Fully agree. I think Slop is getting polluted (especially here on Lemmy) to anything that even remotely touches AI. We’ve had AI for decades. We’ve had LLMs now for a while. Slop is something relatively new. For me, Slop is low-quality bullshit that is thrown out into the void for clicks and likes, a cheap alternative when a better solution exists.

I recently was given an excel document I had to convert, with about 50 columns on it. I had to build a regular import. Now, I could spend a few hours typing that in manually as a C# class, or a few hours coding up some script to scrape the headers into the type, or I could utilize a tool that I have that will spit it out for me into a class. I don’t consider this slop, I consider this the grain of truth that all the tech bros fixate their grand embellishments around. AI does have usages. It’s not nearly what they think it is, but it is there.

Personally, I don’t care. It’s a tool. It’s the same as when drag and drop GUI editors came around. Some people think it’s the worst thing ever created and others see it as a tool that removes boilerplate. I think using it in a project or as a maintainer is a personal decision.

What is interesting is how we praise open source maintainers for building (let’s remember) free software for us to use, but then the community is extremely quick to demonize them. It’s very easy to criticize, but I don’t see anyone stepping up to fix the list of issues themselves by hand either, to fork it and become the sole maintainer moving forward.

Maintaining open source is a thankless job, and they do it for free. They do not owe anyone anything, and their morals are their own. What was probably a side project years ago is now an entire operation, what was fun is probably now work, and yeah, if I was faced with the same dilemmas, I’d probably be looking for tools to relieve some stress too.

I agree. But also the more Linux support we can get the better. Makes Linux more legitimate by the day.

No more Storage Full warnings.

Is that a challenge?

Fun story, I know some of the engineers who worked on that exact Unity item. They were trying to make a very flexible billing system, so that it could be configured by business/marketing at a more personal level, and built it in a way that hopefully it would make it easier on users of Unity. For engineers here, think a purely config/DB driven way to bill, so if they wanted to say apply discounts or anything it would be a flip of an admin panel. It was a rules engine that you had any number of data points that you could use. From an engineering standpoint, it was a noble goal.

However, they handed it over to business, and yup, you guessed it, the MBAs and marketers saw it and immediately went to worst case scenarios. Engineers had no idea it’d be used that way. Installation was one of many metrics that billing could be tied to but it was never designed to. It didn’t matter. The rest of the story is known. Those in charge took something that was meant to ease things for small developers and decided to use it against them. Unity lost all credibility, and my friends, the ones who helped build it, were all laid off.

Moral of the story. If you’re an engineer, never go above and beyond. Never build more than what you are required to. You may have the best intentions, but there are people who will only see the worst ways to use what you build.

Having traveled there myself, I’m so freaking jealous. It’s absolute insanity that us American’s have the gall to say we’re the “best country on earth” but can’t even move our citizens around efficiently. I’ve heard all of the excuses. It’s too expensive, we’re not close together, we’re too big, americans don’t like taking the train. All horseshit. Other larger countries have done it, others have changed their culture, it’s absolutely stupid that we haven’t done it.

It all boils down to one singular fact in my years of advocacy. Car/oil companies do not want Americans discovering that they are wasting their lives and money behind the wheel of cars, because they have never been as profitable as they are now.

I think they’re point is that curl is great but then you have to have a way to render it to know if it’s correct. With apis you can use jq, but yeah a dump of html isn’t really useful to humans

Anything to avoid building reliable clean and functional public transit.

Seriously we already have a futuristic form of transportation that can move you from one end of the city to the other in a reliable way, that does not involve traffic or anything on the surface. It’s called the Subway. You build it once and it’s pretty much good forever.

I have seen so many techbros try to “solve transportation”, and every idea always fails in comparison to building a train line.

Go ahead, you can go use the “futuristic” hyperloop in Vegas right now. You wait 20 minutes to get into a car which takes 20 minutes to get about 6 blocks ahead.

I have the 6, and it’s well worth it, I’d assume the 3 or 4 will be quite the upgrade from a dumb phone

Neat, didn’t know about theirs!

Every developer just died thinking about the maintenance

Speedtest hasn’t been trustworthy for a while. Okla bought them and immediately started selling to ISPs nodes that they could install (probably just a container or something) that would sit as a “local” speedtest node, so you were testing your connection to the ISP, not testing your actual internet connection. (i.e. giving you the best possible results and what your ISP wanted you to believe).

Fast.com is slightly better in that Netflix spun it up to test your connection to their servers. So it’s independent of ISPs - but then they built high speed optic lines to most ISPs so it’s more like the second-best possible speed.

Accenture will be the same or worse. I don’t trust it for speedtests anymore.

That’s fair. A huge difference is how much money is behind the crazy hype machine, and how desperate they are to keep the hype going. Most actual tech people I know, work with, and are connected with in the field have normalized on tech usage. Knowing when to use it and when not to use it. It’s only the tech bros at the top who are still like “Yeah bro it’s totally going to get rid of labor bro we’re all gonna have androids who do all the work bro just trust me just 200 billion more dollars bro I promise”

Exactly. It should all be treated as another tool in the toolbelt. To me, it reminds me of when GUI editors came along in IDEs like Visual Studio. It honestly feels the same. Tech CEOs immediately clamor to say that tech jobs are dead, the market for engineers dips. Engineers freak out and refuse to learn the technology while others learn what it is. Those who learn and use it as a tool elevate themselves and move faster. There is a non-trivial group of people who refuse to use the GUI tools on principal. Eventually the CEOs realize they made a mistake, and then more work comes in faster than ever before. Eventually over the years/decades everyone starts using the tech as a tool.

It’s the same with an AI. Like it’s following the exact same pattern to a T. CEOs starting to realize that it’s just a tool that can be used, but it needs people at the helm to know how to use it. Devs are split, some it’s accelerating their work if they know what it’s doing, others see a useless boondoggle and refuse to use it but are probably only hurting themselves because every interview is asking “are you using AI”. I’d say we’re finally starting to normalize on it’s usage as a tool.

Which i s why i really think it’s a leap to assume that hiring a single engineer means they are trying to modify the kernel. I really doubt any modifications would make it to the kernel for anti cheat. Server side or something in user space is very likely what they’ll be doing

That would all depend on both the Linux kernel accepting that to the upstream (which, let’s remember crowdstrike), and each distro not removing it. I sincerely doubt that is what this role is. This role is much more likely how to make anti cheat work in linux somehow without kernel access.

Which also doesn’t make sense to me, we already have a few anti-cheats on Linux

Look, I don’t enjoy EA, they’ve killed several of my franchises, but what we shouldn’t do is demonize them for attempting to migrate to Linux. If a huge gaming company is taking Linux seriously it’s something we should celebrate. It means we’re making an impact

Yeah this stuff was never impossible before, it’s just easy to digest now.

It definitely had me trust them for way too long. To be fair, I trusted the original CEOs and company though, who from what I can tell were decent enough people.