easier to believe things contrary to evidence, and once you get far enough in that you could potentially be convinced to believe anything. You see this with the antivaxers, flat earthers, conspiracy theorists, far right extremists, etc. Many of these beliefs have a root in established religions, if not explicit religious justification. These things aren’t necessarily directly because of religion, people don’t really need religion to believe wacky bigoted shit contrary even to the evidence of their own eyes, but religion by it’s very nature encourages people to be uncritical. Even if the tenets of a religion are objectively good, the uncritical acceptance of ideas can easily start being applied to a person’s own biases, because it’s just so easy. It’s already easy to be uncritical of ideas but practicing it makes it so much worse. Religion is basically taking a major human weakness and promoting it as the height of virtue. Faith is intellectual sloth.


  • I mean that’s kind of the point. People without empathy will only see a problem with something when they have personally experienced the problem. That is literally the point of the exercise. You put the assholes who lack empathy in the shitty situation they constantly inflict on others so they see how it feels first hand and suddenly they care. People with empathy don’t need to be taught this lesson.