People are really trigger-happy when it comes to throwing magic tools on top of AI that claim to "fix" the weak parts (often placeboing themselves because anthropic just fixed some issue on their end).
Then the next month 90% of this can be replaced with new batch of supply chain attack-friendly gimmicks
Especially Reddit seems to be full of such coding voodoo
Well, we've sacrificed the precision of actual programming languages for the ease of English prose interpreted by a non-deterministic black box that we can't reliably measure the outputs of. It's only natural that people are trying to determine the magical incantations required to get correct, consistent results.
My favorite to chuckle at are the prompt hack voodoo stuff, like, “tell it to be correct” or “say please” or “tell it someone will die if it doesnt do a good job,” often presented very seriously and with some fast cutting animations in a 30 second reel
I feel that companies are shifting towards short take home assignments which I find good personally.
Grinding leetcode was never optimizing for solving problems algorithmically but for performing well in live coding interviews.
So knowing solution design, time/space complexity, what tools and patterns exist for certain sets of problems is valued more than being able to correctly type them out in an unfamiliar UI often with limited functionality, while someone watches your face and screen and ideally you have to articulate your thought process clearly within 20 minutes or so.
I just don't see a usual team behind a violent movie or game having a though process of "how can we make people want to go to war more". My theory is sort of the opposite - people enjoy such media because it's violence without hurting anyone in the real world, a fantasy.
It's often just a part of a broader puzzle - you need to aim with precision, react quickly, properly chain your movements, be aware of your surroundings, know when to be offensive/defensive, apply your tools/skills to specific situation, manage your resources, etc. Shooting is just a subset of all that.
With that logic you could also dumb down chess to killing, because that's the core mechanic.
I repeat this story every now and then but I "maintain" a 18 years old laptop with Ubuntu (mainly for Internet) for non-tech savvy user. I put it in quotes because I just run apt update every now and then - that's it. Just works. The only bottleneck is how resource-hungry browsers got over time but it remains usable. Ubuntu was installed sometime back in 2017 and there was no need for fresh reinstall since then.
I did that for my mom. At some point she learned to click through the Ubuntu updater and she kept her machine updated by herself. I only kept tabs on her computer via the server monitoring tooling I had on my network.
This sounds like the move, vs. having mum on Win+Chrome.
If people had set their family members up with Firefox and Ublock Origin, then the Manifest v2 deprecation wouldn’t have resulted in seniors getting hit with certain scams. Specifically over the period between deprecation and the next visit from tech savvy family members.
Unforgivable btw
Edit - Linux bit’s important too b/c of MS nagscreens that could try to upsell
That can't be literally true, no release of Ubuntu is still getting updates after 18 years. At some point you have to upgrade to the next release, and that's not quite as simple.
The 'upgrade to next version of ubuntu' has gotten pretty good these days.
The only thing I would make sure to do is to have a separate home partition / volume so if you had to blow the underlying OS away after a botched upgrade, it's easily doable.
For the life of me I don't understand why having a separate area for your personal files isn't the default on every OS. Just pick a reasonable size for the OS part (20-30G?) and give the rest to /home
The laptop started with Windows 7 (the best one btw). Switch to Ubuntu was done years later when I handed it over to my parents.
You are right about the Ubuntu upgrades though. Over these years I'd just randomly press update to get out of EoL'd versions when I was around. I think I just went over 4 major versions in a few hours. It just downloaded, installed and restarted without any problems. One outlier was an issue with nvidia driver packages after update, for which I had to consult google.
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