spacechild1

That's pretty rich coming from you.

No, thanks. You should have done more research before making your initial ridiculous claim. Don't throw economy papers at me when it's very clear you don't know what you're talking about.

I don't have time to read these papers. What I can say for sure is that your first sentence

> The "cushiness" of jobs such as fewer work hours, more benefits, etc. preceded the formation of unions and then slowed down (overall) once unions became popular.

is demonstrably false.

Sure, unions are not the only reason for better working conditions, but they certainly played a very important role.

The legal restrictions on the max. number of hours people are allowed to work per day or week are only in place because of the worker's movement and the power of unions. Companies certainly didn't lobby for these laws. In fact, certain industries are constantly trying to soften or undermine it.

BTW, in my country, unions are part of the annual negotations between employers and employees ("Kollektivvertrag"), which most notably includes the minimum wages and annual pay raises.

I don't know enough about the US, but for Europe this is 100% false! The first unions date back to the 18th century and they were an important part of the worker's movement in the 19th century. They absolutely played a crucial part in improving worker conditions during the industrial revolution and beyond.

> Jobs get nice when employers are competing over the same pool of employees.

Maybe in high-paying jobs that require high qualifications. For most jobs, especially the low-wage sector, this is absolutely not the case. There is no competition between employees if applicants are desperate and need to take any job they can.

In my experience, many SFINAE use cases have already been replaced by C++17's constexpr-if. Concepts are just the nail in the coffin :)

As a C++ you should know that the C++ committee is not responsible for implementing features.

I don't use AI for writing code, so I don't have to deal with it in the first place :)

they most definitely are :)

+1 for `std::from_chars`. It's also by far the fastest of all standard conversion routines.

This is one (of several) reason why many larger open source project ban or severely restrict the usage of LLMs. They want contributors to fully understand the changes they are making.

Recently we have received several bug reports with AI suggested fixes. They looked reasonable enough and seemed to resolve the issue at hand. I then took a deeper look and discovered that every single suggestion only hid the symptom but did not address the underlying issue. Applying the suggested fixes would have hurt our codebase, so I eventually had to reject all of them and write my own solutions. This was only possible because I'm deeply familiar with the codebase and the broader context. Someone with less knowledge would have probably just applied the LLM suggestions without much questioning. I find this rather worrying.

I guess in popular open source projects the stakes are just higher than in some proprietory software that will be replaced in a few years anyway. The irony, of course, is that LLMs have mostly been trained on open source code.

Also, some of the projects I'm involved in are over 20 years old. One even celebrated it's 30th anniversary. This means there is also the question of historical responsibility.

I actually watched it as a kid on Eurosport. It also had the dubbed over commentary. The original has lots of comedy bits between the games, most of them were cut in the German version.

> They're using commands, shortcuts, scripts, etc.

Yes, power users often use shortcuts and automation, but how is that an argument against GUIs?

It simply depends a lot on the actual task. Certain things absolutely require a (high fidelity) graphical interface. Other things can be done just as well (and with less distraction) in a simple TUI. You can't generalize.

> a real friend is essentially a platonic partner

There are certainly different degrees of friendship. I might only have one such platonic partner and unfortunately we hardly see each other anymore because we live in different cities and have families. Once in a while we talk on the phone, but when we do it's a minimum 2 hour call.

However, I have several people I would still consider close friends. My personal threshold for true friendship is whether I can comfortably talk about private things.

Back to the study. I don't think it uses such a high threshold as 'platonic partnership'. I found the following paragraph really striking:

"What these numbers also reveal is the hidden depth of the crisis. The 17% with zero friends in 2024 — compared to just 1% in 1990"

Do everybody suddenly get higher standards of friendship? Or did people really get lonelier? I find the second more likely.

> you're highly unlikely to make friends once you're an adult

People keep saying this but that's not my experience. First, it depends on how you define adult. I have only one close friend from my school days, but I met most of my best friends at university and I don't think I'm an outlier in this regard. It probably gets harder once you're in your thirties and start a family. But once the kids get older and you have more time for hobbies again, there are still many opportunities to find friends. Maybe it won't be a deep platonic relationship, but at least it's someone who shares your interests and that you can meet and talk to in real life.

It really depends a lot on the domain.

In (soft) realtime audio programming, your audio callback might only have a time budget of 1.3 milliseconds. Everytime you exceed that limit, you'll hear a dropout. That's when you'll start to optimize the hell out of your program :)

> About a fifth of Americans report having zero friends

Wow, that's depressing...