12_throw_away

Right, exactly. All those disclaimers in front of various AI applications have made people forget that in fact, AI cannot fail, it can only be failed.

Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud, glad some of you people are finally courageous enough to own your beliefs.

"I stole some art" great good for you i'm sure that took a lot of effort

This is a PR-style "refutation" that uses a lot of words to make it seem like it has addressed some issue. I'll just quote one of the reddit comments that is also exactly my reaction:

  if OP isn't some PR account (or andy's alt account) I will eat my hat. none of OP's responses deal with the actual complaints.

PS: cliches like "breaking my silence" / "speaking my truth" etc should result in an automatic 20-point deduction to all bayesian priors for authenticity and trustworthiness

> If so, what specific steps do you suggest I take to acquire a similar understanding?

School! Teachers! Classes!

Seriously, the traditional higher ed system is still a very good place to learn things like this. (I honestly tend to forget about it since academia hasn't really caught up at teaching software engineering, but that's really the exception rather than the rule ...). For traditional subjects like finance/economics, you can absolutely find inexpensive extension courses taught by people who care about pedagogy.

boss: did you just send $5B of our company's liquid capital to a nigerian prince?

me: no worries boss, our market cap is $100B

boss (who is also the tooth fairy): oh right cool np

No, this is a great idea! No more wacom tablet, no more going back and forth between the mac and iPad! I'm looking forward to having a mac where I can just swivel the screen to lie flat and use my apple pen to draw!

Right? ... right? ... wait

oh

oh wait what

wait seriously?

tim. wtf is this shit, tim

I mean, if your multi-year-old project is ever asked to just take a moment to write out a quick formal roadmap and justification ... it is doomed, 100% of the time. The actual content of the request doesn't really matter, it's dead.

To be clear, such a request doesn't even mean that someone is consciously attempting to kill the project (although in the corporate world, ime it probably does). It just means that something went critically wrong. In this case, it appears like python's development process really required a PEP for this sort of work, especially since it was happening on the main branch.

> Is it somewhat convoluted to setup? Absolutely!

Kubernetes™

Wait, but how does that help? Are text templates any better suited for creating JSON than they are for creating YAML? Trying to manipulate well-structured data as if it were syntax-free text seems downright deranged to me, regardless of the specifics of the format ...

> at what point does a tool remain merely a tool, and at what point does it become an end in itself?

As technological animals, our tools are IMO never "merely" tools - we adapt ourselves to them at least as much as we ask them to work for us. E.g., the process of making art is, often, the 2-way process of integrating yourself with your tools. (Maybe art is just the point on the spectrum where the use of the tool is in itself the point of the tool?)

And anyway, every occupation (professional and otherwise) that I can think of fetishizes its tools, at least a little. Or, in a different direction, we might consider how the nature of policing has changed as they've been given more and more military-style tools.

> There are no repetitive puzzles in The Witness or Braid.

I'm sorry, I really like both games, but this is unbelievably false.

just last night I was playing a game on steam, and at a seemingly random point in gameplay (it was Death Stranding, I was just pressing forward like always), every single button on my controller spontaneously remapped to a different button. Turns out my steam input profile had just spontaneously been completely randomized?

All this to say: steam is better than the alternatives, but still has some objectively insane problems.