I hear that. I don’t judge anyone using copilot to cover the gap between perfect and good enough. I use it that way, as well.

A coder passionately loving Copilot strikes me as a bit like a sailor passionately loving life boats.

It’s perfectly rational, and… it implies that they routinely deal with some shit that probably, ideally, ought to get fixed.

I’m projecting my own experience a lot here. When I’m working with code I’m really happy with, I find copilot getting in my way more than helping. When I’m working with code that’s newer and messier, I find copilot pretty handy.

“The problem isn’t just laziness. It’s degradation. Engineers stop exploring. Stop improving. Stop caring. One more layer of abstraction. One more lazy fetch call inside a render loop. Eventually, you’re living in a cathedral of technical debt, and every user pays.”

This quote has the no one wants to work anymore vibe.

We all predicted this when web frameworks and object relation mappers were introduced… And we were right… Kind of. The average programmer is certainly worse - but there’s also many more of us, getting a lot more done. And there’s still plenty of us who master the craft.

Shit. So many great lines.

“It’s autocomplete with a superiority complex.”

“It’s trained on code that’s already an insult to silicon.”

I’ll just drop this here for future easy linking convenience…

“If you’re writing the same boilerplate every day like some industrial-age cog monkey, automate it yourself. Write a library. Invent a macro. Reclaim some dignity.”

I’ve been there. I’m 100% sure my PC is now a brick, but I run across a post by some random person online:

"Press these keys, then type this exactly and hit “Enter”

And roughly five minutes later my PC is stable, purring happily, and two minor annoyances have gone away thanks to package updates.

Thank you all, kind Internet Linux guru strangers.

Edit: More like 25 minutes, really. 20 minutes of my reading docs to verify why this solution can work, and then 5 minutes for it to work.

I’m quite aware that it’s less likely to technically hallucinate in these cases. But focusing on that technicality doesn’t serve users well.

These (interesting and useful) use cases do not address the core issue that the query was written by the LLM, without expert oversight, which still leads to situations that are effectively halucinations.

Technically, it is returning a “correct” direct answer to a question that no rational actor would ever have asked.

But when a halucinated (correct looking but deeply flawed) query is sent to the system of record, it’s most honest to still call the results a halucination, as well. Even though they are technically real data, just astonishingly poorly chosen real data.

The meaningless, correct-looking and wrong result for the end user is still just going to be called a halucination, by common folks.

For common usage, it’s important not to promise end users that these scenarios are free of halucination.

You and I understand that technically, they’re not getting back a halucination, just an answer to a bad question.

But for the end user to understand how to use the tool safely, they still need to know that a meaningless correct looking and wrong answer is still possible (and today, still also likely).

Gnome also has a plugin(s) for this.

I use both, Fancy Zones and Gnome, but I like (one of) the gnome version(s) better.

Mainly, the Gnome version puts a quick toggle on screen for switching layouts with the mouse, and it makes better choices about what windows to display when shifting between windows with Alt+Tab.

It’s so beautiful!

That’s my journey too, except a few of those didn’t exist yet, when I first walked it.

Portable Windows apps and Ubuntu live Boot CDs awkwardly bridges some of the (previous) gaps, for me.

I kinda wish they would come in one package together too.

You may be able to find themed meta packages (single packages that install a suite of related features) for this, depending what you’re looking for.

Lately, I have been confused because I was looking for Gnome add-ons for features that vwere already included but just toggled off.

I now find that most of what I want, as a power user, is a quick settings search and then a toggle button.

The general dividng line, lately, in Gnome, is that plugins may still have bugs, while built-in features tend to be very reliable. Most of what PowerToys contains (that I care about) is just a settings toggle in Gnome. A notable exception is Window tiling, which I use a plugin for.

I’m thankful for both.

The plugin install on Gnome is quicker and less invasive (doesn’t require escalated permissions) than installing PowerToys.

I also like that Gnome plugins let me choose only the plugins I want. PowerToys leaves me with many installed features I’m not using. I think they at least all default to turned off. Gnome does save me a few moments of configuration, too, as the plugin can default to “on” since each plugin is separate.

And Gnome’s tiling has good defaults. PowerToys still uses “these are power users” as an excuse to ignore usability feedback.

They have been for awhile. Early adopter communities like the fediverse used to argue about the good and harm done by the big four.

For about the last five years, I haven’t heard an early adopter defend the big four.

I saw/heard the same things around, for example, SEARS, back when it was week known that SEARS was too big and successful to fail.

Some would call it effortless, even.

The LLM would make queries to the rigid, non-hallucinating accounting system.

And then sometimes adds a halucination before returning an answer - particularly when it encournters anything it wasn’t trained on, like important moments when business leaders should be taking a closer look.

There’s not enough popcorn in the world for the shitshow that is coming.

Or would you want to voluntarily waive parts of your salary?

I already have. I could make so much more money with my skillset doing incredibly antisocial things…I choose not to.

I hope you get some replacement chocolate cake, soon.

I am happier now that I don’t do that, anymore. But I don’t actually regret all the times I did.

Also,Snuffy’s original design was kinda creepy.

That’s the most load-bearing use of the word “kinda” that I have seen in a sentence. That “kinda”, while valid, is under so much stretch strain, it could shatter at any moment.

Wait…Is “Yellow Submarine” not about an ex-Chinese ex-war machine full of utopian communists rescuing diverse survivors of nuclear war into a floating mobile commune (presumably full of recreational drug use)?

Also, I don’t think I can trust android,

Yes. Google’s framework service seems to be spyware.

so I would have to install Graphene OS or the like.

GrapheneOS does seem to be the best way to address the privacy concerns with Android. There’s also LineageOS and others.

In the case, app support would be lacking, though.

Uh…Android is the single most popular operating system in the history of operating systems. The app support is quite good.

If you mean because many apps require Google Farmwork Services, and GrapheneOS replaces it - I find that to be a largely solved problem. The GrapheneOS neutered rebuild of Google Framework Services now fools most apps into working.

It’s been years since I encountered an app that actually couldn’t run on GrapheneOS, unless the app was aggressively trying to spy on me.

The remaining issue tends to be bank and credit union apps, which aggressively spy on their users “for security”. I work around this by using my credit union’s mobile website, instead. It has all of the same features without the spying, anyway.

I disagree vehemently with one of these and I thought it might make a fun little mystery, but on second thought I’ll just state up front it’s the Monty Python one.