gspencley

autism warning

As most people understand the word "dolphin", Orcas are not technically dolphins though they belong to the same family.

I've heard the claim that Orcas are a species of porpoise, like dolphins, but I can't even corroborate that since Wikipedia is claiming that porpoises are distinct from dolphins.

The clearest explanation I've been able to find comes from this article: https://nextlevelsailing.com/relationship-between-orca-kille...

> The classification of orcas as dolphins stems from their scientific categorization. Both orcas and dolphins fall under the family Delphinidae, which encompasses oceanic dolphins. Despite their formidable size and fearsome reputation, orcas share more in common with their smaller dolphin relatives than with other whale species.

So Orcas and dolphins are both categorized in the family Delphinidae which is colloquially referred to as the "Oceanic Dolphins" so, depending on what you mean, yes Orcas are technically dolphins but then ... so are dolphins. Meaning that "dolphin" and "delphinidae" refer to two distinct things even though all dolphins are delphinidae and the colloquial term for "delphinidae" is "oceanic dolphin." But it's important to recognize that the oceanic dolphins is a pretty wide family that includes several species that have the word "whale" in their name, such as belugas and narwhals, in addition to orcas.

I disagree. In a lot of cases text will be clickable, but will also contain content that you want to copy/paste into Wikipedia or a search engine etc. Think annotations (click on this text for more information) or headers/titles that are a proper noun that references something public... like a person's name or a place or a type of object or something.

I don't think that's an "exception." I think that's common enough to make me ask: "please don't make that text not selectable ever."

> but I feel like software engineering has lost much of its craftsmanship

It's not just software. I'm very pro-business / pro-capitalism but I will happily agree that an omnipresent business pressure is to reduce costs and get products and services to market rapidly.

My wife and I bought an antique store this year, and we're converting it into a small live theatre with a magic (stage magic) retail store up front. We are pouring our hearts and soul into this and are trying to bring a high degree of craftsmanship into the venture. We're taking queues from Walt Disney World and want you to feel like you've stepped into a completely different world when you step inside our doors.

Yet now that we're running out of money and things have taken way longer than we had estimated, we have to cut scope. We have to start thinking "What needs to be done today in order for us to open" vs "What can we defer and iterate on and do later?" What are the "nice to haves" and what are the "must haves."

That's business and you see enshitification in all industries. We can see this in everything from clothing to furniture to product packaging. The incentive is always to try and deliver things to market faster and cheaper and this necessitates making cuts. Craftsmanship is a luxury that we all pine for. And there are small mom & pop shops (us included) that try to deliver craftsmanship. But the market for high-cost products with high-craftsmanship is niche.

Software is largely targeting the mass market just like clothing and furniture - other examples where you've seen "high craftsmanship" in the past but these days we get mass produced disposable garbage. It's tempting to say "the good old days" but people had a lot less and that high-craftsmanship furniture was often passed down from one generation to another because it's not like people could typically afford that stuff. It was that people had to save, DIY more, own less and count on hand-me-downs.

It's not so much double the design work, it's double the code maintenance.

I'm of two minds on this. I agree with your complaint that "mobile first" (or just responsiveness in general) has tended to reduce the pleasantness of the Desktop experience. As a web application developer, the idea of having to maintain two separate codebases - one for mobile and one for desktop - is a big "no thank-you." So responsiveness tends to win on maintenance overhead.

> but suggesting that these new technologies are not driving business innovation

How did you take that away from my post?

AI can provide genuine value and also be a hype train. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive.

I put "mobile revolution" in quotes because I was referring to what it was being called at the time, in the context of describing how said "revolution" was affecting me at a time when I had no interest in mobile computing or features. I was relating to the parent who has little to no interest in AI features and wishes that companies would stop trying to "force" it on them.

At no point did I even come close to suggesting that there is no value or innovation to be found there. My last paragraph even directly stated the opposite.

Are you trolling?

AI is just the current incarnation of the hype train cycle.

I've never been a big fan of smart phones and I remember in the early 2010s the "mobile revolution" was in full tilt and it even impacted the Linux experience. I ended up switching from Ubuntu to Mint because they went all in on "mobile + touch-screens are the future!" and released this god awful UI update that was reminiscent of Windows 8.

