There's another camp that don't care about the craft AND also don't care about the product. This camp, wielding power of AI, is making life worse for the other two camps.
I've been getting so many code reviews that are generated by AI, but the author does not even has the decency to self review the generated code before they send out pull requests. It feels like an insult sometimes. For example, unit tests that basically assert if `a = 1` after setting a to 1.
Every PR now has lots of unit tests, but they test the implementation details, not the spec. So now every change that breaks their implementation details causes false positive test failures. This creates a self enforcing negative loop. Every PR now comes with tons of unit test fixes.
People start responding to PR comments with something along the line of: I ask AI but it was not able to solve the problem, if you have a solution, LMK. Or another variant I see often is: I think this is wrong, but AI says this is fine, so I'll leave it as is.
I see craft lovers or product people using AI effectively. I use AI daily too. But the above camp is making my day to day job sometimes unbearable.
if someone really want to have single keystroke, there's always F<number> key that they can map to their frequently used movements, such as last edit, next function, special marker (such as `m`), etc.
I can see how that could work depends on the setup and the context. For example: People might use `. to jump to the last edit, or to a mark they set manually. Or simply `ciq` to edit inside the next quote without any manual cursor movements. I see people use plugin like harpoon to jump to their favorite location quickly. If you don't know about such setup, seeing people type <leader>1 to jump not just within a file, but across files, seems magical.
Dont forget `*` and `#`. Idk if other editors have this now, but before learning vim, I used to ctrl+shift+arrow_keys to select a word, ctrl+c, ctrl+f, ctrl+v, Enter in order to move around in code. Discovering `*` and `#` in vim was mindblowing
> LLMs are okay at coding, but at scale they build jumbled messes.
This reminds me of the day of Dreamweaver and the like. Everybody loved how quickly they could drag and drop UI components on a canvas, and the tool generated HTML code for them. It was great at the beginning, but when something didn't work correctly, you spent hours looking at spaghetti HTML code generated by the tool.
At least, back then, Dreamweaver used deterministic logic to generate the code. Now, you have AI with the capability to hallucinate...
> I think what we're witnessing isn't just an extension of the attention economy but something new - the simulation economy
Is it really new? We've been replacing real human connections with online connections/friendships for quite a while now. Social media companies have been giving us a world full of simulated relationships and making profits off of it. As quoted in the post, the average American adult has 3 friends. Look how many friends they have on FB.
I can't tell if you mean it literally, or you're adopting the FB nomenclature, but in my mind that FB edge is just labeled friend, and is not the relationshipStatus between the nodes
I have a to of "connections" on LinkedIn, too, but I can assure you I am not "connected" to hardly any of them
I like to call our latest economy the jester economy. No longer is it a service economy, but one of influencers, reality tv, and most lately, TikTok stars. We even have a reality tv star for US President!
> Turns out though information is like water; you need enough, but too much and you drown.
How do we slow down or control the flow of information ? Genuine question. I'm just asking to see if there are any studies or proposals that already exist out there.
I've heard people talk about education. But this seems to be part of a long term solution. How can we solve this problem now so that in the next election (next 2 or 4 years) people will not vote against their own best interests ?
Convincing people to quit social medias or stopping listening to TV pundits ? So far that hasn't worked. Facebook/Tiktok just keeps growing.
>> How do we slow down or control the flow of information ?
There's no way that genie goes back into the bottle. And even if you could that's not the issue, people believe whatever they want to believe.
Ultimately education is a good start but if anything US education (which of course is very democratic) is getting worse not better. Book banning and burning spring to mind.
The real root of the issue is individualism over collective good. That's pretty baked into the American psyche (not to mention baked into the constitution) so no amount of education will change that.
For example it's obvious that fewer guns would reduce violence- that's been shown to be true many times over. But the individual's right to bear arms is baked in and not going away.
Of course this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The US acts as a counterbalance to other systems and other ways of life. It fights for women's rights in the middle east and Afghanistan. It traditionally stood up for the little guy against the neighborhood bully (think Kuwait and Iraq).
The pendulum will swing, but just as the USSR exited the world stage, the USA is now doing the same. All empires rise and fall. The gaps left by USaid will be filled by others. China is already buying influence in Africa and Asia.
As it stand today, like as of right now, it's actually possible China is providing Urkaine with more assistance than the USA because they're not going harder on stopping them from buying drones and drone parts.
>> How do we slow down or control the flow of information ?
It’s not a completely new problem. Voltaire wrote about this in Candide in the 1750s. I’m sure there are other (earlier or contemporary) examples that I don’t know, but Candide is the one obvious (partial) commentary on the “flood of information” phenomenon that always comes to my mind. Voltaire’s conclusion was to just ignore it. Worry about your own life. Live on a farm and work a physically exhausting job every day then spend your nights with your family and loved ones that you have no time for all the frivolous noise of news and world events that don’t affect you. When there is an actual signal among the noise, it’ll reach you and you should use your educated/good instinct that you have cultivated from the prior years when you were young and absorbing knowledge and information, and vote accordingly.
Obviously this is my interpretation of the work. Also obviously Voltaire was a very vocal opponent of voting and the will of the masses to enact real political and societal change through education and general shift in social beliefs and attitudes. He was also an advocate for acceptance of others and in Candide he had the wise old man who gives the final philosophical point in the book be a Turkish Muslim man in opposition to everything Christian French people believed in the 1700s. He was also a massive racist against black Africans and didn’t even consider them humans. Soooo your mileage may vary.
The growing concern people have is that you will not be able to vote.
Many people work hard in Russia and spend nights with their families, it didn't stop them from getting shipped off to die in Ukraine or any other god forsaken Russian made hellscape.
In a way, the life Voltaire is describing is kind of, luxurious ?
This is exactly the perfect example of noise. The left in the US worrying about their “right to vote” in 2025 is perfect example of leftist news noise. It’s the exact equivalent of the right news noise of stolen elections. Every. Single. Article. about people losing their right to vote in the US ends up being an absolute strawman non-story that gets pushed to the top of Reddit and leftist facebook groups and twitter accounts and all the other left leaning social media outlets for a week before fading into the noise hole where it belongs. The story got millions of clicks, so it’s worth it.
The guy running basically 'information' for tens of millions of voters is basically curating their information and seems to be able to fire almost anyone at will, and you, for whatever high reason think a fair election is just by default on the cards?
Every PR now has lots of unit tests, but they test the implementation details, not the spec. So now every change that breaks their implementation details causes false positive test failures. This creates a self enforcing negative loop. Every PR now comes with tons of unit test fixes.
People start responding to PR comments with something along the line of: I ask AI but it was not able to solve the problem, if you have a solution, LMK. Or another variant I see often is: I think this is wrong, but AI says this is fine, so I'll leave it as is.
I see craft lovers or product people using AI effectively. I use AI daily too. But the above camp is making my day to day job sometimes unbearable.
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