It's a leadership failure. They obviously have a UI/UX dept. Those people want to be considered productive. Hence, they need to force a major redesign every now and then. Without a Steve Jobs like leader, those things will happen due to fundamental laws of corporate bureaucracy.
And the 2nd level consequence of that levelling the playing field would be more competition, and fewer huge, powerful gambling companies. Fewer, huge companies have the money and skills to buy politicians (exhibit one: "prediction markets"). Banning ads would be a net positive for the addicts, and net negative for politicians, hence it won't happen in our current universe.
This. And same for phones, tvs, operating systems.
I bought a perfectly fine macbook pro m1 in 2020. It has been made far, far worse, slower, bloated and less responsive by apple. I see nothing improved, everything significantly degraded. It used to be that I could airplay to our tv with a single mouse click, now it seems to work once every 5 attempts, and takes about a minute. It used to be near instantaneous.
I bought a top of the line philips oled tv in 2020. I think I paid 4k for it. It has been made slower, bloated, less responsive by google and philips (or whatever company makes those tvs branded by philips).
I buy a top of the line iphone every 2-3 years, and it gets worse.
I bought a SONOS soundbar a few years ago. It used to work fine and produce nice sound. Now if I start my tv, and don't play anything for a few minutes it goes to sleep, and I need to restart my tv to get the sound to play.
Blocking updates on anything newly purchased seems like the best option. Not buying anything from those absolute crap companies seems like the second best option, but its hard to find alternatives.
I look at people who use fb or tiktok, or x, the same way I look at smokers or alcoholics. With sadness and pity. The fact that we let children use this is hard to accept. The fact that fellow hackers and engineers, some of the brightest minds, have contributed to this is extremely disappointing. Shame on you.
the bucket of crabs truly pervades in its metaphorical accuracy. regardless as to intelligence, humans are liable to drag down their fellow men. insane to consider that children are effectively drugged from infancy. for this i do not blame an uneducated society strained to its zenith; i blame the sociopathic and the craven who have enabled the proferring of digital drugs, and consequently accelerated societal addiction. the shame falls entirely on them. may reincarnation be real such that sadistic six figure salaried software engineers and their malicious managers are forced to reap the rewards of such "engineering".
The interesting part about vibe coding is the spectrum of experiences and attitudes. I have been playing with it for 2-3hrs a day for the last 4 months now. None of my friends who are using it are using it in the same way. Some people vibe and then refactor, some spec-everything and micro-prompt the solutions. Nobody is feeling like this thing can go unsupervised.
And then there is one guy, a friend of mine, who is planning to release a "submit a bug report, we will fix it immediately" feature (so, collect error report from a user, possibly interview them, then assess if its a bug or not with a "product owner LLM", and then autonomously do it, and if it passes the tests - merge and push to prod - all under one hour. Thats for a mid cap company, for their client-facing product. F*** hell! I have a full bag of bug reports ready for when this hits prod :->
I find it hard to understand that people consider $200 p/m a lot for what they are getting. Expensive compared to what? A netflix sub?
A 1hr of a senior dev is at least $100, depending where one lives. Since Claude saves me hours every day, it pays for itself almost instantly. I think the economic value of the Claude subscription is on the order of $20-40k a month for a pro.
When did I say anything about what I'm getting? I said I pay $200/mo and I expect that to cover anything up to my usage limit. I don't expect any slightly non-standard configuration to immediately ignore the high subscription price that I pay and go straight to "extra usage" that has to be billed separately by the token. I wouldn't even care if fast mode used 10x or 50x the usage as long as I could actually USE the balance that I already pay for. I thought the point of extra usage was to be for overage.
When you say "saves me", do you mean that you can prompt claude for like 1 hour per day, get your typical pre-AI output, and then go about doing whatever you like outside of work for rest of the day?
Same. First time in 2 months that I found it easier to fix the bugs it created manually, rather than get it to fix. Its google-code-CLI-on-gemini-2.5 level bad for me today. Meaning, almost comically bad.
When I was 6, I got a Commodore PLUS/4, which was Commodore's unsuccessful attempt at a business-oriented 8 bit computer. I think my folks wanted to give me a Commodore 64, but things happen. Since there were not nearly as many games on that thing, I learned to program early. It had a build in assembler/disassembler (shift-reset would reset the computer without wiping the memory - just the first byte of the program memory), so I learned how to reverse engineer assembly code before I was 10. This arguably "wrong tool" shaped my whole life, and was maybe the most important thing that happened to me. If I got a C64, I could have easily turned into someone else.
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