korazail

I'm going to expand on TrickDacy's comment:

Every both sideser is either extraordinarily lazy or a closeted right winger

and instead state: It is OKAY to be mad at democratic politicians. Especially the spineless ones we have an abundance of right now. And there is certainly some rage we can all aim at the DNC as an organization, which appears to be trying to hamstring any actually progressive candidates.

But there really isn't a competition in the race for 'who is most evil' between D and R. One side is at least appearing to fight for worker rights, healthcare, equality, peace and other progressive/liberal goals. The other side is actively dismantling the government... like actively and they told us they were going to. There's no both sides here.

So, by 'closeted right winger', what I think Trick means is that anyone boldly claiming 'both sides' falls into one of a few categories:

• lazy: Doesn't "do politics" and gets their news from tiktok, fox, cnn, their buddy at work, and doesn't put in the critical thinking to make their own decisions. "Both Sides" lets them get away with not caring enough and just moving on with life.
• gullible: Believes they are thinking critically, but are swayed by media, social or conventional, into thinking that all politicians are shit, and if one is corrupt then they all are.
• malicious: Knows they are being disingenuous, but knows the other categories exist. If they claim 'both sides' are doing something, then when one side actually gets caught doing it, the public just kinda shrugs it off. This also depresses voter turnout in general, because of the lazy group.

So. What is your purpose in your post. Are you lazy, and just know that democrats also suck, but want to sound smart on the internet? Are you gullible, and really think that democrats would be just as bad if they had power? Or are you malicious, and trying to make the people that would otherwise "do politics" give up and become lazy?

If you are not trying to make people give up, STOP. There is no both sides. There is the fascist, authoritarian, oligarchic, billionaire side, and then there are the people. If you want to make a real difference and move the needle, then the time is now, but it's not in a forum post saying 'both sides are bad.' It's going to be in your local democratic organization, trying to find candidates to run for local or regional offices and then supporting them. The people THERE are definitely on our side, since they are just us. And if we can build strong networks THERE, then we can push people into the national stage who will also fight for us.

The democrats who act like republicans need a strong local network to primary them. Be the change you want to see.

I don't see what value you think you're getting from this conversation -- other than expressing your anger, which is valid. Your anger is valid, if you are sincere, and many of us feel it too. We really are your allies here, and not your enemy. Your language suggests your are not a US citizen.

Yes, Kamala lost and due in part to her stances around Israel/Palestine and her chasing the 'moderate' vote she was unlikely to win. By blaming the losing party for the bullshit the winning party is doing, you are in part blaming the victims. We don't want this either.

Literally anybody could have won if spineless cowards like you had supported them, but [...]

What's to say that village604 didn't vote for her? That huge numbers of people didn't vote for her even while they were unhappy with some of her decisions. Literally anyone could have won if "we" would just vote for them!?

I will highlight that we, "liberal" voters (language matters), did not get a chance to choose someone as our candidate. That's a real issue and we need to hold the DNC accountable for that. We also had large amount of content (somewhat like yours) that 'Kamala/Biden are bad because ...' but ignored that trump would clearly be worse in all cases. I can't imagine that this didn't depress her votes. This is hard to prove, but it seems unlikely that this was not in part built by non-US actors who wanted to destabilize us.

Long-story-short, we "liberal" voters are partially to blame for not turning out enough to get Kamala elected... but we also have a larger body (quantitatively) of trump voters who did show up. THEY are responsible for his policies. And the constant harping on "liberal" voters is doing nothing useful to make things better. I can only imagine that you are one of those non-US actors.

You stand for absolutely nothing, you deserve Trump and worse.

I stand for empathy and compassion. For those that live in my neighborhood, my city, my state, my country and my world. I stand for Palestine. I stand for the homeless. I stand for the disabled, the war veterans, the disadvantaged. I am wealthy (comfortable, not millionaire), white, male, and a citizen of the US. When given the opportunity to vote for those causes, I will every time. I will happily pay higher taxes to let someone sleep tonight with a full belly. Your blanket statements against people like me only make things worse. Stop. Be nice to each other.

