Every Discord user is already in their "ecosystem". Even if you use a third party client, every single message you send is available to them to scan/sell to advertisers or cops with zero barriers whatsoever.

The only benefit of a third party client (besides UX enhancements and customization) is that Discord can't execute malware/spyware natively on your PC. This is something they will inevitably do in the future in an effort to chase endless growth, but afaik it's not happening today. They make enough money from the data they harvest from your chats, at least for now.

Portuguese, not Spanish (but close enough lol). I wonder if it's a wayward bot from Bolsonaro's bot farm? He probably just forgot to turn one off when he fled to the US.

Monopolies got us to this point. Another monopoly isn't going to save us.

The solution is politics, regulations, and enforcement. These companies are breaking laws, and have even been found to do so in court (see how many times Google has been found to be a monopoly, for example). The problem is spineless and/or corrupt judges and politicians not doing anything about it.

But just a few weeks ago, MAGA seemed unstoppable, and today it's completely dead. There are still corrupt dems in power though, and they're going to try to steer us towards the same do-nothing equilibrium of before, so we gotta keep the pressure up. This is a great time to write to your elected officials, especially the ones who weren't up for reelection this cycle.

The fishy part for me is that they're both from Taiwan, and they're both in charge of companies that are some of the biggest customers of TSMC, Taiwan's biggest chip fab that practically has a worldwide monopoly on high-end chip manufacturing. There's also the national security angle here, with TSMC probably being the only reason China hasn't invaded, as the entire world would have something to say about it.

Idk, there's a lot of fertile ground for conspiracy theories under these Taiwanese billionaires.

99% of new Rust projects today are vibe coded, so probably yeah

I guess AMD didn't get the memo that fascism isn't cool anymore

French government is desperately in need of cash, so the tech illiterate politicians ask Cat, I Farted® for help and it gives them this.

How about an advertising tax? Every company serving ads through the internet (aka platforms, particularly the exploitive ones) need to pay up. That's Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc.

Conan and vcpkg are the two big ones I'm familiar with, but some projects use CMake FetchContent (with github acting as the CDN/registry), and depending on your requirements you can also just use system package managers on Linux, maybe Homebrew or Nix/Guix, or more niche ones like Spack. I've seen projects packaged using self hosted Pacman registries, and that works surprisingly well.

So you're saying PhotoCraft is okay because it counts as a clean room reimplementation of Photoshop, yet you're not commenting on whether LLM-generated code is tainted by the training data, and thus can never be considered "clean" for the purposes of clean rooming?

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of clean rooming has always been that the engineer can't have specific knowledge of the thing he's reimplementing. For example, those lawyers in that room can't describe a Microsoft product to an ex-Microsoft engineer, because that engineer has seen Microsoft's code base and may use that knowledge to inform their design. Likewise, you can't give the engineer a copy of, say, Microsoft Office's source code to use as a reference.

Yet an LLM trained on Microsoft Office's code base being used to reimplement Microsoft Office counts as a clean room reimplementation? It seems to me like the benefit of the doubt in that situation should go to Microsoft, and the engineer is the one responsible for proving they didn't use the part of the LLM trained on Microsoft code...which is impossible.

...although tbf Photoshop isn't open source, so its not obvious how much of its code exists in Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. Maybe the code leaked in the past, or maybe Adobe engineers who use Claude inadvertently shared company code, and that ended up in the training data.

(Also, for the record, fuck Microsoft and Adobe)

AI clean rooming

The only way "AI clean rooming" is possible is if the model was trained with verifiably clean room code. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc only exist because they took our work without paying or asking for permission. Anthropic has a profitable business because they're reselling the thing they built with our work. They built X with Y, but they didn't pay for Y. It's as clear an example of copyright infringement as possible.

So is your article about "clean rooming" specifically, or is that just a term you're misuing here informally to refer to LLM-powered reverse engineering in general?

I was never convinced by Meson's value proposition. From what I remember, it was always just meant to reinvent CMake with a different DSL. Like, literally just CMake but slightly different.

I understand CMake's DSL isn't the prettiest, but as far as improving ergonomics of a build system, minimizing the amount of build scripts you write is far more effective than changing the syntax. If you find yourself writing too much CMake in a project, then switching to a build system with a different design (eg Bazel, Scons, Waf, ...) is probably the better choice.

