Developer and refugee from Reddit
In our case, there are enough upper management folks who are opposed to it that I doubt it will last or ever be enforced. For people like me, it really doesn’t make any sense to enforce it in the first place, because all of my teammates are in other states and countries.
Making me go to the office just means you can’t schedule early meetings with me, because I’ll be commuting during that time.
My office just did the same thing. And the backlash is enormous. No one wants it. No one likes it.
The funny thing is that I’m actually an Arch user. I’m just not a dick about it.
Yeah, this sucks. Use the distro you like, people.
I like it, but I don’t nerd out about it.
I’ve read Lord of the Rings a few times. And The Hobbit. And his lesser-known works (e.g., Leaf by Niggle, which is just great). And The Silmarillion. And The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (which, honestly, isn’t his best). And I know what an Istari is (and why Gandalf, being a lesser Ainur, is actually so much more than a mere “wizard”). And I know that while they changed the line from “you cannot pass” to “you shall not pass” for dramatic purposes in the movie, the original line subtly says a whole hell of a lot more about who and what Gandalf is and why the Balrog should have actually been shitting itself.
So you might say I’m passingly familiar with it.
Oh, you need Fate Accelerated. Six stats, five descriptive phrases that define your character (one of which is your character’s “trouble,” giving the GM automatic story hooks) and a smattering of stunts your character can perform, and off you go!
Regarding Traveller, I’ve never had the stomach for it. Me and a group once sat down to create characters, and discovered it was so rules-heavy that by the end of two sessions dedicated to character creation, we still didn’t know for sure that we’d done any of the characters correctly.
I’ll check it out. I’m very much interested in video games that delve into deep topics that way. Have you ever encountered The Talos Principle series? Fantastic games that do surprisingly accessible treatises on philosophical topics while forcing you to think through pretty mind-blowing puzzles. Highly recommended.
Ha! My glob, she was so amazing. I had the opportunity to attend a reading she did from The Lathe of Heaven years ago, and I was struck anew not only by her creativity, but by the philosophical ideas underpinning it. A lot of people think The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is her most philosophical work, but I actually found what Lathe had to say about control, obedience, and power incredibly compelling.
Oh, goddamn it, this is gonna take a while.
That’s a good list for starters.
That’s how it’s done, yep.
Yep. Premiered in 2013, so it meets the OP’s requirements.
Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my fiber supplement, and Matlock will be on the television box soon, so I’d better go.
Not the person you asked, but I do that sometimes. For instance, when I want to watch a specific video but I don’t want having watched it to affect other video recommendations.
You’re right, unit tests are another area where they can be helpful, as long as you’re very careful to check them over.
Actually, there’s growing evidence that beyond a certain point, more context drastically reduces their performance and accuracy.
I’m of the opinion that LLMs will need a drastic rethink before they can reach the point you describe.
Le plus drôle c’est que je parle français. Très amusant, n’est-ce pas?
Oh, and Talking Heads fans calling them “psycho killer.”
Well, they don’t hate me, but they do get tired of French people sounding out our shared username and then making jokes about it.
So there are a few very specific tasks that LLMs are good at from the perspective of a software developer:
And that’s… pretty much it. I’ve experimented with building applications with “prompt engineering,” and to be blunt, I think the concept is fundamentally flawed. The problem is that once the application exceeds the LLM’s context window size, which is necessarily small, you’re going to see it make a lot more mistakes than it already does, because - just as an example - by the time you’re having it write the frontend for a new API endpoint, it’s already forgotten how that endpoint works.
As the application approaches production size in features and functions, the number of lines of code becomes an insurmountable bottleneck for Copilot. It simply can’t maintain a comprehensive understanding of what’s already there.
After working on a team that uses LLMs in agentic mode for almost a year, I’d say this is probably accurate.
Most of the work at this point for a big chunk of the team is trying to figure out prompts that will make it do what they want, without producing any user-facing results at all. The rest of us will use it to generate small bits of code, such as one-off scripts to accomplish a specific task - the only area where it’s actually useful.
The shine wears off quickly after the fourth or fifth time it “finishes” a feature by mocking data because so many publicly facing repos it trained on have mock data in them so it thinks that’s useful.