zwischenzug

Didn't the card have a limit?

It felt much the same when posters went from hand-drawn to created by computers. Personality went from handwriting or eccentric, dynamically-created fonts to Comic Sans. To me this feels like the next level.

TBH, most of those menus just looked like pre-AI menus to me...

Except the "merge mess" footgun.

I got into training people in Git (I now do it for O'Reilly) because I worked with 12 teams that merged _everything_ into sub-branches. The result was that the `git log --oneline` command resulted in screensful of just pipes.

My initial training goal in training was getting my students to understand a rebase to avoid that mess.

If Farage wins he is still subject to an investigation that could eject him from Parliament, over a 5m crypto gift/loan he received from an ex-pat donor that he did not declare.

Farage is looking to get a popular mandate to try and both draw attention away from that investigation, and justify keeping his position because "the people have spoken". The other parties don't want to undermine the investigation by taking part in an election which would be moot if he were found guilty anyway.

Farage is therefore punching on air, and has been reduced to arguing that a joke candidate with a bin on his head who claims to be from outer space is an "establishment" (aka "deep state") plant.

It's actually a smart move from the other parties. Without a serious "enemy" to fight, populists look foolish as their usual rhetorical moves have no bite.

"placelessness" was coined the year after I was born! So if it's not 'just age', then it's been going on a long time.

On cities, I guess my point is that I didn't have to seek out new experiences. Simply going there guaranteed new experiences. I spent a lot of time in Vienna growing up and everything was different. I literally couldn't have a familiar experience even if I'd wanted to. In fact, I remember having to spend lots of money and travelling a long way to find a specialised shop to get a familiar food item (baked beans) to relieve the homesickness.

I don't think people under a certain age can really appreciate how different it was.

This touches on something I've (and many others) have felt throughout my life, not just since the advent of LLMs.

To take a simple example: I grew up with computer games in the '80s where there were no 'physics engines' or frameworks for building games. As a result, each game was an expression of the author's personality somehow. Fast forward to the noughties, games bored me as they mostly looked and felt the same, or maybe felt like 3-5 different games all packaged differently.

Another example: going abroad on holiday in Europe (I'm from London) used to be a relatively wild, vibrant experience, filled with unexpected differences and challenges (not all positive). There were no McDonalds or Starbucks and the shops were filled with unfamiliar products and foods. Now everywhere in Europe feels the same when I visit, especially with smartphone in hand.

And films went from wildly different to one another to what now feels like 'arty' and 'CGI' being the two choices.

This article continues that into the realm of ideas, or idea production. Everywhere you go looks and feels familiar.

Or am I just getting old?

I don't know TBH. It's just that if you're going to have a 'pure' designation for a tech, it's going to be pretty strict (as per bash and adding modules). I've never heard of 'pure' linux, but 'pure' bash has a recognised meaning. If someone said 'pure Linux' and it meant the core without loaded modules I wouldn't be shocked. Not sure how useful it would be, though.

Pure Linux doesn't.

I see some similarity to how I felt when library management/wrangling became a huge part of software development.

In the last century I enjoyed crafting my own 'libraries' of functions that I could then use on the projects I worked on. As time went on, there was less and less of a point doing that as the odds rose near to 100% that there was 'a library for that' thing I was working on, so I was encouraged/forced to download it and use it.

It solved problems and was quicker than writing bespoke code (and libraries were hardly a new idea), so the logic was hard to deny, but I enjoyed my job less over time. Now I've risen up the ranks and now code mostly for fun (yes, I use AI to write functions for me) I look at what it must be like to enter the industry and think it all looks very different to how it did when I started.

You could argue that AI has done this much faster than it did in my early career, so people have less of the 'boiling frog' experience I had, and more of a 'sudden shock' to the system.

It's sad, but I've been doing this to other industries all my career, so I can hardly complain.

This should be an essay.