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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • Russ@bitforged.spacetoProgramming@programming.devThe Copilot Delusion
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    1 month ago

    As long as it is done properly and honest, I have nothing against a “Pro” and a “Contra” article.

    Neither do I, personally. Though I am certainly less than inclined enjoy an article where the author is oddly preachy/“holier-than-thou”, sayings things such as you’re not a “real” programmer unless you sacrifice your health debugging segfaults at 3AM or have done the handmade hero challenge (certainly an interesting series to watch, but one that I have zero interest in replicating). Yet the author accuses copilot of having a superiority complex. I cannot say for sure, however I would assume if the article was in favor of AI rather than against, then there would definitely be comments about exactly this.

    The overarching tone of the article seems like if it were written as a direct comment toward a user instead, it would run afoul of beehaw’s (and surely other instances’) rules, or at the least come really close to skirting the line - and I don’t mean the parts where the author is speaking of/to copilot.



  • I don’t see how that’s going to work out well. That’s asking to end up with a mess that you’re just going to have to rewrite anyways.

    I do not even have a complete hatred for AI like a lot of folks do, but I don’t trust it that much (nor should anyone).

    You’d be better off with an actual deterministic transpiler for that (think TypeScript -> JS but the other way around I suppose), not something with a ton of random variables like an AI.


  • Patching Comic Code? It was quite a while ago unfortunately, so I don’t have the exact commands available, but I used their Font Patcher tool in order to do so.

    From what I recall, the tricky thing was actually getting the dependencies it required to be installed properly, Font Forge would be up and running but then the script’s errors indicated that it couldn’t resolve all of the necessary dependencies. Not sure what OS you’re on so your mileage may vary - but for Linux they now have an AppImage that looks to contain everything it needs, and for macOS/Windows if you have Docker available there also appears to be a pre-built container for it. There’s also quite a few examples that I don’t think were there when I used it, since I also recall not being 100% sure of what flags were needed to run it


  • I pretty much agree, personally I rarely ever downvote a comment/post - to the point where I cannot even recall when my last downvote was, unless I accidentally have done so via a mobile gesture (I try to be cautious about this). If I were at my PC, I’d check my instance’s database, but alas.

    [The rest here on is more of a “6 o’clock in the morning stream of thoughts from my perspective” thing. My friends know me as being very verbose - last paragraph is where I try to steer back on track]

    If I do upvote something, generally it’ll be something that I feel is driving forward a discussion in good faith (even if I don’t necessarily agree with the content itself) and is respectful of all parties involved.

    Though a lack of an upvote from me doesn’t indicate disagreement either.

    An actual flat-out disagreement from me tends to be more on the rare side of things. Because so many comments are an opinion / viewpoint rather than solid fact. It’s one thing to say “No, 2+2 does not equal 5” since that is rooted in fact.

    Whereas I have to feel pretty strongly about something to directly challenge an opinion, especially since it super easy to misjudge tone on the Internet/across text and I’m not here to unintentionally start a war over something that doesn’t have a right or wrong answer (within reason - but even that itself is something that isn’t binary). I try to be cautious about asserting something is wrong unless I’m very sure of it (even if I do often fail at that, given the previous issue of tone being hard to judge across text), and of course in most cases you can’t really say another person’s opinion is unequivocally wrong.

    I don’t mind giving a different viewpoint, but again I try to be cautious about it because I don’t want to come across as “My viewpoint is ultimately right and yours is wrong” and that is unfortunately how a lot of discussions end up being seen (or I just simply make the human error of just having a far too strong opinion of my own).

    I do my best to keep my tone as neutral as I can, though as they say “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” My original comment is a good example of this, because I do agree that downvotes are far too often used in the manner that you stated. I also agree that they’re typically a poor way of criticizing someone if they don’t include a corresponding reply (if I say something that is factually wrong - or even just poor taste, I usually want to know about it so I don’t keep doing so!), my only divergence from the matter was that they are a criticism - just a really bad way of doing so.



  • Oh hey, someone else who uses Comic Code - greetings!

    I remember when I first saw it, I laughed - and then it grew on me. Then it turned into “I can’t believe I am buying a derivation of comic sans” but it is actually a really nice monospaced font.

