Having done both, right now I prefer vibe coding with good engineers. Way less handholding. For non-technical managers, outside of prototyping vibe coding produces terrible results
Well you do need to vet dependencies and I wish there was a way to exclude purely vibe coded dependencies that no human reviewed but for well established libraries, I do trust well maintained and designed human developed libraries over AI slop.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a luddite, I use claude code and cursor but the code generated by either of those is nowhere near what I'd call good maintainable code and I end up having to rewrite/refactor a big portion before it's in any halfway decent state.
That said with the most egregious packages like left-pad etc in nodejs world it was always a better idea to build your own instead of depending on that.
I've been copy-pasting small modules directly into my projects. That way I can look them over and see if they're OK and it saves me an install and possible future npm-jacking. There's a whole ton of small things that rarely need any maintenance, and if they do, they're small enough that I can fix myself. Worst case I paste in the new version (I press 'y' on github and paste the link at the top of the file so I can find it again)
I just decided to create a vm for my claude code with strict network controls so it can't access my own internal network and I limit what exactly gets shared to it.
> This has been going on for years; the right simply refuses to countenance the possibility of legitimate organic opposition, while also being chronically unable to provide any evidence for their claims.
That strategy is also typical of China. Whenever there's a protest (for example the HK protests), it's always financed by western interests. Even volunteers organically organising themselves to help victims of the Tai Po fire were deemed to be western interests trying to discredit China. It's a surprisingly effective tactic.
I just always wonder how we have so many people eating this up when the strategy is so blindingly obvious.
I can’t help but be a little depressed by this realization. But to take it a step further, while I think there are some people who are genuinely buying this propaganda, I expect that a chunk of the propaganda aligned side also don’t think there is any point correcting the misleading statements. They benefit from the overall control of their ‘side’ and so just go right along sliding toward the fanatical fringe extreme of their side. On the other ‘side’, many people seem to have decided there is no use attempting to counter message after seeing the failure to move any extremists from their positions (and a failure to get even a milk toast correction from the non fanatics who are aligned). I think that the end result of this pattern is a gradually accelerating move towards the far ends, leaving no one to have any reasonable discourse in the center.
I’m not saying I support the center positions, nor that I don’t support what is often called an extreme position, just that this seems to be a watershed moment globally.
Polarization leaves very little room for reasonable discourse at the poles too. Pure tribalism doesn't care about reason unless that reason is in service of the identity and ideology of the tribe.
What if political discourse was focused on policy not identity and couched in terms of mutual interest instead of party affiliation? There would still be tensions, trade-offs, conflicts and political strategy at play but the discourse would be infinitely more reasonable.
I think this is what we mean when we talk about "center positions": a "value-based realism" that recognizes that society is nothing but the mutual alignment of values and interests. I don't understand why "common sense" has become so unpopular.
> I don't understand why "common sense" has become so unpopular.
IMHO, that's exactly it. You named it. Common sense is actually missing from more and more people. Why that is? I don't know - lack of basic common sense education, family, primary school, too much facebook, tiktok, common sense defined by YT shorts?
It's going to get far worse once the AI generation grows up.
> I just always wonder how we have so many people eating this up when the strategy is so blindingly obvious
It shouldn't be surprising considering how naive people are in general. People actually believe we live in democracies despite a century of evidence to the contrary. Propaganda and indoctrination are highly effective, and why wouldn't they be? I think it's the same reason we end up with so many unhinged people believing in reptilian conspiracy theories ir whatever: the media is always lying to them on a daily basis, so they can't trust it and without educations of their own have no way to distinguish truth from falsity anymore... why not just go with what sounds good or feels right. What other option do they have? Buy in, tune out or be lost. Those are the choices for 99% of people alive. Also, who has the energy anyway? Few are as privledged with time and energy as we are.
Thing is, someone is paying all these bills. Yes really. Trump gutting USAID funding brought a lot of this out in the open: many organizations that claimed to be independent turned out to be mouthpieces of the US government and closed down as soon as the funding dried up.
I don't understand how you're aware of terms like COINTELPRO, yet are dismissive that black box slush funds like USAID weren't facilitating US soft power.
Heard of ZunZuneo, National Endowment for Democracy, Reporters Without Borders? The DOGE campaign put a spotlight on the ulterior motives of these "independent" USAID funded initiatives.
I guess so, it’s certainly no secret that US soft power has been a HUGE part of foreign policy, but I do t really see the connection between cointelpro( which had a lot of moving parts, like infiltration of news rooms in the USA and following around black student on college campuses for example) and this soft power.
American soft power is good. It means we don’t need to use direct action aka bombs and missiles.
I just reject your claims on this. US soft power is, for the United States, good and desirable.
> Who opens an physical encyclopedia nowadays?
I know plenty of people who binge wikipedia and learn new things through that. While Wikipedia is not always perfect, it's not like older printed encyclopaedia like Britannica were perfect either.
You have a point with trusting AI, but I'm starting to see people around me realising that LLMs tend to be overconfident even when wrong and verifying the source instead of just trusting. That's the way I use something like perplexity, I use it as an improved search engines and then tend to visit the sources it lists.
> 1. You can think of this as a lighter version of Japanese office culture, but not limited to office... it's kind of everywhere in society.
Having worked in Japan, while there is a strong respect for authority, there's also much less hesitation about asking for clarification. I worked with an Indian offshore team and in a Japanese company and, while there's a lot to dislike in Japanese office culture, this kind of pattern of behaviour doesn't happen.
2 & 3 do make sense though.
I've had mixed result with your advice at the end. I'd say that it worked for about 30% of the offshore engineers I've worked with and indeed I had more success with juniors than with more senior developers.
I also worked with japanese, including on site in Tokyo and quickly learned that asking "did you understand it?" is useless. I always had to keep in mind to ask "what did you understand?".
That's what eBay does to me. You get to choose, at the time of login, between entering a password and getting an email verification, or just getting an email verification. At least with the bug report I had submitted to my bank, the password requirement had to be disabled from inside a settings menu, instead of being a clear option in the login prompt, but it that case it wasn't even a 2nd factor.
Long long ago the google toolbar queries could be reverse engineered to do an i feel lucky search on gmail. I created a login that (if @gmail.com) forwarded to the specific mail.
Unlikely to happen but it seems fun to extend email [clients] with uri's. It is just a document browser, who cares how they are delivered.
I hate this as well, especially since I have greylisting enabled on some email addresses, so by the time the email login is delivered, the login session has already timed out and of course the sender uses different mail servers everytime. So in some cases, it's nearly impossible to login and takes minutes...
It's the same on the sender side. Most people of course just outsource it to some SaaS like Sendgrid, and of course have some fancy microservice event bus architecture to get it there. That 'your login email has been sent' actually means 'your email has entered the very first queue, and we're hoping it makes it through all the layers soon'.
There have been plenty of instances where I tried to log in somewhere, and the first attempt to contact my mail server was twenty minutes later. And of course they then deliver all five retries at once.
I think that really depends on countries. I went to an engineering school only 15% of applicants out of high school were admitted and of those who were admitted only around 75% graduated.
Western education passing as many fee paying students as possible seems to be very much a UK/US phenomenon but doesn't seem to be the case of European countries where the best schools are public and fees are very low (In France, private engineering schools rank lower)
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