It’s kind of weird because it kind of acts like 80/20, but you end up doing a significant effort to unwind things back to 60/40 to start trying to massage it to what you really need.

Assuming it’s one of the areas where it does relatively strongly, other areas it will flounder far worse and for some scenarios it can essentially one shot a working thing, if it is really a supremely common and simple thing.

Keep in mind that my frustration stems from this sentiment:

No, voting in primaries isn’t going to fix the problem.

So a scenario that is “first, vote for a president who will…” brings us back to voting, so I’m glad for that, just that many folks are saying don’t even bother trying to vote.

But putting that aside, and going with the assertion that a President can unilaterally disband the current system and let everyone collectively ‘re-roll’ a new system, this doesn’t really pan out either. The assumption stems from a belief that the current administration demonstrates that an administration can act unilaterally. This isn’t actually true, he has the support of congress, even if congress likes to sometimes pretend they don’t support him. If you had your hypothetical, he’d be removed by congress immediately and the speaker of the house would replace him. Of course that’s ignoring the reality that there’s no way you vote someone with that position in without also voting in a lot of congress, but again, this scenario involves a lot of popular support expressed through voting. Not amendment level popular support, but enough popular support as to make the amendments frankly not really needed.

But stepping back a bit further, one could put aside the concept of a president and stick more with the historically demonstrated reality that a system can be taken down with less than it would take to rework the system as it stands. The amount of support to amend the current system would be inconceivable the way it works, but systems can be changed in other ways. Those ways amount to a combination of numbers, conviction, force, and cohesion. I just don’t see that, and at least some of the folks on that anti-electoral bent have acknowledged that, and have suggested a hope for a collapse event that will draw numbers and conviction. They assume a cohesion will occur that naturally would align with them, despite not putting in the work because it ‘just seems obvious’ that they are right.

The reality is that people can look around globally and see that the system fails them more than they would like, but grading on a curve the current system resembles the ones that work more closely than it does in much worse systems. Rerolling the system would be pitting people against each other based on conviction to do physical violence, the resulting fear, and numbers. Very high odds you kick that off and ultimately end with an authoritarian state focused on purity of ethnicity, religion, gender and such because those dudes are way more willing to do harm than others.

Guess my career has gone such that I’ve always looked to code and git history to wrap my head around, because the documentation people write is unreliable.

Particularly in enterprise, where for some reason there’s some “developer” who writes a word document and then buggers off while someone else actually does the coding and the relationship between actual code and document drift because the “architect” never had to reconcile his document with the realities.

Problem being that most of the people calling the shots can’t tell the difference between slop and good work even before AI.

If it is any consolation, in my experience no one will ever read the system architecture document anyway. So if it’s totally wrong, no one will know.

No, voting in primaries isn’t going to fix the problem.

You said that verbatim. It’s a safe assumption to say ‘voting isn’t going to fix the problems’ is intended to mean ‘voting isn’t going to fix the problems’.

Ok, so the platform page had: “Stop fueling the war between Russia and Ukraine and lead on negotiating a peaceful end” This was just a stupid statement, acting like Russia didn’t just up and unilaterally invade a nation.

She said NATO should be disbanded. She wanted the UN Security Council both to be abolished and yet at the same time wanted the UN Security Council to hold Israel accountable.

Her platform was a lot of Russia’s invasion was actually all the fault of the west and the best way forward was to just capitulate to Russian aggression.

She was just a total shit candidate, with a lot of Russian agenda points featured in her campaign.

Here, I’ll do the thinking for you.

Oh, thank you, obviously I need that. What a shit opening.

either start writing amendments and getting them passed through Congress, or have the state legislatures demand a convention be arranged.

This was supposed to be guidance from the “don’t vote” crowd. There’s no way that “don’t vote” leads to “constitutional amendment”.

You start writing the new one, then ratify it the same way the same way the old one was.

At least a bit more closer to direct. Usually there’s an acknowledgement that this isn’t in the cards, and instead they advocate to vaguely organize and wait for some catastrophe to generate the popular support that is lacking.

don’t complain if voting by the rules doesn’t bring about the change

The whole point was about people who refuse to vote by the rules not bringing about the change.

