Someone on Mastodon was saying that whether you consider AI coding an advantage completely depends on whether you think of prompting the AI and verifying its output as “work.” If that’s work to you, the AI offers no benefit. If it’s not, then you may think you’ve freed up a bunch of time and energy.

The problem for me, then, is that I enjoy writing code. I do not enjoy telling other people what to do or reviewing their code. So AI is a valueless proposition to me because I like my job and am good at it.

Not an answer, and I won’t get a lot of upvotes for saying this, but if your plan for saving the world is for people to change their behavior en masse, you’ve already lost. And we need population-level change in order to have a meaningful impact.

The way we get people off meat is by making the alternatives more (or equally) tasty, convenient, familiar, and affordable. The day we do that, the war is won. There will be some stragglers (of the “beef! murica!” variety) but not many.

We’ve made inroads. Indian food is delicious, way more popular in the West than when I was growing up, and vegetarian-inclined. Vegetarian burgers are more popular and varied than ever. New meat substitutes are being invented all the time. People are interested, but there’s not a well-lit path to vegetarianism for working-class folks just yet.

If you want to eat less meat, do it. But also, find some good meatless recipes and cook them for/with your friends. If they add those to their rotation and pass them along, that’s the kind of thing that can build toward change.

My high school music teacher went to a Dragonforce concert circa 2008. He said they were completely wasted, didn’t sound anything like the album, and barely knew where they were. Just an absolute waste of time. He got an autograph from one of them (must’ve paid for a VIP ticket or something) and they wrote “wish I didn’t have to meet you, asshole.”

He liked them a lot less after that

For sure, I wouldn’t say it’s unpleasant.

Jack Johnson. If you hear one of his songs in public just say “oh, Banana Pancakes” and move on with your life. Not a soul on earth will be able to correct you

Not OP but yes, if you can get through the dialogue with Kierkegaard the rest is pretty digestible. That said, you might get more out of it if you’ve got a basic foundation in existentialism and nihilism first. A lot of what makes absurdism interesting and important is its contrasts with other philosophies.

Microsoft Office: it’s not even good enough for international criminals anymore ™

I worked at a company that made software for multi-level marketing companies (legalized pyramid schemes). Some of our clients sold snake oil remedies and were always getting in trouble for claiming they could cure cancer. I liked my coworkers and the job itself, but I hated the nature of what we were supporting.

I don’t think you can separate one from the other.

The company was always getting screwed over by dishonest clients, but we never sued because it would be bad for our reputation. The financial pressure grew until we started acting like a much dumber business: taking bad deals, outsourcing to cheap overseas teams, forcing everyone to work crazy hours, doubling up on the “we all have to make sacrifices” kool-aid, the list goes on. I didn’t stick around for long.

I’d do it again if I had to, to keep food on the table, but that experience taught me there’s no “right way” to operate in a bad industry. Eventually you either assimilate or go out of business.

I use whatever line completion is built into JetBrains out of the box. Other than that, no AI whatsoever.

Only about 10% of my time at work is actually spent writing code. At least double that time is spent reading code, and the rest is documentation, coordination, and communication work that depends on precise understanding of the code I’m responsible for. If I let AI write code, maybe (doubtfully) that would save a little time out of the 10%, but it would cost me dearly in the other two categories. The code I write by hand is minimal, clear, and easy to understand, and I understand it better because I wrote it myself. I understand all the code around it, too.

If you ask me, AI code generation is based entirely on non-programmers’ incorrect understanding of what programming is.