We need business to drive innovation ... but there is bad with the good (and vice versa - we shouldn't forget that either). When something gets "hot" the business world will always go all in on the trend and "force" it down everyone's throats. It's driven partly by fear: "If I don't offer this to my customers, my competitors will and I will fail." The rest is the normal pursuit of profit, which isn't a bad thing IMO but it means there's a lot of: "There's a pie here and if we don't get our slice someone else will."

How is that a refutation?

If I want to understand any position I would look for first sources. Say I want to understand why Russian invaded Ukraine, I would seek out Russian sources. When I try to understand the Palestinian position, I seek out Palestinian sources.

The beautiful thing about intellectual honesty and openness is that you don't have to agree with any position. You can expose yourself to things that deeply conflict with your personal values and walk away with a deeper understanding of why you value what you value, and how to refute ideas that you strongly disagree with.

To dismiss a source because it is Israeli ironically gives fuel to the antisemitism charge. You're saying that the very reason to dismiss it, to not even bother entertaining its arguments is because it is Israeli and no other reason. Beyond that, you are even arguing that any claims of prejudice can be dismissed outright on the basis of one thing that one Israeli Minster once said [allegedly].

That is the very definition of prejudice.

There's a content creator I used to follow who said her outlook on social media changed the day she discovered that her 11 year-old nephew was an "edge-lord" on Twitter who was trolling at such a sophisticated level that it caused her to rethink every post that had ever provoked an emotional reaction.

Apparently he came across as articulate enough that she couldn't tell the difference between his posts and that of any random adult spewing their political BS.

This predated ChatGPT so just imagine how much trouble a young troll could get up to with a bit of LLM word polishing.

20 years ago it was common for people to point out that the beautiful woman their friend was chatting up is probably some 40 year-old dude in his mom's basement. These days we should consider that the person making us angry in a post could be a bot or it could be some teenager just trying to stir shit up for the lulz.

Dead Internet theory might be not be literally true, but there's certainly a lot of noise vs signal.

> Do you have a right to force the other person to keep your conversation private?

It depends. If you're speaking to a doctor or a lawyer, yes, by law they are bound to keep your conversation strictly confidential except in some very narrow circumstances.

But it goes beyond those two examples. If I have an NDA with the person I am speaking with on the other end of the line, yes I have the "right" to "force" the other person to keep our conversation private given that we have a contractual agreement to do so.

As far as OpenAI goes, I'm of the opinion that OpenAI - as well as most other businesses - have the right to set the terms by which they sell or offer services to the public. That means if they wanted a policy of "all chats are public" that would be within their right to impose as far as I'm concerned. It's their creation. Their business. I don't believe people are entitled to dictate terms to them, legal restrictions notwithstanding.

But in so far as they promise that chats are private, that becomes a contract at the time of transaction. If you give them money (consideration) with the impression that your chats with their LLM are private because they communicated that, then they are now contractually bound to honour the terms of that transaction. The terms that they subjected themselves to when either advertising their services or in the form of a EULA and/or TOS presented at the time of transaction.

> Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit.

That is physically impossible. Again, it's a "me problem", I'm not trying to say that the world needs to accommodate my unique personality, but if other people are within speaking distance of me with no partition, they cannot "melt away."

When I was younger, discovering my mysophonia and autism, my mother would used to say things to me like "just tune out the noise." If only! I mean, how do I develop that super-power? Please, it would change my life so much for the better. I don't know what that means.

The thing that practically defines mysophonia is an inability to do that with trigger sounds.

But for me it's not just noise. I can't relax in the presence of other people. I guess it could be an extreme form of social anxiety. But it's not so much that I feel fear or anxious ... it's that I am hyper-alert when other people are around me. If I can see someone out of the corner of my eye, my brain can't go "just ignore them." It's not wired that way.

One of my trigger sounds, speaking of mysophonia, is actually people talking. I don't like listening to the sound of people speaking amongst each other. I don't know anyone else that has that particular trigger sound. But if I'm minding my own business somewhere and suddenly I hear people having a conversation ... it can send me into an autistic meltdown.

And yeah, you can put on noise cancelling headphones in public. Which I do when I'm in those situations. If it was just the noise alone then it would be a problem that is not insurmountable. Though it would still be a problem.

But reading a book? Impossible for me when there is even a single other person in the room.

Again, it's a me problem. I'm not saying the world should change for me. All I'm saying is please don't take away my car. It's the only thing that enables me to be at all mobile.