But such a tremendously condescending tone is pretty asshole way of commenting.

I would argue the difference is not some tiny percentage of voters, but his first term had a lot more long term establishment people in it. He fucked off and went golfing and the assortment of people in the administration really set direction. Bad direction, but moderated.

After his 2020 loss and subsequent sore loser meltdown, anyone vaguely moderate went with the prevailing wisdom that he was out of the picture and abandoned him. Meanwhile just the worst people bet on alignment with him and stood by and crafted a plan and administration for 4 years to be just even worse.

Yes, because ignoring the system works sooo much better.

That may be true, but last round, where was the decent third party candidate?

Stein had as part of her platform that Ukraine should surrender to Russia on the name of peace, for example.

It is technically the truth, but skips the lede.

He does vote that way, but clarifies California is a place where he can, and if your situation is more competitive, you need to vote with that inch in mind.

Well here he is applying nuance. He can vote that way thanks to the realities of California. He is trusting the audience to understand that nuance of that stance.

It’s a tricky one, since on the one hand he may be overestimating the electorate, but on the other folks inclined to listen to him may internalize the nuance and not get alienated by assumptions that he is selling out. I’m leaning towards the latter since he at least is calling people to vote instead of some blindly anti electoral take, which is fairly prominent in the online discourse.

A complete lack of specific action suggested. So tired of these “don’t even try not even in the primaries” comments. Just some vague wave a wand and have a new system, avoiding precisely how that would happen.

So far whenever pressed the answer tends to be “just wait until this all collapses on it’s own, then our “I told you so” will clearly let us take charge once the masses have finally had their eyes opened by a collapse”.

Yeah, he even explicitly makes that clear. It’s a pretty good take.

When it comes to my actual core work and getting things done, I’m still content. Even with the pressure to “use AI”, it’s usefulness is limited enough in my specific niche that I actually still do most of it. There are a couple of more mainstream components that it did accelerate, but the core of my job it kind of just isn’t good at. I still have authority over it and how it is done, and I can keep it pretty solid.

However the phenonomenon of people telling me how I should be doing my work who know absolutely zero about my work is exhausting. Someone who has never written code or used any version control, even with AI for some reason is telling me I should stop using git because it isn’t AI friendly because he read some article and he thinks it sounds smart to say it. Someone telling me they vibed up a solution for something and sent it out to our customers and then I get stuck trying to repair the customer relationship when it is crap, and expectations are that I should be able to fix it real quick because “the AI did all the hard stuff already”. So much harder fixing slop from someone that vibed without knowing than starting from scratch, but no one believes it because it almost looks right and how far off can it really be of it looks that right?

Most days I avoid that and I do feel like it’s getting better as the novelty wears off and these people with no stake in things are getting bored of slopping up stuff they find out they don’t actually care about, so it is fine.

However, I would absolutely suggest not trying to get into this industry. It is an absolute shit show to onboard into now. I am so glad now that my kid had zero interest in this stuff, saved them a bunch of disappointment.

My family got stuck with one. It couldn’t get the order right, kept doubling an item. Finally my kid asked for 10,000 waters and that caused the human to get tagged in.

Likewise, this court argues, having legal access to a work does not give you the right to feed it into an LLM as training data.

Seems more narrow than that. If your “AI” just copies the input almost verbatim, then it’s not “transformative”.

Unfortunately they still seem to regard the big players’ consumption as “transformative” enough to not count.

Self-checkout was a boon because reduced wages to process customers (in theory).

Now they have an even better mechanism to push: delivery and pickup. Keep the customers away from the merchandise except what they have already paid for. Wal-Mart pushing the promise of free delivery under 22 minutes when I go to check if they have something in-store.

It wasn’t about the cashier, it was about the line.

Before self checkout, the wal mart near me would on a typical day have 3 or 4 cashiers working. At the height of their adoption, they had 28 self checkouts typically up.

But now, they have 2-3 self checkouts open and a big line, while you can generally find one of the handful of cashiers with no one waiting. It baffles me that people would wait to self-checkout when there’s a cashier open with no line, unless people have just that much social anxiety (a wal mart seems a tricky proposition) or else people are liking their chances for skipping scan of an item here or there.