I was actually just thinking about those the other day and how I kindof miss them in a certain way. Just a silly little break from daily monotony of writing code; wiggle the cursor a bit and watch a tiny cat try to catch it.

Best of luck! If you’ve got questions or problems feel free to DM me (or reply here) and I’ll try to help as best I can. I’ve been using linux since the mid 90s, so I have a decent idea of how it all works :)

I think it has some valid use as a tool in programming, though relying entirely on it (“vibe coding”) just produces a mountain of difficult to maintain crap.

What works for me is using it as tool like one could delegate to a junior programmer. I can write the signature of a method that it will complete the contents of; for example I’ll write “function reverseTextInSentence(string: text) {}” and tell an AI to implement that method. It saves me a little time and I can keep thinking about the larger picture rather than the details of reversing a string of text.

That said: do not let it organize the structure of your project, don’t let it name things for you, don’t use in place of critical thinking, don’t ever think it can actually use logic and reason besides repeating things it found on online forums, and don’t let it write projects wholesale. It’s a tool that can be useful, and you need to know when to use it and when its use will just make things worse.

Also fuck the AI corporations, run a free model on your own hardware.

I’ve had this experience myself; I’m an American living in the Netherlands and sometimes just don’t know the name for the thing I need nor where to buy one. LLM bots are fine for the translation part, but they will make wild assumptions like telling me I can buy a kitchen strainer at the hardware store or food spices at a place called Kruidvat which translates to spice-bucket basically but is actually most like CVS without the pharmacy and does not sell any food besides some candy and chips.

It’s hilarious how quickly these bots can swing from super useful to actually harmful to trust.

“But how about I just summarize it for you instead… poorly and with a few lies added in?”

If you are in Europe just get a Dutch bicycle. Cheap (you can find them in any canal in Amsterdam, just hop in and grab one!), repairable, and will last for years post-canal treatment.

Of course, that was just for demonstration.

Though after a campaign has hit level ~8 or so it can be a fun reward to players to let them just squash a group of 1st level mooks as a kind of reminder of how far they’ve come since 1st level. At 9th level it’s reasonable to have +20 to your attack, and an NPC only has an AC of 10…

AC is only line of defense; don’t forget your reflexes and will can be targeted to do much worse things than just hurt you.

In Pathfinder 2e it is not true that rolling a 20 means an automatic hit. Rolling a 20 only automatically increases the degree of success by one. For example; if a character with +0 to their attack rolls a 19 versus an AC of 30 it results in a critical miss (19 is more than 10 below the target number). If they roll a 20 however it gets upgraded by one level and becomes a regular miss.

Police have had, since the late 90s I think, the “Hotplug” which is a special battery pack / generators that provide a special power plug where you can gently loosen the existing plug, slide the generator’s plug in place over it, then remove the computer from the main supply while keeping it powered on.

Power plug locks only buy you time or prevent casual mayhem; the police can work around those.

I’ve never worked retail, but I loathe Christmas music anyway. I fucking hate going shopping in the US between October and January.

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

I suspect the big problem is that IAM (AWS authentication system) is affected and it is not decentralized, which is causing other systems worldwide to fail because the internal authentication is broken.

I can’t login to the AWS console to check on my stuff in the European zone, because the login goes through IAM in us-east-1 where all the authentication does.

It really highlights just how centralized so much of the internet is on like three companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google)

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

I suspect the big problem is that IAM is affected and it is not decentralized, which is causing other systems worldwide (even outside of AWS’ us-east-1 location) which rely on IAM in us-east-1 to also fail. I’m having trouble even logging into the AWS console to check on my European servers.

Edit: IAM is the main authentication method. So AWS may still be up and running fine in other locations around the world; but if you can’t connect to them because AWS’ internal authentication is all fucked up…