Follow up question if you will: What changed for you?

As you say, the conditioning is there and deep. What triggered you to re-evaluate your stances on beliefs so deeply held?

I'm also a middle aged white guy raised in the 80's. My parents were democratic, but even I fell for some of right-wing propaganda when I was old enough to vote, but didn't have world experience. It's insidious. I can only imagine I'd still be there, if not for my social structure guiding me towards a more progressive understanding of the world.

And you are a hero to that plow driver. And others like you are heroes to the people that also had to be out on terrible weather days and holidays.

I assume a gas station could run without anyone present, leaving the convenience store part closed, but having someone on-hand to hit an e-stop if needed is pretty important.

My goal is not to devalue your work, but rather to support it. "Essential workers" are called that for a reason. We should work to ensure that they are paid their worth. Just because it's not necessarily a "skilled" job doesn't mean it's not important. The bro running the local hedge fund is providing way less actual value than anyone in a service job.

I'm an arachnophobe when I just walked through her web and don't know where the fuck she is. From a distance, though, I'm all 'Wow, what a wonderful creature!'

The spider spinning a web in front of my door is an asshole. The one eating things inside my house is a bro. The one guarding my rose bush is beautiful.

If you're spider-curious, take a look at Travis McEnery. If you think your an arachnophobe, check him out too; exposure therapy worked for Chill and youtube is a safe distance from the spiders.

No kidding. If I have to tell the stupid model what I'm talking about explicitly with a cell range, I might as well write the function myself. And if I'm an excel novice who doesn't know SUM(), then I should go learn about it to solve my problem instead of offloading to a model whose result I can't verify.

LLMs are not a replacement for knowledge and skill. It's a tool that might, might be able to accelerate things you already could do.

That said... can copilot do conditional formatting? "Highlight in red all rows where cell 5 is No" would actually be useful. Conditional formatting rules are madness.

I just really looked at the image. =COPILOT() is absolutely insane... Does that make a call to microsoft from this sheet every time it's opened? when the related cells change? when anything changes? If your document is 'financial forecast fy 2026', have you just given the whole doc as context to another company? sure, sure, sure, they said they wouldn't look at your stuff, but prove it.

This is so me.

I live in a neighborhood with a school. Lots of children roam the streets. Presumably, they are taught to always look both ways, expect cars to misbehave, and otherwise look out for their safety. I haven't heard of any injuries from cars.

I constantly watch cars, especially the oversized trucks, blow through stop signs, or accelerate to 35 mph on a 1/4 mile stretch of road with side street parking. It really boggles my mind when these same drivers then stop just before the school and drop their kids off to walk the rest of the way. Do you not understand that you put local neighborhood kids at risk from the driving you do, just to save a few moments of avoiding the actual car rider line? Where child safety is a priority.

"Nice stop!"

And then at night, delivery drivers blast through the area. Ignoring stop signs, driving excessively fast past parked cars. Kids live here, and they don't always remember to look. Especially at dusk, when kids are still playing, but visibility is poor. These drivers gamble with three lives: the inexperienced child, their own, and that of the family that would grieve. For what? A few seconds?

Be nice to each other!!!

Thanks for your reply, and I can still see how it might work.

I'm curious if you have any resources that do some end-to-end examples. This is where I struggle. If I have an atomic piece of code I need and I can maybe get it started with a LLM and finish it by hand, but anything larger seems to just always fail. So far the best video I found to try a start-to-finish demo was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AWEPx5cHWQ

He spends plenty of time describing the tools and how to use them, but when we get to the actual work, we spend 20 minutes telling the LLM that it's doing stuff wrong. There's eventually a prototype, but to get there he had to alternate between 'I still can't jump' and 'here's the new error.' He eventually modified code himself, so even getting a 'mario clone' running requires an actual developer and the final result was underwhelming at best.