From an efficiency point of view public transportation makes a lot of sense.

From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it. I do look forward to travelling to the Netherlands one day and I will enthusiastically use public transit there just as a personal experiment to see if my experience differs enough from the subway transit in Montreal or Toronto that gave me nightmares and has me thinking every time I travel there: "Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this."

The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers. I don't see myself ever not being a driver. I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.

It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.

> Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it

Citation required.

Money is an intermediary form of exchange. It arises organically because if, for example, you are a dairy farmer, there is no practical way for you to a) save enough milk to barter for a house (not only is it perishable but where do you store it all? Especially before refrigeration) and b) find someone with a house they want to trade for that much milk.

Money is just a commodity and in the absence of fiat currency it arises organically. People tend to seek intermediary forms of exchange that are non-perishable, easily divisible, transportable and difficult to forge/counterfeit because it is a necessity of life.

You simply cannot practically barter everything you'd ever want to trade. So instead we humans trade what we produce for something we can stash away and trade later more easily.

Money is not an invention to compel action. It is a natural product of trade that arises because most people, when they're not too busy spouting ideological drivel on Internet forums, have common sense.

What a weird straw-man. I said that, on an individual by individual basis, people get to decide what criteria are important to them and can discriminate (or not) accordingly. That if one entity doesn't want to work with another, there are lots of other permutations that an environment of liberty allows for. As opposed to a government mandated system where everyone is forced into the same criteria under threat of penalty.

I did not say, or even suggest, that the absence of a social credit system somehow results in everyone wanting to do business with you under any circumstance, and that you can opt out of the criteria that someone else uses to decide if they want to associate with you.

I really cannot understand how you were able to twist the meaning of what I had written so dramatically. Or are you just trolling?

You misinterpreted my language. What I meant, for clarity, was "individual entities." Be that individual persons or individual businesses.

It's the difference between one party wanting to distance themselves from you, due to their own "individual" reasons, or all of society by decree under penalty of law.

> The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing. We pretend our algorithmic reputation scores are just “user experience features.” At least Beijing admits they're gamifying human behavior.

Um no. That is not the only difference by a LONG SHOT.

If I want to evaluate whether or not I want to involve myself with you, in any capacity, then that negotiation is between you and me. I can ask for references. I can ask for a credit check. I can go pay for a police background check. I can read public review sites. Or, I might decide that because you listen to country & western music you're not a real person and I can't know you and leave the vetting at that.

Consequentially, however, that dealing impacts our relationship and none other. You might find other people who don't care about the same "social credit criteria" that I do and you might find yourself dealing with them instead.

That's kind of the beauty of this thing we call "freedom." Anyone gets to choose who they want to deal with (or not) and make their own individual choices. The "systems" they opt in are always opt in (or at least they should be).

The difference between a government "social credit" system and individuals (businesses or people) vetting other individuals based on their own chosen requirements is force.

A government system mandates this across society in a broad authoritarian sweep. Get on the bad side of "the party" and now you are a social pariah and will not have any luck finding anyone who wants to deal with you, country music lovers be damned, because it is forced upon everyone. A business has no choice but to apply "the" system because if they don't they get punished. It is not opt-in, it is a one-sized-fits-all mandated by force of law system that removes individual discretion and choice from the equation.

That's a LOT different than just "we're upfront about it."

Furthermore, while I appreciate when authoritarians are honest about their violations of basic human rights and freedoms, that doesn't suddenly make what they are doing OK. I don't want to deal with a thief who is honest about their thievery any more than I want to deal with one who tries to hide it.

Our CEO was boasting about new speech to text technology recently. They said something that I found extremely objectionable:

"I can speak a lot faster than I can type."

The fact that I found it objectionable doesn't mean that he said something untrue. For him and most others, it probably is true.

But for me, a keyboard warrior by trade for 30 years who has high functioning autism and crowded teeth and actually doesn't like talking, I can type WAY faster than I can speak aloud.

In spoken conversation, I am usually a man of few words. But sit me in front of a text prompt and I will TL;DR the fuck of you with a 5 page essay on a topic you probably don't really care about.

My point is that everyone has their own preferred method of communication, and most people like talking just to hear the sound of their own voices. A lot of people say they prefer interacting with a human at restaurants - I avoid going to restaurants because I don't like interacting with people and will DoorDash to my home instead. To asocial introverted keyboard warriors, it's sometimes difficult for us to relate to the baseline human experience.

