I wasn't great at exams, but I think if I re-did university today I'd still do much better because my personal learning style is best when I talk through the material with someone. Sitting in a lecture listening to someone monologue at me, reading a static textbook, those weren't great. But with LLMs every student now has full-time access to a "live tutor" with infinite patience and no sense of social risk from asking it dumb questions. It's absolutely my perfect learning environment.

Progressive and socialist platforms are very popular, in hindsight. It's just that propaganda can make people who rely on, say, the ACA vote against "Obamacare".

In two sentences you first tell me that a thing is popular, and then explain why that thing is not actually popular.

People fall for propaganda. Evidently Democrats haven't been very good at countering it, and they really need to win some elections soon. So if countering the propaganda isn't working they may have to live with it. Doing the "Am I so out of touch? No. It's the voters who are wrong." Simpsons meme thing isn't going to work.

If the Democrats want to win elections they're going to have to appeal to enough American voters.

Unfortunately, a lot of American voters are pretty regressive in this way. So now Democrats face the question: compromise a few principles for the sake of their other principles actually getting implemented, or take the high ground and lose. Thus sacrificing all of those principles.

Never a fun place to be in, but that's democracy.

To be serious for a moment here on programmer_humor, yeah, it's a real puzzler. For now there's still a role for programmers like us in all this because we're still good at knowing how to translate the requirements of non-technical people into the things we actually ask the coding agents to build for us. But AI's getting good at that too. As might be expected, they're language models so interpreting what people tell them using language is kind of their jam.

If I were advising someone who's looking at whether to get into programming as a profession right now, I'd tell them to only go that route if they had the resources to take a mulligan on their education and try something else if a couple of years from now it turns out that the robots have completely taken the job over. I think it's a real possibility, and will lead to some interesting times indeed.

Until then, I guess we keep making jokes about it? Just make sure not to take them too seriously. AIs can count how many Rs are in "strawberry" now. They can whip up a bit of Javascript to do it for them in their harness' sandbox.

Yeah, I've been tinkering with coding agents for a while now and it feels like some sort of "phase transition" happened earlier this year - the models and their harnesses went from being the sort of clumsy barely-passable student coders that people make fun of to being actually highly competent. Lately even the small local models have reached that level - I've been using Qwen3.8 27B on my own machine and it's been doing just fine. I suspect a lot of the folks making fun of them tried them early on and wrote them off, not giving the latest versions a second chance.

The compiler comparison works there too, IMO. I remember back when I was learning the tricks of the trade there were all sorts of ways you were supposed to write code to trick compilers into generating more efficient results. Coding standards would say to use ++i instead of i++ for incrementing loop indices, use x*0.1 instead of x/10 because division was way more expensive than multiplication, using memcpy instead of copying values with =, using int instead of bool, and so forth. Lots of stuff. Some of it was never useful, it was just folklore and superstition. Other stuff did make a difference with early compilers but modern ones know these tricks themselves and can often apply them better than the human programmer can. So the old-school greybeards who still insist on doing that stuff can actually make things worse these days (disclaimer: my beard is pretty grey these days too).

I expect so too will this "hah, vibe slop" attitude eventually pass away. AI is getting quite good quite quickly.

Indeed, throughout nature it's almost all sigmoids. The trick is that sigmoids look exponential before the inflection point and it's hard to predict when that inflection point is going to come.

I'm really not clear what point you're trying to make. If I manage to conceal a gun until I'm inside your car you can't kick me out? Or there's some sort of time limit on being able to kick me out?

I'm saying that a corporation providing a transportation service to the public is an entirely different fucking situation than an actual human in their home.

Your car is your home? Sorry, didn't realize you were so hard up.

You want robotaxis to be allowed to refuse to carry colored people?

Did you know there's a law specifically prohibiting discrimination on that basis? There isn't a similar law for guns. It is not an "equivalent argument" and trying to compare carrying a gun to having a particular skin colour is frankly bonkers.

Waymo taxis can indeed talk to the people inside them. They can also connect you to a remote human operator if you want to "talk to a supervisor."

If your rule is "no guns in my car" why do you think saying "but I'm just going to the shooting range" makes a difference?

The TLDR is "there are also gun nuts who don't like Trump."

Which I suppose I must admit is a good thing, with a tired sigh.

So you're saying that your right to carry a firearm overrides the rights of a property owner to decide whether you're allowed on their private property? If someone was to get into your car while carrying something that was legal for them to carry but that you didn't want in your car, you shouldn't be allowed to eject them?