    Only thing I didn’t like was having to figure out how to use Font Patcher to make a copy of it that supports nerd fonts, but it was a one and done process.

    (I also don’t really like how it looks in my IDE the few times I find myself on Windows, but I don’t really blame the font for that one - looks perfect in the same IDE on Linux…)



  • I think downvotes are criticism/judgment - even if it’s more of a silent type (in lieu of actually replying, as you pointed out).

    Even from the standpoint of “You should only use downvotes to indicate that a comment/post is off topic for the community” that Reddit originally tried to (naively IMO, you can’t enforce it not being a “I disagree” button, but I digress) have is still what I’d consider to be criticism. Mainly because regardless of the vote being cast as that vs a general “I disagree”, it’s still an indication of disapproval of the commenter.

    Criticism of course comes in a lot of forms, and can vary on the “level” of it - I wouldn’t say that downvotes are a high level of criticism, but one nonetheless.

    That’s just my view of it, at least, I can’t see how they wouldn’t be a form of criticism - you shouldn’t use them as a “This breaks the rules” indicator because that should be a report instead of a vote IMO, otherwise it’s far less likely to be acted upon/handled.


  • Welcome to Lemmy!

    For me the first Linux distribution I used was Ubuntu 8.04 - though I never had installed it on physical hardware, just a VM - VirtualBox IIRC (that didn’t occur till Ubuntu 8.10). I was in my early teenage years and had discovered Linux and found it interesting, I used the WUBI tool to install it through Windows and updated the bootloader to keep Windows as the default (with a one second timeout) since it was the family computer, I think my family would’ve shat their pants if they randomly rebooted the PC and was greeted with Linux heh.

    Though a few years later on an old secondary family laptop (it was the “someone else is using the other computer” spare/backup) that was running Vista, it had gotten so buggy and bogged down that I installed Kubuntu for my family and they happily used that until eventually that laptop was retired. It never got them to really look into permanently switching to Linux, but I think that’s more than fine - I’ve never been one to “proselytize” Linux: If it is the right tool for you, fantastic - if not, no hard feelings is how I see it. In the aforementioned case, it was the better tool over the bogged down and buggy Vista.

    As for nowadays, its CachyOS on my desktop (I’m not married to it, but its been working alright for me for about a year now), SteamOS on my Deck, Fedora on my secondary laptop (an old intel macbook), and then Bazzite on my ROG Ally. Windows is still installed on a secondary drive on my desktop, but I very rarely have to boot into it.



  • I’ve never had to downgrade Firefox, most of the time I don’t even notice its been updated unless it pops up a “Welcome to Firefox vSomething” page which it hardly ever does.

    I did try out Zen, and its certainly an interesting browser, but there’s a couple of issues with it that I have:

    • It’s a browser that is as far as I understand, maintained by one person - I learned a while ago not to use critical software that is only maintained by one person
    • It’s still in alpha, and things change very quickly with it. Unlike Firefox I do notice when Zen updates because some behavior will have heavily changed. A few weeks ago there was an update for example that completely removes the new tab page (pressing Ctrl + T or the new tab icon just opens the URL bar and then when you submit your address/query then it navigates directly to it in a new tab). Interesting change for sure, I’m not sure I dislike it but that is a major behavior to change in an update with no prompt about it being updated, and it wasn’t togglable in the settings menu - you had to go to about:config to change it back. When I looked at the GitHub issue regarding this, the dev seemed a bit… unhappy with people’s reaction, to put it lightly.
    • Because its still in alpha, there can be stability issues like you mentioned; I recently finally switched back to Firefox when I noticed for some reason Zen was causing my GPU to run in high power mode and using high utilization as if I were running a game and dragging the rest of my system down. Thought maybe I’d left a video running in a tab somewhere and that it was just HW accelerated decoding, but nope.

    Obviously those last two points as mentioned are more understandable because the browser is in an alpha stage, but browsers are for better or worse very critical pieces of software. I can’t have it just randomly crashing out on me, or behavior changing out from under me every week. This combined with people selling Zen as if its the next coming of Christ has kinda left a bad taste in my mouth for it. Don’t get me wrong, what the dev has pulled off is incredibly impressive and major props to them for it, but I’ll be waiting for it to leave the alpha stage until I’m able to daily drive it. For now I’m just back on regular mainline Firefox.