Nothing to do with charge-backs as our bank was not providing payment processing for us. We ran a "free site" that made its income from referring subscription sign-ups to paid sites through their affiliate programs. We sold nothing direct to consumer. Our customer was other adult websites.

The banking services they terminated consisted of a single business checking account, business savings account and company credit card. That was it. That was what they deemed "too risky."

We learned from someone who used to work at Chase's compliance department that most big banks just have a flat-out ban on working with any customers that are involved in the industry in any capacity what-so-ever due to concerns over serious things like human trafficking. It was the fact that we were distributing [lawful and traceable to the producer] content that made them not want us as a client.

I don't think he was trying to imply that he did anything wrong. He was admitting the ignorance regarding how banks and banking work... plus acknowledging that a lot of readers will have had experiences that would make them think "Oh you young fool."

In 2022 I lost my business banking and had to shut down a business that I owned for 20 years because it was related to the adult entertainment industry and, despite being completely legal and aboveboard, a single wire transfer that got a little bit of scrutiny resulted in them asking questions about what we did and, knowing that I was doing absolutely nothing wrong, I answered all of their questions truthfully and completely. A few months later I was told that we "fell outside of their risk appetite", our accounts were being closed... and for two months we searched for any bank or credit union in Canada but none would take us.

A lot of industry insiders had that exact reaction: "Are you stupid? Did you not know?! You NEVER admit that you're in this industry you moron!" etc. We even had a very sympathetic branch manager suggest that we re-incorporate, re-brand and hide what we do (a front, in other words). I couldn't do that. And I mean, we had no issues for 20 years. 10 of which were banking as a corporation (was personal accounts before that since we ran it as a proprietorship) and I thought that being in Canada we were pretty progressive. No one I told on a personal or professional level had ever cared. So why would the banks? We were lawful so why should they care?

> Is it possible to stay better than AI? Maybe for some people. Not for the average person.

I know we're talking broadly across all industries but I can only speak to what I know and am able to observe directly.

My opinion of the average software developer with a few years experience is not very high. Yet now that we have non-coders shipping features written with LLMs, and we're starting to observe the fallout from that, I'm getting closer to saying than an entry level coder is far better than an LLM (depending on how we evaluate "better").

There are also a lot of hidden costs associated with LLMs. For example, I'm spending a lot more time reviewing PRs than I used to. And we're taking a lot more time doing rework than we were before.

We can't yet say that LLMs have caused an increase in regressions, since we've been racing towards a major new version release, and so people are rushing in general and that skews the numbers. Over time, however, we'll have data on rate of bugs introduced before the widespread company adoption of LLMs vs after, controlled for crunch times as well.

If the average software developer only spends an average of 20% of their time actually writing code, then even if an LLM can offer an optimistic 50% productivity increase, then we're only optimizing for 10% best case scenario.

I think there is a lot of marketing-hype-driven ideology around "AI" right now that is leading a lot of people to buy into some of the overstated claims. This ideology may have companies genuinely slowing down their hiring of entry-levels at the moment, since some people are saying that an LLM is like having an incompetent intern. The business thinks "If you need to babysit a junior and you need to babysit an LLM, then why pay for the junior?" And we still need better data to determine if, on average, what a company pays for a junior is truly more expensive than delegating the work to an LLM + taking on the maintenance and review overhead. We don't have the answers yet. My personal bias has me thinking that on average a junior will provide higher returns although not necessarily immediately. The benefit of a junior is that they learn from mistakes and can adapt more readily to specific business requirements.

This is not to say that LLMs aren't valuable. I think the trade-off for entry-levels is that I would have killed to have something like Cursor when I was a a pre-teen teaching myself to code in the 90s. When you want to build something complicated and don't even know where to start, and LLM can get you some scaffolding and show you a basic strategy that you can build on. Then you go fix bugs and poke around and break stuff.. it's a great learning tool. So I expect that, over time, the talent of entry-levels will probably increase. In the short term, we need to get through this AI bubble and stabilize. Companies will learn where LLMs save costs and where they can still benefit from less-experienced coders. It will just take a bit of time.

Yes. I have checked many checkboxes that say "Verify You Are a Human" and they have always confirmed that I am.

