Ugh, if only. Amazon has done everything in their power to bury and strip that number from the internet. Once upon a time that worked great.

Storytime! Earlier this year, I had an Amazon package stolen. We had reason to be suspicious, so we immediately contacted the landlord and within six hours we had video footage of a woman biking up to the building, taking our packages, and hurriedly leaving.

So of course, I go to Amazon and try to report my package as stolen… which traps me for a whole hour in a loop with Amazon’s “chat support” AI, repeatedly insisting that I wait 48 hours “in case my package shows up”. I cannot explain to this thing clearly enough that, no, it’s not showing up, I literally have video evidence of it being stolen that I’m willing to send you. It literally cuts off the conversation once it gives its final “solution” and I have to restart the convo over and over.

Takes me hours to wrench a damn phone number out of the thing, and a human being actually understands me and sends me a refund within 5 minutes.

For sure, valid to fear the enshittification of steam. But they aren’t killing proton. Maybe ignoring proton at worst. But Steam has profit motivations for not being reliant on Windows, which has actively been trying to supplant them with the Windows Store for years.

As another separate, profit-motivated company, with a gaming division and a lot to gain from eating Steam’s lunch, Microsoft is not Steam’s friend. Proton is a critical bargaining tool for them, and not having to include windows licenses for devices like the Steam Deck helps their costs too.

Oh, what an interesting idea! I like this, on Monday I’ll test out switching to this as my main search engine for work and try to report back how it goes!

Seems like a sensible overhaul, hitting the major issues with the fee, but still going ahead with a version of it. Big points for me:

• Not retroactive. Only affecting the next version of Unity, and you can even opt out of updating to skip the fee.
• Data is now reported by the customers. Still not sure how that plan to enforce this, but it’s a hell of a lot better than some arbitrary data collection scheme being baked into the game.
• Free version is excluded. No charging tiny side projects, or students or something, it only affects already paying customers.

Still not sure I love charging per install as a concept, and they’ve already overplayed their hand and burnt many bridges, but at least this implementation isn’t insanely hostile. Guess we’ll see how this plays out from here.

Having used tailwind a little bit, I have nothing but praise for it. Effortless copy/pasting of components with confidence, really nice look by default, easy tweaking, absolutely no management or planning required to organize your CSS, and it’s all right there, directly on your html, never anywhere you have to hunt for it. Feels very freeing to just… not think about CSS at all.

And the “clutter” really is fine, modern IDEs with good syntax highlighting, plus a tailwind extension to help complete the class names and clean up accidental duplicates or conflicting properties, and you’re good.

Agreed. The upload schedule has been a holy grail within LTT for a long time, and I truly believe it’s the root of all of this, yes, even the sexual harassment. Or at least how that harassment was handled so poorly. When do you have time to make good HR policies? Pull people into HR for reprimanding? Have opportunities for others to second guess decisions? Do training? Or heck, even just have less tired and irritable people making in-the-moment stupid decisions?

This uncompromising maximum velocity hurts everyone, and I hope they keep never bring it back to this pace, even after the process improvements they have planned.

Exactly the mistake threads just made, trying to capitalize on twitter’s rate limiting fiasco. The “general public” is extremely fickle, and Reddit will give us more opportunities.

Eh, there’s a lot of valid things to be skeptical about. Using these tools as a DM is fundamentally different from using them as a massive corporation, as you’re not considering replacing your team of talented artists and writers to cut costs.

That said, done right, I also think this could be amazing. Legally train these models on the wealth of historical D&D art, and provide it to DMs to use during their campaigns to make maps, art for places the DM is describing on the fly, all of these things that no artist could possibly make because these locations are being invented on the fly as the players throw a skilled DM curveballs. D&D feels like an ideal “problem” for a lot of the “solutions” AI has to offer.

Whoops

Well, happy you’re here!

Whoops

Well, happy you’re here!

Yeah, I’ve realized I mostly want “social media” as a place to create discussions. For that, honestly, the smaller community size is perfect.

I find massive communities have a way of devolving into hive minds. Once you reach a critical mass of people who think one thing, any comment to the contrary is just… obliterated, whether by an exhausting amount of argument, or downvotes. And then it just becomes known that that’s the opinion of the community, and people stop even bringing it up. At least that’s my theory on how it happens.

Over here, with a smaller community size, I’m finding a lot more genuine conversation, no matter the topic. It’s awesome. And I’m still finding Lemmy large enough to bring me interesting links and memes to talk about.

Eh, I’d assume the comparison isn’t flattering. I think the point of this article is to argue you don’t need ElasticSearch to implement a competent Full Text Search for most applications. Splitting hairs over a few milliseconds would just distract from that point, when most applications should be prioritizing simplicity and maintainability over such tiny gains in a reasonable dataset.

Might be interesting to try to analyze at exactly what point elasticsearch becomes significantly useful, however. Maybe at the point where it saves a full tenth of a second? Or where it’s returning in half the time? Could be an interesting follow up article.

Eh, the python one will probably perform better, because sum is probably written in native C under the hood.

Great read!

I think a bonus point in favour of composition here is the power of static typing. Introducing advanced features like protocols can bring back some of that safety that this article describes as being exclusive to inheritance.

Overall, I think composition will continue to be the future going forward, and we’ll find more ways to create that kind of compilation-time safety without binding ourselves into too restrictive or complicated models.

Alright, guess I’ll reiterate my usual beats here. AI code assistance is interesting, and I’m not against it. However, every current solution is inadequate, until it does the following:

1. Runs locally, or in an on-prem instance. I’m not taking it up with legal or security if I’m allowed to send our proprietary code off to be analyzed on a foreign server. And I’m not doing it without asking. It just isn’t happening.
2. It has to be free, or paid for by my company. It’s cool, and it might help me work, but paying a subscription fee on something that only benefits me at work is essentially the same as a pay cut. Not interested.
3. It has to analyze the entire repo. In my current tests of ChatGPT, for most cases I’ve spent long enough giving it context that I could’ve just… solved the problem myself. It needs to have that context already.

What a fantastic read! Quite funny throughout, and genuinely insightful.