For me, a 'game' is this tiny product that could be a viable unit. It doesn't need to talk to other services, it just needs to react to user input. I want to see a speed-run of someone using LLMs to make a game that is playable. It doesn't need to be "fun", but the video above only got to the 'player can jump and gets game over if hitting enemy' stage. How much extra effort would it take to make the background not flat blue? Is there a win condition? How to refactor this so that the level is not hard-coded? Multiple enemy types? Shoot a fireball that bounces? Power Ups? And does doing any of those break jump functionality again? How much time do I have to spend telling the LLM that the fireball still goes through the floor and doesn't kill an enemy when it hits them?

I could imagine that if the LLM was handed a well described design document and technical spec that it could do better, but I have yet to see that demonstrated. Given what it produces for people publishing tutorials online, I would never let it handle anything business critical.

The video is an hour long, and spends about 20 minutes in the middle actually working on the project. I probably couldn't do better, but I've mostly forgotten my javascript and HTML canvas. If kaboom.js was my focus, though, I imagine I could knock out what he did in well under 20 minutes and have a better architected design that handled the above questions.

I've, luckily, not yet been mandated that I embed AI into my pseudo-developer role, but they are asking.

I think this is what will kill vibe coding, but not before there's significant damage done. Junior developers will be let go and senior devs will be told they have to use these tools instead and to be twice as efficient. At some point enough major companies will have had data breaches through AI-generated code that they all go back to using people, but there will be tons of vulnerable code everywhere. And letting Cursor touch your codebase for a year, even with oversight, will make it really tricky to find all the places it subtly fucked up.

I have 3 questions, and I'm coming from a heavily AI-skeptic position, but am open:

1. Do you believe that providing all that context, describing the existing patterns, creating an implementation plan, etc, allows the AI to both write better code and faster than if you just did it yourself? To me, this just seems like you have to re-write your technical documentation in prose each time you want to do something. You are saying this is better than 'Do XYZ', but how much twiddling of your existing codebase do you need to do before an AI can understand the business context of it? I don't currently do development on an existing codebase, but every time I try to get these tools to do something fairly simple from scratch, they just flail. Maybe I'm just not spending the hours to build my AI-parsable functional spec. Every time I've tried this, asking something as simple as (and paraphrased for brevity) "write an Asteroids clone using JavaScript and HTML 5 Canvas" results in a full failure, even with multiple retries chasing errors. I wrote something like that a few years ago to learn Javascript and it took me a day-ish to get something that mostly worked.

2. Speaking of that context. Are you running your models locally, or do you have some cloud service? If you give your entire codebase to a 3rd party as context, how much of your company's secret sauce have you disclosed? I'd imagine most sane companies are doing something to make their models local, but we see regular news articles about how ChatGPT is training on user input and leaking sensitive data if you ask it nicely and I can't imagine all the pro-AI CEOs are aware of the risks here.

3. How much pen-testing time are you spending on this code, error handling, edge cases, race conditions, data sanitation? An experienced dev understands these things innately, having fixed these kinds of issues in the past and knows the anti-patterns and how to avoid them. In all seriousness, I think this is going to be the thing that actually kills AI vibe coding, but it won't be fast enough. There will be tons of new exploits in what used to be solidly safe places. Your new web front-end? It has a really simple SQL injection attack. Your phone app? You can tell it your username is admin'joe@google.com and it'll let you order stuff for free since you're an admin.

I see a place for AI-generated code, for instant functions that do something blending simple and complex. "Hey claude, write a function to take a string and split it at the end of every sentence containing an uppercase A". I had to write weird functions like that constantly as a sysadmin, and transforming data seems like a thing an AI could help me accelerate. I just don't see that working on a larger scale, though, or trusting an AI enough to allow it to integrate a new function like that into an existing codebase.

Oh, I'm mad at them too. And I understand how her failure and that of the DNC screwed things up. I'm mad at lots of people :)

I'm not mad at you, in particular, but I'm mad at the concept that we, on the left, are always chasing the 'perfect' candidate and allowing really shitty people to win when a non-shitty person is available.