And of course, since Meson is just a CMake clone, it's always going to be compared to it, and its always going to have to compete on features. On that front, CMake has always been ahead, and I don't see that changing. So in the end, Meson is just another example of that one XKCD meme about standards.

It's not so much an LLM thing as it is a data/curation thing. Idk the specifics, but I do remember back when I used it, chatgpt occasionally presented me with multiple responses, and asked me to pick the one that I liked best. It's like how Facebook/tiktok/whatever curate your feed by examining how much time you spend eg looking at one post vs another. There's nothing inherent about LLMs that cause them to prioritize emdashes, thats all the result of extra massaging the operator has applied to the model.

This is also why I feel it's important to not focus on perceived "LLMisms" as a way to detect slop. It's extremely trivial to hide that, and the ones that don't are low hanging fruit.

This is all I can find: https://www.resetera.com/threads/psa-about-goodbye-volcano-high-and-its-writer.226357/

I wasn't sure if I hallucinated that, but good to see I was at least in the ballpark lol

There are already plenty of package manager options in the C++ world. Having an "official" one arguably only helps improve the onboarding experience, but overall it's a chokepoint for the entire ecosystem. There are rarely "one size fits all" solutions to a problem, and there certainly isn't one for a problem as complex as software builds and packaging.

Yes, CMake is crazy. And ugly. And inconvenient

How many years has it been since you last used CMake?

CMake suffers from some of the same perception issues as C++. A lot of the criticism usually boils down to the designers prioritizing backwards compatibility, a thing even critics would agree is a good thing. As an example, the OP shows a CMake and Meson snippet. The CMake one is 3 lines, the Meson one is 2. The extra line in the CMake sample is a version declaration for backwards compatibility, but the rest are identical.

If you look past your preconceived notions, you'll find that CMake is a good build system and very easy to use. It's also one of the few that fully supports C++20 modules today.

It's by no means a silver bullet, and the generator-based design isn't always the best choice, but its undoubtedly the best choice for the vast majority of C or C++ projects.

Aren't these the people that made a weird furry VN with dinosaurs that had something to do with Harry Potter rule34 fanfic featuring underage characters?

Good == you like it.

I don't like Kate personally. I use (and am addicted to) Sublime Text, but for an open source/free alternative I recommend Gram, or LiteXL. There's also one called Lapce that I thought was interesting, but I haven't looked into it in many years so idk if it's good yet.

For something more sublime-like, there's Cuda Text, but it's written in Pascal, an old/dying language, so it's at higher risk of abandonment because of a lack of contributors.

So basically, this guy is wrong.

I've had this (controversial) theory for a while that I've yet to see proven wrong. Before AI, it's basically been known that most programmers "age out" of the craft, because it's really difficult to keep up with it forever, and most people in middle of the bell curve simply can't do it. Big tech used to get sued for ageism all the time, because they would do shit like only promote or hire young people (which is illegal).

The aging millennials of today were the young rockstar ninja programmers of the past 2~3 decades, but now most of them are getting too old to keep up. That's why you see AI psychosis hitting the older coders harder than anyone else, since it provides a convenient way to not face the realities of aging. It's easier to think you can still be a rockstar by "pivoting" to AI, than it is to admit that you don't have the energy or motivation to keep your skills sharp. Tim Sweeney (and to a certain extent John Carmack) come to mind as high profile examples of this.

A pre-AI version of this is pivoting to management. That's what pretty much everyone does, and it's common to find people like that who haven't written a line of code themselves in years. But I guess becoming an AI cheerleader is easier to do, and the number of open management roles certainly isn't big enough for everyone.

Don't use AI. Don't do it. People telling you "it's great for learning" are full of shit and going off of gut feeling, not experience. These LLMs have only been around for a few years, and have only gotten semi competent at generating code for even less time. There is no data or evidence that it helps people learn programming, and plenty of evidence that they do the opposite.

So avoid it. Pick a simple project, and see how far you can get. You will probably fail, but that's the point! You'll most likely find something interesting or tough to focus on in the middle of it, and you'll learn a whole lot about whatever that is, and it'll stick with you long after you've abandoned that project.

My advice is to start very small, and avoid anything GUI related. Write like a bare bones terminal only blackjack game, then add a high score table, persist those high scores to disk, etc. If you fail even at step one, that's fine! Just try something else, like tictactoe, Simon says, or a non-game like an app for converting between Fahrenheit and Celsius.

Ask for help on a programming forum somewhere with real people.