I know it may be hard to believe if you only browse Lemmy (like myself), but the average person actually likes these so-called “AI” tools or at least a significant amount of them do.

This is probably true but makes me sad. I tell all my friends not to use the lie machines but a bunch of people at work use them all the time.

I don’t think there’s any evidence that AI needs to be baked into the browser. They have a robust extension ecosystem for this sort of thing.

For the code, open source is probably the way to go. People should be able to build from source. Otherwise, how do they know you’re not doing something shady. Open source is generally a net improvement on security, assuming people actually look at it.

For screenshots, first fix it so the screenshots render nicely on narrow displays.

Would probably need to be open source to be trustworthy. Running a random executable from the Internet seems dicey.

Needs more screenshots. The two that are on the site don’t render great on mobile. Can only see a small portion.

I’m unclear how you find another user and verify who they are.

Website should have a clearer feature list. The user manual wants to download a text file instead of showing it in the browser.

Microsoft doesn’t have to compete very much. They’re not a monopoly, probably, but a strict definition. Apple exists. Linux exists and is better than the terminal hell the average person thinks about. But that’s not enough pressure to make microsoft actually try to appeal to customers. Most people are basically stuck.

We should break up all of these companies that are so big they can coast with shitty products for years.

People’s inability to grapple with cognitive dissonance, and how people often go with “I’m a good person making good choices” instead of the more difficult path of changing, is part of why everything is so horrible.

But of course, she shrugged it off and said she did not care.

Getting people to care is strangely hard. I think it’s because accepting some of the things we want people to care about means grappling with how the world is unfair and fucked up, and people are emotionally just not ready for that. People are stupid cowards.

I feel like there should be circumstances where if you’re accused of something and found innocent, you need to be made whole. Maybe that’s a huge payout. Maybe you get all your stuff back.

If the police bring you in for questioning because you were riding your bike, and you’re shown innocent, they should pay out like $500/hour to you.

• it’s free
• runs on a wider range of hardware
• is more customizable
• can run much windows software with wine or proton
• has a large ecosystem of native software
  • much of it free and open source

The advantage of Mac is it’s more widely used and thus more widely supported (for things that are supported at all). You can just buy an apple computer from a trusted source and it’ll work. Linux doesn’t quite have that yet. If more people move to Linux , you’ll find better drivers and stuff.

Hacker should make the phones explode or something. Trash startup funded by trash.

What an incredibly stupid thing to do. LLMs are not the correct tool for this problem. Especially not like this.

How will it reduce demand for parking? Do you envision the car will drop someone off and then drive away until it finds a parking spot that’s farther than the person would want to walk?

That sounds like a very hard problem , and people wouldn’t be happy waiting 5-10 minutes for their car to navigate back to them. Or it would just cruise around looking for parking, causing more traffic.

Cars could tailgate like virtual train cars following each other at highway speeds with very little separation, lanes could be narrowed to fit more cars side by side in traffic, etc.

Once again reinventing buses and trains

It took like 100 years to build the car-hell we have now. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to fix it.

And people are, famously, stupid. They’ll fight like hell to avoid change, but once it’s in they’ll fight like hell to keep that change.

Plus there’s a lot of selfish idiots that need to be overridden.

So leave that problem for later. Let them keep driving themselves, and focus on improvements where people actually live.

Most people live in or close to cities.

I learned today that the board of directors at this huge multinational non-tech company I’m at wants 80% of people using AI, and has a target for lines of code written by AI.

Both of those are insane.

The lines of code one is extra double insane. People knew lines of code was a shit metric in like the 90s.

You have to be careful at low skill/knowledge levels, because it’ll happily send you down a crazy path that looks legitimate.

I asked it how to do something in oracle SQL, because I don’t know oracle specifically, and it gave me a terrible answer. I suspected it wasn’t right so I asked a coworker who’s an old hand at Oracle, and he was like “no that’s terrible. Here’s a much simpler way”

I found it’s useful for code where I know like 70% of what I’m doing. More than that and I can just do it myself. Less than that and I can’t trust and diagnose the output.

I’d rather have old fashioned stack overflow and tutorials, honestly. It’s hard to actually learn when it just gives answers.

Most of the code at my current job doesn’t even have the optional type annotations. You just see like def something(config). What’s config? A dict? A list? A string? Who the fuck knows.

Unfortunately most of the developers seem to have a very pre-modern take on programming and aren’t interested in changing anything.

Get a code formatter. Ruff is popular. So is black. Never think about it again.

I don’t have the means or motivation to do research now from the couch, so I’ll concede you may be correct. However, I think it might be even safer to take those same billions of dollars and invest them in mass transit and other infrastructure changes. That would mean fewer car accidents, less pollution, nicer spaces, healthier people, healthier economies, etc. private car ownership cannot be the long term solution. If it’s not an outright dead end, it’s certainly a side street instead of high speed rail (if you’ll pardon a strained metaphor).