I've never really followed X (nor Twitter), Bluesky, Instagram, TikTok, etc. so I basically live under a rock. Sometimes I ask dumb questions to try to understand people a little better. Apologies if my questions inadvertently offend anyone. I mean no harm.
It sounds like life has been rough. I understand, friend. I can even empathize with several parts of it.
I hope it's okay if I offer some unsolicited advice. I know you didn't ask for any, but if I ask first, I might forget it before you respond. It's 100% okay to ignore the rest of this message you don't want it...
First, before getting to the deeper/not-very-fun stuff...
I had a YouTube channel where I made people laugh with goofy ass animations, my weird accent and nothing else.
Knowing that you can leverage your accent for comedic effect is an awesome level of awareness! I've seen a few people in language-learning communities trying to learn how to "get rid of" their accents to make funny content on YouTube, and I just think "...why?" That seems like such a great tool to make funny things even funnier.
Anyway, I suppose that wasn't advice, but I'm curious about something... When the racists in video games mock your accent, have you ever tried making them laugh by doing an impression of their accents? Like, not as a retaliation, but as a way to shift the tone from hate/negativity to jokes/banter? When any of my foreign friends have done impressions of native English speakers' accents, it's pretty much always funny. Some can even do a variety of accents. I had a Bangladeshi friend who surprised us with a Texan impression, followed by Irish. He was actually kinda good at both, which made it even more hilarious for some reason 😆
I've noticed that, in many contexts, if you can embrace the cultural differences and joke around about it, it can sometimes improve the overall tone. It's almost like the racists are pretending to be even more racist than they really are. It's strange, but I've seen it many times.
If you try it, I'd suggest doing it early on, when they just start "poking" at you a bit to see how you'll react. It probably wouldn't work after things are already heated.
Anyway, on to the more serious stuff...
These are some things that have really helped me, in the past.
Uninstall social media apps from your phone for two weeks (including a Lemmy app, if you use one). If you can't resist the urge to check social media on your phone, then log in from the phone's web browser. Do not enable push notifications if the site prompts you for it. Even if you occasionally refresh the page in the web browser, that's better than push notifications.
The goal is not 100% cessation of social media consumption[^1]. The goal is to make social media access just a little less convenient, and it's only temporary (two weeks). Much easier to achieve than complete cessation, and the results might actually be greater than expected (it was for me).
Take a break from reading/watching/engaging in political content for 1-2 weeks. Political topics are usually not conducive to overall happiness[2]. It might be almost impossible to 100% avoid everything political on the internet – someone always finds a way to shove politics into awkward places in online conversations – but just try to ignore it. Do not reply. Don't even finish reading it[3]. The world will still have plenty of problems to read about after this break.
I would encourage doing both of those things at the same time, but if the thought of that makes you less likely to try/succeed, then just try one at a time. That would still be better than nothing.
When I did these things, it felt like I had broken an addiction by the end of it. My life was permanently better[^4]. It's crazy how strong of a hold social media has on our brains.
[^1]: That would have a lower likelihood of success because we are humans, and many social media apps are designed/engineered to leverage human psychology.
[^2]: They're GREAT for engagement though. Algorithms on mainstreams platforms leverage this because it's extremely lucrative (for billionaire CEOs).
[^3]: I've heard that some highly religious people (I don't remember which religion[s]) will "avert their eyes" and even shield them if they see something/someone that could spark temptation. That seems a bit extreme, but if they can do that in everyday life for years, then it's possible to avoid certain online content for a short time.
[^4]: I eventually "relapsed" on a few habits, but not all of them, and not as intensely.
Another assumption that I wasn’t skeptical.
It wasn’t an assumption:
Anyway, you’ll see all this eventually, when some data gets published.
That is not a skeptical position.
You can't possibly know what was in my head while going over internal data. But at this point, that horse is so beaten and so dead that it's starting to stink.
And my point is that given that the data shows objectively that it does fool people - even subject matter experts - it is reasonable to believe that effect continues until proven otherwise. We know it’s a feature of LLMs, and the fact you continue to push on with your blind faith undisturbed by this knowledge is truly alarming.
In the follow up study, first of all I want to point out that it’s not definitive that it made them faster, the error bars include regions where they were slowed down. And none of this includes the long-term effects of poorly made, unmaintainable code that was farted out in bulk by an overworked engineer who didn’t have time to properly review code that they didn’t write and don’t fully understand.
I'm just gonna zoom in on this part for a sec:
unmaintainable code that was farted out in bulk by an overworked engineer who didn’t have time to properly review code that they didn’t write and don’t fully understand.
I fully agree that all of this is bad.
Don't create or approve unmaintainable code. Avoid overworking engineers (this is more of a management problem). Make time to properly review and understand the code, request changes, even reject patches/PRs/MRs if it's hot garbage, etc. The practices predate LLMs and should still be upheld today, regardless what which tools are used. I feel like I've already covered these things already though. These poor dead horses 🙁
Onward...
It also doesn’t include the effects of long term exposure to LLMs reducing their solo effectiveness. If you only measure the immediate delta, then it could look like the LLM is helping when actually it’s just making people dependent.
And the selected dev quotes are also alarming in light of that information:
“I’m torn. I’d like to help provide updated data on this question but also I really like using AI!” — a developer from the original study early-2025 when asked to participate in the late-2025 study.
