devilsdata

I like /r/rust, /r/writing, and /r/sydney. I also like browsing by top of all posts for subreddits about things I don't know much about, like /r/sociology, or /r/meditation.

I don't think these are enough to make me want to stay on the site, because I can join the Rust Programming Language forum. I'm sure there is a similar analogue for the writing and Sydney subreddits.

Yeah my plan is to spend the next few months really thinking about what I need from Reddit, and trying to replace it with books.

I'll say it again, the day they block me from old.reddit.com, is the day I leave the site permanently.

I'm a senior software engineer and I don't identify with tech bro. Might be worth doing some soul searching as to why you're insecure about this.

Peace.

Sorry, but if the information exists elsewhere, why not find a better news source? Fox News, and any company derived from Newscorp/News Limited are bad enough that I would say more than half of their articles are entirely false.

Find the same article on AP news, or Reuters or something.

On the balance of probabilities, the CRISPR thing is a hack job. AI did not do it. It's likely the AI-assisted work of researchers white labeled as AI.

Do you just believe every bit of press release that you read? These companies have an enormous amount of pressure on them to make profit. They can and will lie to try and convince you that AI is better than it is.

Is there any evidence outside of these companies that AI is breaking new ground on literally anything? No. It can help a little with a lot of different types of work– none of it novel.

What do you mean when you say the "story for sharing data between processes isn't really solved"? My understanding of this is mostly academic because I don't personally mix languages all that often, but aren't there many established ways of communication between languages. You have IPC, unix sockets, FFI, protobufs, and other serialising/deserialisation formats. Not to mention the classic (but probably slightly overkill) move of spinning up a local HTTP server and using REST endpoints.

What useful things do LLMs "discover"?

The only part of fiction writing I've found AI to be particularly useful in is asking it questions like; "considering this story idea, what are the best settings in Europe?" "what would a cooper's workshop smell like?"

Other than that, it's a time waster.

LLMs exclusively hallucinate. That is the sole mechanism their reasoning is based on. The fact that they are ever correct is a happy coincidence.

You can reduce the likelihood of incorrectness by adding the real facts to the context, which is what LLMs do. But that in and of itself is not a guarantee that the LLM will be correct. Because its fundamental process of reasoning is probabilistic word-by-word hallucination.

But I don't use LLMs to summarise articles.

Absolutely agree. If a JS developer doesn't know Rust, Go, Zig, or something, then they probably aren't going to do a good job at maintaining critical infrastructure, even if it were written in JS.

Why are people writing "critical" infrastructure in JS anyway, it is the wrong tool for the job.

I don't understand your reasoning. Why should they quit git and Linux (and presumably all applications written in C) if they believe Rust is more secure than C?

Is all use of Rust "coerced" and "forced on everyone", or is there a way to write things in it that makes sense?

That's a good point. It was just observation, but it would be nice see a visual test.

I have ADHD and am not going to remember a lot about Judy. But I will write down the things that I know she likes in a note, and I'll occasionally ask Siri to list what Judy likes when I'd like to do something nice to her.

ADHD and memory problems suck :(

That's a solid recommendation, thanks. I also did journalism. So I can write succinctly, I just have to put effort in like you. Which is much more than I'm willing to put in after I just wrote a treatise on the human condition to send to the lead developer at 07:30 on Monday.

AI is incredible for consumption. Using it as an assistant for summarisation and learning I think is fine. But it should stay very far away from creation of anything.

I'm naturally verbose due to my ADHD. I'm trying to learn to be more succinct.

In the meantime, for business communication, I use AI to shorten my text, to make it more concise.

The AI in Siri is actually really good. I can ask it something like "what is Judy's favourite food?" and it will do a full search of the databases of all the default apps and find that info.

As for the other AI features such as autocomplete, memoji, notification summaries... I'm really not a big fan at all.

Yeah I'm running macOS 15 until it becomes unsupported, then I'm going to try Debian or Fedora.

The blur effect from liquid glass slightly, but noticeably, lowers the frame rate on iOS 27, as well. By turning on "Reduce Transparency" it became a bit smoother, more like iOS 18 was. God I miss iOS 18.

