I also don’t get why they seem to be popular with people who like to act scientific, because they seem very unscientific to me.

They absolutely are. And it’s very aggravating to see people immediately invoking it without a second thought. They just assume it to be some absolute universal truth that should be accepted without question. But why?? How is that any different from religion at that point?

I utterly loathe Hanlon’s razor. It’s peak naivete, especially when it’s applied to groups of people that have ulterior motives - like business interests. It essentially gives companies a carte blanche to do evil shit, and when they get caught, all they have to do is blush and say “oops, how could that have possibly happened???!” But in reality, they were just doing some sort of self-serving behavior and hoping they could get away with it. And of course, they’ll just end up doing it again a few months or years later on when the attention has died away.

Moral of the story: Hanlon’s razor does not apply to corporations or other business interests. If it’s your neighbors, well maybe give them the benefit of the doubt. If it’s a multinational conglomerate, hell no, fuck that. Assume guilt 100% of the time.

It’s a publicly traded company, isn’t it? Most likely there is some investor in the CEO’s ear asking him to push this down on all staff… so they come up with bright ideas like putting silly “requirements” like this in their job descriptions as well. And in any case, AI investors are so desperate these days, chances are that they’re doing everything they can to create general LLM FOMO in a similarly desperate push to increase adoption.

That’s what I’m guessing at least. Even to me it sounds a little like a conspiracy theory, but then again these people have a lot of influence.

It means that the parent company has major investors in the LLM space.

The whole notion of CSDs is a blueprint example of what happens when UI designers try to think things through too hard. They come up with grand solutions to trivial problems that are so poorly thought through that they create even bigger problems.

Realistically, nobody is going rewrite their entire application just because of what a tiny cabal of Gnome developers think. Just read this post that was linked elsewhere in this thread. At the end, Tobias is basically arguing that people should go out there and harass the developers of all Linux desktop applications (including the entire KDE project!) to follow through on this ridiculous idea:

Thus, our goal is for as many apps as possible to have the following properites [sic]

• No title bar
• Native-looking close/maximize/minimize icons
• Respects the setting for showing/hiding minimize and maximize
• Respects the setting for buttons to be on the left/right side of the window

Which apps are affected? Basically, all applications not using GTK3 (and a few that do use GTK3). That includes GTK2, Qt, and Electron apps.

If that alone doesn’t alert people of how out-of-touch the Gnome developers are, then I don’t know what would.

I know what you mean, just beware: in lots of cases it’s not as universal (as in distro-independent) as some still think it is.

This is especially true when we start talking about BSDs and other non-GNU platforms.

Interesting. Were you using a Jenkinsfile? I’m not sure I completely understand your use case, but using a Jenkinsfile would mean that your entire pipeline would be defined in a file in source control, so you could roll it back if you made a change that didn’t work quite right. Seems to be what your looking for if I’m understanding what you’re looking for.

https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/jenkinsfile/

I looked at it for 5 seconds. The UI looked pretty hideous. Even new reddit looks better than it.

I’ve found the edit/test/debug loop in Jenkins to be much faster than Github Actions. It was quite a refreshing change when I made that transition.

The best way I found to do this is by commenting out the portions of the build that take the longest.

Which is stupid, but that’s what you get with Microsoft products.

(I get that there may be ways to test this locally, but I found this method to be the easiest.)

I thought they renamed their entire product line to “Copilot” by now, didn’t they?

Uninstalling it at this point would leave absolutely nothing left!

It’s called tivoization and started with a device called “Tivo” which was the first of its kind to attempt this procedure.

There are probably lots of hardware devices in your house that use GPL software but prevent you from actually modifying it because the hardware will refuse to run modified copies. If a piece of software is licensed GPLv3, it would violate the license terms to do something like this.

That’s certainly one possibility. But another possibility is that the people praise LLMs are not very good at judging whether the code it generates is of good quality or not…

Agreed. To make it a bit more general, whenever I see people claiming to be able to predict the future with absolute certainty and confidence, that to me is just a sign they are idiots and shouldn’t be listened to. Definitely had a lot of those in past companies I have worked in. A lot of the time, they’re trying to gaslight people into believing in their version of the future so they can sell us garbage (products, stock price, etc.). They’ll always get some fools to believe them of course.

The number-one frustration, cited by 45% of respondents, is dealing with “AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite,” which often makes debugging more time-consuming. In fact, 66% of developers say they are spending more time fixing “almost-right” AI-generated code.

Not surprising at all. When you write code, you’re actually thinking about it. And that’s valuable context when you’re debugging. When you just blindly follow snippets you got from some random other place, you’re not thinking about it and you don’t have that context.

So it’s easy to see how this could lead to a net productivity loss. Spend more time writing it yourself and less time debugging, or let something else write it for you quickly, but spend a lot of time debugging. And on top of it all, no consideration of edge cases and valuable design requirement context can also get lost too.

I’m a slow adopter of new technologies like AI LLMs. My reasoning is that if it turns out to actually be a good product, then it will eventually prove itself, and the early adopters can be the “beta testers” so to speak. But if it turns out to be a bad product, then I won’t have wasted my time on something that isn’t worthwhile.

Maybe a day comes when I start using these tools, but they clearly just aren’t all that useful in their current form. In all honesty, I’m pretty sure that they will never be useful enough for me to consider them worth learning, but definitely not so today.

Cupertino has complied anyway, and said it introduced “Notarization for iOS apps, an authorization process for app marketplaces, and requirements that help protect children from inappropriate content and scams.”

Notarization requirements mean that they still maintain total control over the operating system and what software it can run. These kinds of onerous requirements keep the bar artificially high for competitors and are only possible because they are still enforcing their monopolistic control over the platform.

So no, they’re not complying at all actually. They’re just doing the same thing in a different way.

I don’t think so. These AI stunts are all coming from a small group of Silicon Valley investors. They only want to focus on software that’s widely used, so web browsers are a natural target. Mail clients aren’t that popular anymore, so I doubt they’ll advocate for fucking them up.

The last Windows OS I used was XP, around 2004-ish. Even back then, it was obvious to me that, because it was closed source, that they could one day start acting against my interests, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I saw open source as an insurance policy - it prevents vendors from acting maliciously against their users. In that very quaint, old time, nobody believed that MS would ever do something like that, but it didn’t matter - the fact was that they could, so inevitably, they would.

I’m quite proud of how prescient I was when I look at what they’re doing today. No evil is too great to stop a greedy businessman.

Anyway, I decided to just be brave and create a partition on my main drive and install Ubuntu on it. All I needed to get my work done was OpenOffice, LaTeX, a browser, a compiler, Python… Everything worked better in Linux than Windows so even though I was dual-booting, I practically never used Windows again after a couple weeks. Later on, I switched to Debian, and the next laptop that I bought, I just wiped the hard disk and used Linux for the whole thing. I kept the recovery partition because I was paranoid but obviously never needed it.

Today, there’s no doubt in my mind that Linux is the best OS. Sure, Macs have better batteries, but if I’m doing productive work, then I don’t really need more than an hour away from my charger. I could maybe agree that the BSDs are better, but I’ve never tried them.

Agreed, and it feels like a waste of so much great potential when you consider the fantastic development they poured into it. Such a shame.