alterom

Yeah, and today's "plastics" is AI.

If that's not apparent already.

To clarify: I'm calling out parent commenter's inability to sympathize with the OP because the OP is unpleasant.

Yes, the OP's communication style and personality is a factor in their relationship with the community.

And assuming the "unpleasantness" claim is true, one could say this:

    "It is unfortunate that someone with OP's skill set has alienated themselves from the rest of the community. *While I sympathize with them*, the reality is that *skills alone are not enough*, and never have been; making amends with others is just as important skill as any other in this field — or any field where a solitary effort isn't the end-all result. Gregory Perelman, perhaps, can afford to be unpleasant; a videogame reverse engineer, however talented, may not, if they want to both thrive and be happy in this line of work.

    It's sad, yet that's how the world works. Everyone loses here."

See? It is possible to express what you call a "common sentiment" and tie it to the discussion without any loss of sympathy.

The parent commenter is unable to do that. In their own words (in a follow-up comment), if someone is unpleasant, their sympathy ends.

This is a very common pattern, alas, in non-autistic people.

That said, commonness is not an excuse.

>You're flaming someone who expressed the common sentiment: the OP's words makes him seem unpleasant to be around.

Incorrect.

I'm flaming them for saying that how pleasant the OP is to be around decides the commenter's ability to sympathize with the OP's predicament.

Nobody asked the commenter to be around the OP.

Quite literally, nobody asked that; and their opinion on that subject matter, however common the sentiment may be, is as relevant as discussing the physical attractiveness of a burn victim in an willful negligence case.

It would be one thing to say that the complaint has no merit, or that the outcome was inevitable given how much the environment changed, or even given OP's interactions with the community.

But saying "I can't sympathize with them because they're unpleasant" is another thing.

>If you meant something besides your own moral superiority, say so.

I hope I was clear enough here.

Note that I never said anything about myself here, so "my moral superiority" doesn't come into play.

But since you seem to want to bring my personality into the discussion, I'll say this about myself: I am autistic, and the words that I say express precisely what I mean.

Please take care to read them, and not look for hidden or implied meanings within.

Thank you in advance for understanding, or at least a bonafide effort to attain it.

>if you're unpleasant, people will route around you. My sympathy ends

You're repeating what I already stated: that your sense of sympathy depends on how pleasant someone is (not solely on how unjust or unfair their predicament is).

No need to reiterate that you don't see an issue with that.

> Some sites, once connected via passkey, make it all but impossible to connect in another way.

That's not a usability nightmare.

That's plainly a nightmare.

Also, the very thing that passkey evangelists were foaming at the mouth 1-2 years ago here assuring me Would Absolutely Never Happen and Is Not A Concern, because the spec says passwords should still work.

To the surprise of exactly no one with half a brain, things didn't play out that way.

> though we're back to a "biometrics as password" problem in many device flows

Meaning if you're detained with the device, you can be legally required (and physically forced) to unlock not just the device, but all your online accounts.

Nothing suspicious here, not like authoritarianism is on the rise or anything, and whoever lives in those countries can get fucked in any case.

>So far, it's about 30% of sites screwing it up...

A year or two ago I was told it'll be 0%.

In 1-2 years, it'll be 90%.

I'm tired.

Your two examples are taking something that's already built, and are extracting a feature (security flaw) or translating (decompiling).

The Kolmogorov complexity, at best, remains unchanged.

"sudo make an OS" is a different kind of transformation.

It's as much programming as downloading an Ubuntu image, and you don't need to wait a decade to do that.

> It's like saying that concept of dynamite fishing affects passionate anglers.

Are you implying that it does not?

If dynamite fishing were deployed on the scale the AI infra is, with VC capital and government backing, we'd run out of fish in a week.

The concept doesn't affect much, deployment of it affects a lot.

They are a rational actor in a world of skewed premises.

>And yet the war which realistically can't be won

...is being fought on many battlefields, including the elections in the US.

And I am not so sure Russia isn't winning that one.

> AI is natural language programming then they already had it in 1978, because AI is in fact "asking a programmer to write code for you". And you can even ask them to do it at different levels of abstraction!

There are a few little differences between human beings and computers that you should know about.

For example, humans are sentient, have agency and can be held accountable.

So when you give humans a bad spec, you can still get what you want, because, with some luck, you're simply delegating the task of thinking and making choices to another human, who, by the very premise, understands the language you are communicating in, and can work out your intents with you.

The whole "this meeting could've been an email" thing, you know.

That meeting could've been a pull request if whoever needed a thing to be done could figure it out on their own.

LLMs can be helpful for figuring things out, sure.

But "sudo make me a sandwich" style of vibe coding is just removing the obstacles to enshrining ambiguities and bad decisions in code.