I live 20 minutes metro ride away from the best coffee shop the entire Asia Pacific (awarded 2026), Only Coffee Project in Crows Nest, Sydney. And it's really, really good. But that level of quality is not particularly unique here.

Sydney and Melbourne are known to have the best coffee in the world on average. Italian immigrants came over and took what the Italians started and perfected it. McDonald's McCafe was conceptualised and started in Melbourne in 1993, because of Melbourne's strong coffee scene. Australia is the only country that Starbucks failed in, because the coffee here is already too good.

Having said all of this, I still think that about 2/3 of coffee being made by baristas in Sydney is undrinkable. If the beans aren't poor quality or stored incorrectly, the barista will use tap water that is too hard or soft, grind the beans on the wrong setting, over or underextract, overheat the milk until it denatures, not wipe out the previous grind from the portafilter (leading to an ugly, bitter flavour), and do many other little things that ruin the coffee.

I can literally walk into most coffee shops and hear the milk frother "screaming" as the proteins are being denatured. This is the coffee snob capital of the world, and most people still drink terrible coffee without giving it a second thought.

The average consumer doesn't have enough knowledge to have good taste. It's tragic. It sucks. We would have a better world if people cared just a tiny bit more about the things they consume. But they don't, because there isn't enough time and energy in their life to dedicate to truly looking into something.

And this is why I think that there will unfortunately be a demand for AI art. I don't want this to be the case. I hate it. I hope you do too. I hope we all demand higher standards from the art, culture, and goods that we consume.

But as long as people drink bad coffee, they'll read AI slop and recommend it to their friends. It's just how it is.

I actually no joke had the idea of making this in Rust. Basically store snapshots of the history alongside an eventlog (binary file containing compressed chronological input events).

But the problem with this is that someone could write an agent to mimic a human. And if there is a financial incentive to prove that you're not AI, which there always will be, it is inevitable.

I've considered learning to handwrite to write my first drafts like that. But then I could use an AI to generate realistic looking scans of handwriting.

I guess I could physically mail the originals to a third party verifier. That's what it may come down to for creatives.

You're fighting a losing battle advocating for public stewardship of anything on this website. The majority of people I've spoken with here are American, doing very well for themselves, and aspirational entrepreneurs.

They have no concept of how much cheaper medical care can be. They don't realise there is enough for everyone. They are blind to the fact that many other countries care for all of their people for a fraction of the price. The people on this forum live in a strange parallel reality where there is only enough to go around, even though that hasn't been true for a very long time.

So when people ask why they don't provide for the poor or fix their broken healthcare system by introducing single-payer healthcare, they'll speak to you like you're an idiot or a child. "Who is going to pay for that?", they ask, while paying an order of magnitude more for a GP visit than any other citizen of any other nation does. To them, you just have a poor understanding of economics.

If you can't be bothered writing it, why should I be bothered reading it?

Agreed. I've had a lot of this kind of attitude lately on this community. Might dip.

Is your point that busses aren't profitable? Why do they need to be?

I am sure if you did the math, having the occasional empty bus does not hold a candle to the amount of dead mass being dragged along in single-occupant cars.

The wear-and-tear on the road from the sheer volume of cars alone makes them cost more to us as a society than busses.

So regardless of density and passenger volume, busses are incredible.

The promise of tech has been that if we let it rip, we'll have a better democracy and living conditions for all. That promise has failed to materialise, for a variety of reasons. There is increased surveillance, enshittification, huge subscription fees, and upward pressure on climate change (directly linked to bitcoin mining then AI data centres). Then you get Musk lobbying against a city's plans to build a public transport network, so he can build an unsafe single-car tunnel for the rich.

I think people are quite justified in being skeptical of new technology, especially when the track record has shown that the promised societal benefits often never actually materialise. Worse, still, the money earned from selling the new technology is used to make conditions worse for most people. Big tech has a lot to answer for.

I'd be less skeptical if the values of tech capitalism shifted to become more pro-human. They really haven't, and they probably won't. So for now, consider me bearish on new tech.

I can not imagine that the cost of busses can ever approach the cost of the equivalent amount of cars (for the same amount of passengers).