Can’t wait to watch the “blue no matter who” and “I have a fixation on the genitals of trans folks” crowds duke it out again in a rigged election system.

A few years ago I was a titled member of a local activist group that was considered “militant” by local police. It was a Black-lead group (I’m white myself) that spoke out and fought against police corruption, had a low-frequency radio station, and some other cool socialist shit. Anyway, I learned in a roundabout way that the local police would come by my house weekly to keep tabs on when I was home and when I wasn’t. I’m pretty sure they did this with every member. I’ll admit it was kind of flattering, seeing as I don’t consider myself even remotely important, but also fun because it wasted some cops’ time.

I don’t think people fully realize that the tons of funding these pig farms get is enough to allow them to arbitrarily put surveillance on everyday folks without even breaking a sweat. Some of the FOIA requests I’ve heard about from people in my local activist circles are wild. FBI vans, country-wide surveillance tracking using ATM cameras, wild shit!

The tl;dr - yes, even you can be under some sort of surveillance. Even if it’s just that the cops have seen your face more than once at various marches.

If this is the eye-scanning orb bullshit, stay far, far away.

All the details point to Palantir from what I’ve read. There is this sudden massive surveillance and censorship push everywhere we look. I’m convinced they are trying to funnel people into a position where they have zero privacy (and eventually payment system) protections. We’re going to see new tech pop up. A Palantir VPN; a Palantir payment processor; some new crypto banking system. They’re forcing us all into a world where Elon Musk’s stupid “Everything Platform” idea is a reality so that we are beholden to a single entity that possesses all of the keys.

Welcome to your new life! It’s nice having such a lightweight OS that isn’t constantly trying to send your data to every advertiser on earth. I love the peace of mind. Pop_OS is a good choice too! Even as someone that has been using Linux for years, I still go for the it-just-works-out-of-the-box distros.

And to make it worse, this is happening again.

Lol mine was too insignificant to make the cut.

Yeah, you get immediate feedback, vs a scenario where you have to manually check the “facts” it provides in order to ensure it’s not hallucinating. I’ve had Copilot straight up hallucinate functions on me and I knew that they were bullshit instantly.

I iterate with it a ton and feed it back errors it makes, or things like type mismatches. It fixes them instantly and understands the issue almost every single time.

That’s the trick. Iterate often and always give it new instructions if it does something stupid. Basically be as verbose as needed and give it tons of context, desired standards, pitfalls to avoid, whatever. It helps a ton.

I’ve had the greatest success with Claude. The company I work for basically let us all go wild with a few to trial, and Claude has been the best for all of us—even better than GitHub Copilot.

I pay for my own pro plan outside of work and use the VSCode plugin. I’d say read the quickstart guide and experiment with it. Start off with having it do smaller changes and don’t be afraid to be verbose. The more context, the better. Point it to existing files you want to follow the patterns of and model after; give it links to resources for best practices, etc. You can also use it in “plan mode” if you want to see its proposed approach before it starts editing.

I also recommend leaving it so that each change it makes requires your approval (it will do this by default and you can step through everything). That way you always have some control and if it does something dumb, you can stop it at that step and pivot with a different instruction. Alternatively, if you want to see it go ham and carry everything out without approval at each step, you can enable auto-accept.

Once you get into it, start looking into how to craft instruction files. You can have those at your disposal for things like writing tests, language-specific guidelines and practices, etc. That way you can make sure it uses those as a reference so you don’t have to give it the same instructions over and over with every prompt.

If you hate writing tests, I’ve had really good luck letting it handle that. I tend to use it more for the bulk tasks that suck. For things where I want more control, I work with it on a piecemeal basis in my project.

Speaking as someone who hates generative AI but has been forced to adapt to using AI in the programming field to stay relevant, this doesn’t suggest they’re vibe coding. The programming world is the only place AI has actually added value (I should note it’s done some neat stuff helping with diagnoses in the medical world too), but like everything, you get what you put into it.

Feed it enough instruction and context, and it can handle the drudgery of things like tech debt updates and other things a programmer knows how to do, but would rather offload to a tool. I’ve had Claude do refactors like that while stepping through and reviewing every single change. It has saved me hours, spared me from hell, and made me look good at work.

That’s my grounded take as a person that has worked with Claude a ton.

But AI everywhere else? Fucking worthless. The whole point is to do the bullshit mundane tasks so that us humans can do art and passionate work, not the opposite.

Qobuz (pronounced Co-buzz). Based out of France.

Hey, those buildings and apartments aren’t gonna rent themselves! /s

They will follow anyone. I was being “checked on” weekly by local police a few years ago because I was involved with activist groups. The amount of resources they have to throw at this nonsense is through the stratosphere.

They aren’t proposing anything and there’s nothing to get. They never propose anything because their whole platform is built on bullshit. It’s their way or no way. Have you not seen these folks get off on watching the “out group” get arrested, beaten, etc? They use democrats as the punching bag like any of us give a shit about them. None of this stuff even matters in the end because it’s nothing more than punching horizontal vs punching up.

This is where they malfunction every time. The propaganda they’ve been fed tells them that all leftists are liberals and vice versa. As soon as you step outside of that structure, they become unmoored.

Had some libertarian try to discredit my views and claim they were all from the mainstream media I watch. Homie, I don’t watch, nor read any of that corporate media liberal horseshit. Try again.

God that sucks. I was laid off for 3 months and hated it. I can’t even fathom 2 years. That is rough, friend.

I should clarify that my post is mostly about the tech industry because that’s all I really know. It’s a field where you can get some leeway and figure shit out. If you’re a doctor, they’re gonna check your background and credentials pretty thoroughly and I don’t recommend lying in a field like that.

Do whatever you need to do. Lie on your resume; use AI; automate job applications; rewrite your resume using any tool you can find. It’s a cutthroat environment and I don’t envy anyone trying to find a job right now. Someone I know has been trying for a year and a half and still nothing.

The tech capitalists have captured full control of the industry and they now hold all of the leverage. We don’t have the room we once did for bargaining.

Also, when you do a peer review, say nothing but positive things unless the person is vile. Support fellow working class folks. We can struggle together.

What the fuck, this story is insane.

The subtext here: “if you post anti-Israel stuff, you can kiss your chances goodbye!”