Sworn, way too much Ball X Pit, and Resident Evil Code: Veronica.

Fascists making a tool that does nothing but steal Other people’s work is so on brand for them. They’re incapable of making anything original.

Ahh this is awesome. Funny enough, before I was a web dev, I was a graphic artist. Showing my age as well, my first version of Photoshop was 5 and I learned how to edit on old PowerMacs in high school. In the early 2000s I was on a forum with a similar group of folks. I think I was the only one with formal training, so I’d design forum signatures for everyone, as well as show people how to do their own graphics (as well as where to ahem acquire the software to do so).

I got into IRC and all of those tools late in life, but forums were fun back in the day.

I always wanted to checkout Siggraph but never got the chance.

I used to have a small crew that I would play Left For Dead 1 and 2 on Xbox with. We would all get on mics and get drunk and/or high the whole time. When random people hopped in to play humans vs zombies matches, we would hype them and welcome them. Always tried to be the group that didn’t deter players or talk shit. Had a lot of fun sessions that would go to 3 or 4 AM. I haven’t seen them online in ages.

Came here to say the same! That game cracked me up all the way through.

I use Mullvad daily. Never turn it off.

War(io)

People openly bragging about being exploited has always been hilarious to me. I’ve been pushing back on bullshit employer things since my first job in my teens.

Yep. When federating with so many instances, nothing is truly deleted unless every single instance honors its removal. That’s just the reality. The nice thing is that as an instance owner, I can see the mod log of everything from the places I federate with. So admins at least have a point of reference to work together. I also have the ability to restore comments and things that were deleted. I’ve never used it because I prefer to stay in sync with everyone else, but I’m 1 person. There are many instances and mine is microscopic.

It’s going to be long and arduous. The US has such massive reach and influence that it’s going to take a long time before it topples. After that, we will probably be stuck in some Peter Thiel wet dream where he tells us Skynet was actually the protagonist and the Nazis had some good ideas.

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.