In fairness, however, my daughters ask me that question all the time and it is possible that the verification checkboxes are lying to me as part of some grand conspiracy to make me think I am a human when I am not.

The thing about automated systems is that they typically cover the happy paths, and leave people who fall outside of those happy paths extremely frustrated.

Take automated phone menu systems, for example.

"If you are calling about X, press 1

If you are calling about Y, press 2

If you are calling about Z, press 3"

customers presses 0 because they are calling about none-of-the-above and wants to talk to a human

"I'm sorry. I don't recognize that menu option. To hear the options again, please press 9."

Oh just today, to give another example of how automation can seriously frustrate end users, I'm trying to get a Square POS account approved for my new business. Their automated verification system sent me a form requesting more information about my business because certain information "could not be verified." One of the questions on the form was asking me to explain a discrepancy between the legal business name I typed in when setting up the account and the business name as it appears on the articles of incorporation that I submitted. The discrepancy in question: white-space and capitalization. No human being would read the two strings as distinct or recognize any discrepancy. Only software does that.

My favourite code smell that LLMs love to introduce is redundant code comments.

// assign "bar" to foo

const foo = "bar";

They love to do that shit. I know you can prompt it not to. But the amount of PRs I'm reviewing these days that have those types of comments is insane.

I went through the parents, looking for a claim somewhere that AI was "useless." I couldn't find it.

Yes there are lots of skeptics amongst programmers when it comes to AI. I was one myself (and still am depending on what we're talking about). My skepticism was rooted in the fact that AI is trained on human-generated output. Most human written code is not very good, and so AI is going to produce not very good code by design because that's what it was trained on.

Then you add to that the context problem. AI is not very good at understanding your business goals, or the nuanced intricacies of your problem domain.

All of this pointed to the fact, very early on, that AI would not be a good tool to replace programmers. And THAT'S the crux of why so many programmers pushed back. Because the hype was claiming that automation was coming for engineering jobs.

I have started to use LLMs regularly for a variety of tasks. Including some with engineering. But I always end up spending a lot of time refactoring what LLMs produce for me, code-wise. And much of the time I find that I"m still learning what the LLMs can do for me that truly saves me time, vs what would have been faster to just write myself in the first place.

LLMs are not useless. But if only 20% of a programmer's time is actually spent writing code on average then even if you can net a 50% increase in coding productivity... you're only netting a 10% overall productivity optimization for an engineer BEST CASE SCENARIO.

And that's not "useless" but compared to the hype and bullshit coming out of the mouths of CEOs, it's as good as useless. It's as good as the MIT study finding that only 5% of generative AI projects have netted ANY measurable returns for the business.

> But I flat out don't believe the "piracy doesn't lead to lost sales" shtick, of course it does.

I'm not as certain as you are. Correlation does not imply causation, but media sales have trended upwards in the age of piracy which leads to some interesting hypotheses.

A few years ago Shirley Manson (lead singer of the 90s band Garbage) accused YouTube of making its fortune off the backs of content creators - basically charging the entire enterprise as being one big exercise in copyright infringement. And yet the music industry, as well as Hollywood, seem to be doing better and better each year in terms of dollars made. Some of the distribution models have changed - broadcast and cable television are pretty dead in the water, but the entertainment industries in general seem to be doing better than ever. And yeah lots of individual artists are still getting raw deals from Spotify and labels etc. as they always have. But industry-wise, in terms of dollar amounts, it seems there's more money to be made than ever before from creating and selling entertainment.

The statement you made that I absolutely agree with is that it's hard to get real world data on this. An individual who is able to get free access to something may be unlikely to ever pay for that same thing.But the answer to the question: "Does piracy hurt the industry's bottom line, or help it on the whole?" is a very difficult question to answer. And we have to consider the even harder stuff to measure. Things like: is a teenager who pirates recorded media more or less likely to buy merch and concert tickets? More or less likely to buy a special edition package with tangible collector items?

At the end of the day, I have no clue.

I also offer all of this being very pro-capitalism and pro-intellectual-property. I don't condone piracy. But if we're just looking at raw data and trying to form our hypothesis, we have to start with the fact that the raw data points to upwards trends on the whole.

Oh don't get me wrong. I'm sure that an LLM can write a decent test that doesn't have the problems I described. The problem is that LLMs are making a preexisting problem much, MUCH worse.