I've voted in every primary and off-year election since 2006, preferring the more progressive or dare I say socialist candidates in 2016 and 2020. Despite my choices not being the ones the rest of the county chose, I still voted for the democratic candidates in those elections. I would have liked to have a voice in 2024, but I wasn't given one and it pisses me off.

Despite that, I think there was a clear "better for US and better for the world" candidate, but she got a bunch of negative press from people and organizations who were either too stupid to recognize the best of bad choices, or were actively trying to sabotage her chances. I think that negative press caused some people to decline to vote for her that otherwise would have, and the margin in some states was thin. I think it very well could have changed the election results if people had said things like "I don't like her stance on X, but we should vote for her because she's clearly better on Y, Z, A, B, C and D than him."

I am NOT trying to say that the topics where people didn't approve of her stances were not valid, or that they are not important. I would love to have the Epstein files released, and I would love for the US to support Gaza, and I would love for us to figure out how to support minorities, trans people, and all sorts of other disadvantages. I'm a caricature of the bleeding-heart-liberal and will fight for other peoples' rights harder than I fight for my own. I happen to be privileged in race, gender and birth social status, but I recognize it, and that it is a fleeting privilege if I don't help others retain theirs.

What I am trying to say is that when every political discussion turns into 'but genocide' or 'release the files', we stifle the ability to discuss things that are also important. Specifically those two examples because 'but genocide' was used during the election to great effect and 'but epstein files' is currently being thrown around here so often it feels like either just a meme or an intentional distraction. You did this exact thing when you took my whole response and turned it into 'genocide isn't as bad as facism?'

Thanks for writing more than a witty one-liner this time.

No, I don't. They are both horrible. Way to pick a single issue -- which I'm sure is important to you -- and make it the whole thing, but many attacks were lobbed at Kamala, from her gender, race, her history against crime, to her unwillingness to support Palestine.

In the context of USA politics, but also what seems to be the whole world's fall into chaos, we keep choosing the worst options instead of the not perfect ones.

I'm pro-Palestine. I would love for my country to support Gaza, but, and sorry for shouting here:

IN WHAT FUCKING WORLD DOES DONALD TRUMP RESPECT PALESTINIANS MORE THAN KAMALA. IN WHAT FUCKING WORLD DO YOU SEE HIM MAKING THINGS BETTER THAN SHE COULD HAVE.

This is the absolute worst take. She could have been terrible for Gaza, but we already knew he would be. In the context of the US election, there's no case for refusing to vote for Kamala over trump if you're hung up on this issue. You are exactly the problem I'm mad about. Do you not understand how tearing her down hurt everyone? How continuing to focus on this one issue to the detriment of all others prevents us from being able to actually talk about it because the children in the room get elected?

Yes, complain about the US stance, and I'm with you. Publicly deride the better option because it's not perfect and you have people sit out the election because of both sides and you will see that the worst parts of humanity win instead.

You're just as bad as the Epstein Files meme folks. Yes, it's an important issue, but making it the ONLY issue prevents conversation on any other topic. And to hold off the Epstein people: We already know who is in the files, we don't NEED the confirmation. The fact they won't release them implicates the people in power. You think another felony conviction is going to stop him/them?

The time to vet US politicians is in a primary... again, we didn't get one this time. When the time comes to choose who is better or worse for yourself or the world, though, you vote for the least bad option.

And I think perhaps the end result is that yes, I think fascism is worse than genocide because I think it's a precursor. The US is aiding a genocidal country right now (for reasons that I don't understand, there seems to be a ton of pro-Israel sentiment), but is not the acting force there, that's Israel. Right now, on my land, the US is trying to move towards genocidal tendencies against it's own people: see ICE deportations and hostility. This is a direct result of choosing trump over basically anyone else.

Editing to add: I think this a bait I keep falling for. Anyone responding to a serious post with a single sentence is a troll. I'm hoping to inform others who might feel like zark but didn't post what they did rather than discuss with them.