I stopped into the Amazon Fresh in Broomall, PA, to check it out not too long ago. It just looks bland and dystopian from the outside, and not much about it is impressive from the inside. I've worked with computers and technology my whole life, and the entrance to the store just confused me. If I remember correctly, I had to scan the Amazon app on my phone to enter the building. Once inside, it felt like a warehouse; the aisles were too small, and the food selection wasn't even really that great. (From memory, it was a few years ago that I went)

All in all, it's a cool concept on paper with absolutely terrible execution.

Only went once, bought some snacks, and left.

It's certainly not routine, but I'd say the privatization of the space industry that's unfolded over the last few decades is significant progress.

When I get depressed and look out at the world, I'm actually amazed at what I'm living through—the internet, space travel, electric and autonomous cars, smartphones. It's really amazing.

"Progress" towards what? The average dystopian sci-fi story where the galaxy is ruled by mega-corporations?

SpaceEx has made a ton of progress in space travel, granted it's not an ideal situation with it being a mega corp, but it moved a hell of a lot faster than NASA could have.

Perhaps someday we'll have individualized space flight like we have ownership over our cars and private planes.

Don't know what you're getting at by saying the galaxy will be ruled by mega-corps. Seems pretty democratic so far, and most of the things achieved couldn't have been without organization.

I fit the same criteria. I think college is probably a wholesome experience, but I don't really know, as I only went for two years and didn't really get much out of it.

I had a few major issues with the experience:

One: It was force-fed to you in High School, it almost seemed like there was no other choice at the time, and it was far too easy to go into massive debt at such a young age.

Two: I was already self-taught in computer science, and the coursework didn't really expand upon my knowledge any.

Three: The bureaucracy was insane, having to deal with Student Aid, registration, and signing up for classes. It was nauseating.

Four: While there were some interesting classes in other domains of knowledge, the fact that there were so many required courses, like Writing and "English Composition." Kind of soured the experience. I didn't learn anything in the Comp Sci classes, and probably 60% of the other stuff I wasn't interested in. As an Adult who's paying tuition, you should be able to 100% pick and choose what courses you want to take, but because I was only 19 and fresh out of high school, that liberty didn't really dawn on me until after I had finally left.

I went to a community college. I assume a four-year school or something more academic by nature would be interesting, but not worthy of hiring one person over another strictly on credentials.

I actually have a good friend who was a car mechanic for a few years; we sort of grew up together. I became a developer, and he ended up driving for a towing company after he burned out in the shop.

I don't know who had it more difficult. Both are careers worthy of respect.

Mechanics need more spatial awareness and are hands-on; it's relatively easy to change the oil or swap out a tire. He taught me how to do brakes once, but I didn't internalize any of it. It's not so easy to replace an engine.

I did full-stack development for five or six years. He actually came over once, and I taught him a few things about the modern front-end stack. How to run Node.js, how to install dependencies via npm, and how to use GitHub. All things he was curious about.

I would assume it's pretty annoying to work at a local or small-scale shop and have a car come in with modern electrical issues that only the manufacturer knows how to deal with.

I just asked ChatGPT. "Based on everything I've asked, how old do you think I am?" It was dead-on with its answer. It guessed 30-35. I'm 32.

That was just a spur-of-the-moment question. I've been using ChatGPT for over six months now.

>It was dead-on with its answer. It guessed 30-35. I'm 32.

Horoscopes must feel like literal magic to you.

I'm not familiar with Horoscopes.

They're all about saying things that apply broadly enough, in a way that makes them seem specific, in order to make people go "Wow, that's dead-on!" An example:

  You’ve recently been feeling a quiet tension between wanting stability and craving some kind of change. On the surface, things look mostly under control, but there’s a sense that one small adjustment—something you’ve been postponing—could shift your mood more than you expect.

See also: Cold Reading

(What I'm saying is calling 30-35 "dead on" makes you look like somebody who is easily impressed by parlour tricks)

That doesn't make any sense.

I only asked ChatGPT to guess my age because I'm assuming OpenAI is going to have the LLM assume your age going forward, which is an interesting use of the technology. Rather than ask up front, it just guesses based on the utilization of the tool. I understand "dead-on" may have been the wrong use of the term, let's just say it was fairly accurate...

I probably would be impressed by a good parlour trick or an accurate horoscope. Lmao

But did it tell on what basis it made that assumption?

Yes, it listed a few of my past questions as reference points. I had asked some questions about Nintendo 64/Dreamcast and Gamecube games. It also used information I had asked it about programming languages and some work-related questions to guess my age.

I don't know how OpenAI plans to do this going forward, just quickly read the article and figured that might be a good question to ask ChatGPT.

Edit: I just followed that up with, "Based on everything I've asked, what gender am I?" It refused to answer, stating it wouldn't assume my gender and treats me as gender neutral.

So I guess it's ok for an AI agent to assume your age, but not your gender... ?

I don't really feel like diving into the ethics of OpenAI at the moment lol.

Age is a must. Gender is too easy. You know what the problem is? These systems know your ethnicity and religion.

I would assume that it would be able to make those assumptions based on the questions you ask it, but OpenAI would never allow an LLM to answer those types of inquiries. That would obviously cross some boundaries.

I find it strange that having it assume your age isn't off limits - according to the article, it's about to become a major feature.

The best developer I've ever worked with had a degree in Philosophy. He leveraged React in a way that was elegant back when React was still fairly new. It was super hard to scaffold back then, but we got it done and completed a pretty important project with it. It was shipped, hosted, and delivered into production for the company to use on time (it was somewhat of an internal tool, with a public-facing side for data collection).

One of my best working experiences.

And yet, there's still room for people who love to code to do great work. Look at bun for instance https://bun.com/. It's a JavaScript runtime that dramatically improves on the performance of node.js to the point where it will likely completely deprecate it in the coming years. It does so many things right out of the box, but it's essentially just an incremental improvement in the development world.

I think AI-augmented development will lead to faster and vastly improved software over the years. This isn't just a space that's being disrupted on the maker/creator side of developing software. And from a makers/creators point of view, you wouldn't even need to keep up with the latest trends like performance, AI should just know which libraries are the best to use to develop your solutions.

Because they're a corporation that makes money. They have incentives to employ people, and the vendor lock-in with Windows is far too large to change anything at the moment or anytime in the foreseeable future. Changing Windows to become a Linux-based distro would be a massive corporate undertaking; Microsoft isn't in the business of pleasing tech-minded people. They're a business that makes money.

Linux isn't a corporation; it's really more of an idea. They don't have marketing departments or people trying to sell you licenses. They don't have vendor lock-in or active-directory or a cloud based infastructure. They don't have an entire advertising division or a search engine. There aren't any shareholders to please or paid employees to keep on payroll for government kickbacks. They're not targeting the casual, media-focused, average computer user like Microsoft, which makes a lot of money by doing so.

In my last job, I worked in a mid-sized suburban office. There weren't any "Linux reps" knocking on our door, making sure we were getting the most out of Ubuntu.

Wow, this is interesting to see. I thought jQuery was dead.

My next question would be, is this something that OpenAI and Anthropic would train their data on? If I ask Claude Code to write an app and utilize jQuery, would it resolve to the previous version until it's retrained in a newer model?

most code from jQuery 2 or 3 works in 4.

they have legendary backwards compatibility.

most of the breaking changes are dropping support for ancient browsers.

so yes, LLMs are great with jQuery.