That problem statement is:

- Not all tests add value

- Some tests can even create dis-value (ex: slow to run, thus increasing CI bills for the business without actually testing anything important)

- Few developers understand what good automated testing looks like

- Developers are incentivized to write tests just to satisfy code coverage metrics

- Therefore writing tests is a chore and an afterthought

- So they reach for an LLM because it solves what they perceive as a problem

- The tests run and pass, and they are completely oblivious to the anti-patterns just introduced and the problems those will create over time

- The LLMs are generating hundreds, if not thousands, of these problems

So yeah, the problem is 100% the developers who don't understand how to evaluate the output of a tool that they are using.

But unlike functional code, these tests are - in many cases - arguably creating disvalue for the business. At least the functional code is a) more likely to be reviewed and code quality problems addressed and b) even if not, it's still providing features for the end user and thus adding some value.

> making tests

What I'm about to discuss is about me, not you. I have no idea what kind of systems you build, what your codebase looks like, use case, business requirements etc. etc. etc. So it is possible writing tests is a great application for LLMs for you.

In my day to day work... I wish that developers where I work would stop using LLMs to write tests.

The most typical problem with LLM-generated tests on the codebase where I work is that the test code is almost extremely tightly coupled to the implementation code. Heavy use of test spies is a common anti-pattern. The result is a test suite that is testing implementation details, rather than "user-facing" behaviour (user could be a code-level consumer of the thing you are testing).

The problem with that type of a test is that is a fragile test. One of the key benefits of automated tests is that they give you a safety net to refactor implementation to your heart's content without fear of having broken something. If you change an implementation detail, and the "user-facing" behaviour does not change, your tests should pass. When tests are tightly coupled to implementation, they will fail and now your tests, in the worst of cases, might actually be creating negative value for you ... since you every code change now requires you to keep tests up to date even when what you actually care about testing "is this thing working correctly?" hasn't changed.

The root of this problem isn't even the LLM, it's just that the LLM makes it a million times worse. Developers often feel like writing tests are a menial chore that needs to be done after the fact to satisfy code coverage policy. Few developers, at many organizations, have ever truly worked TDD or learned testing best practices, how to write easy to test implementation code etc.

Yeah I'm not an AI naysayer but was pretty skeptical that AI could actually do anything for my workflow.

Tedious, repetitive stuff that you'd typically write a throwaway script for is one good use case for AI for me. This doesn't come up very often for me, however. But this morning I needed to update a bunch of import statements in TypeScript files to use relative paths instead of referencing a library name and Cursor did that for me quickly and easily without me needing to write a script.

I've also found that if you're unsure how to solve a problem within an existing codebase, or you're about to go down a rabbit hole of studying documentation to figure out how to wire something up, an LLM can get you up and running with code examples a bit quicker.

But if I already know, high level, how I'm going to solve something then the whole "needing to review the AI code" part of the workflow more than eats up any time savings. And the parallelism thing is just a ton of context shifting to me. Each time I need to go back to an agent to review what it did, it takes me away from the deep focus on a domain problem that I was focused on, and there's a good 20 - 30 minutes of productivity lost by switching back and forth between just two tasks.

I replied to someone else with the same response. I'll repeat it here. The point of my reply wasn't to do with MFA codes, specifically, but the fact that MALWARE can take screenshots in order to harvest things, such as MFA codes or anything else. Preventing screenshots is likely, in my opinion, a defence against malware harvesting anything that way. Your online banking can present a lot of sensitive information visually that could be used for things like identity theft etc.

And yes, there are other ways that malware can harvest information and if your device has been root-kitted you're screwed no matter what. But the fact that there are 100 ways to attack you doesn't mean the banks don't see value in trying to prevent 50 of them.

You're laser focusing on MFA sniffing, specifically. The point is that malware can take screenshots to harvest information. Your banking information has a ton of sensitive information about you that could be used for a variety of different purposes, such as for identity theft. My point was that making it impossible to take screenshots is trying to protect against the possibility that there is malware harvesting anything through screenshots.

I have yet to move into the woods but, given my current levels of burnout, I think such a proposition is highly underrated. What's wrong with moving into the woods?

Wait, if everyone moves into the woods there will be no more woods that offer seclusion. Yeah moving into the woods is awful! I hope she doesn't burn out!