“I found I am actually heavily biased sampling the issues … I avoid issues like AI can finish things in just 2 hours, but I have to spend 20 hours. I will feel so painful if the task is decided as AI-disallowed.” — a developer from the new study noting selection effects when choosing what tasks to include in the study.
“my head’s going to explode if I try to do too much the old fashioned way because it’s like trying to get across the city walking when all of a sudden I was more used to taking an Uber.” — a developer from the new study noting selection effects when choosing what tasks to include in the study.
These quotes don’t demonstrate that LLMs actually help, only that they are addictive, which we already know to be true. If you’ve ever tried to talk to an addict about their problem you’d recognise this language.
Yep. I did mention that there were selection effects. (Also, I've talked to many hardcore drug and alcohol addicts. They're very different 😆)
Especially the quote that they could do something in 2 hours with an LLM that would take 20 hours alone. That can’t be true, that person is definitely wrong about the effect of the LLM. If it were really that effective, LLM companies would be clamouring to show the data that proves how effective their products are. Why aren’t they?
*sigh* Alright, I guess we can zoom in on this one too...
Especially the quote that they could do something in 2 hours with an LLM that would take 20 hours alone. That can’t be true, that person is definitely wrong about the effect of the LLM.
This seems pretty speculative. Do you know what their task was? Do you know what the quality of the result was?
If it were really that effective, LLM companies would be clamouring to show the data that proves how effective their products are. Why aren’t they?
Ok, there are some more assumptions here...
companies would be clamouring to show the data that proves how effective their products are.
You assume they're not?
Why aren’t they?
You assume that the only possible reason is because they can't? Could there be no other possible reasons?
Here's one possible explanation that comes to mind: There have been deals made between rival AI companies because more compute capacity simply does not exist yet. I doubt Anthropic was super happy to buy compute from xAI, but they've been continuously pissing off their non-enterprise customers by tightening usage limits, doing dumb things with their APIs to detect and bill different use cases (e.g., OpenClaw) at different rates, etc. They have to honor SLAs for their enterprise customers, so they've been throttling their less-profitable customers while scrambling to secure more compute power.
Onward...
The fact this data is so hard to find and so hard to fund when there are so many billions being dumped into this field should tell you something, it should be deeply disturbing, but you just carry on fully convinced that you’re right and that there’s nothing to what I’m saying, even though you admitted you would’ve agreed just 3 months ago. Again, if you can actually show that the difference is so dramatic, then show it. You’re not though.
Yeah I think I've made it pretty clear why. No need to bruise more horse carcasses.
Anyway, my apologies for splitting this paragraph. You finished this one out with another assumption:
You’re just convinced that you don’t need to re-evaluate what you believe. That doesn’t say good things about where your head’s at.
And then wrapping up with more assumption:
If you truly weren’t trying to convince me, you could just stop. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove by continuing.
You assume that I'm trying to convince you of something? And that the only possible reason for me engaging with you is that I want to prove something?
I promise, I can't sell you AI. Like, even if I had some crazy sales skills, I still physically couldn't fulfill that sale. I only have one GPU in my home server, and it's not even enough for myself. I have nothing to gain here.
Anyway, I think it might be more productive to just put this thread on ice. It's starting to get a bit repetitive/circular at this point. Could be interesting to revisit this in a year though, to see how things have progressed 🙂
Ohhh, great points. I considered most of those things, but somehow didn't even consider the potential consequences of downtime. Maybe I'll only self-host an email service for throwaway email addresses then, and not for important things.
Thanks for the insight.
Setting the "US defaultism" (or whatever it's called) thing aside for the sake of staying on-topic... People on both sides do the TL;DR thing. Sure, more academic/scholarly types tend to lean left, but that doesn't mean that everyone who leans left is an academic/scholarly type. If you assume that people who do that on Lemmy are MAGA, I'd confidently bet that you're correct less than 50% of the time (again, that's not even considering the users outside of the US).
This behavior predates the entire existence of MAGA and the massive divide between right and left. Many pre-2016 e-commerce copywriters would probably know what I'm talking about. For example, Amazon puts those five "About this item" bullet-points near the top of product pages, way above the actual product description. It's not some politically-driven design; it's just from research and testing. It's a very important area when creating an effective Amazon listing, especially the first and last bullet-points – because yes, plenty of people don't even bother reading all five before quickly scanning the first and last. (Many of them don't even realize that they do this until someone points it out.)
BTW, insulting people (i.e. saying they're like MAGA people) is probably a very ineffective strategy for influencing them into reading more of your writings. Again, just basic human behavior stuff (there's a famous Dale Carnegie book about these things).
At least consume a lot of movies and TV shows, and I mean a lot, all of IMDB’s top 250 movies, shows, animations, even if it’s background noise in a secondary monitor.
Just to add another suggestion to this: Audiobooks while physically busy (driving, exercising, repairing/tinkering with something, etc.)
I searched "bricks minifigs" (to cover both "Brick & Minifigs" and "Bricks and Minifigs") to see if anyone on Lemmy was talking about this. I got no results from that, but I found this post by searching "Reckless Ben".
Just in case anyone is interested in more, here's Bricks & Minifigs' blog post about the matter, and Reckless Ben's reaction to the Bricks & Minifigs blog post.
The whole thing is kinda mind-blowing (even the fact that a Star Wars Lego collection could be worth $200k). It gets much worse in part 2, which is currently paywalled, but I think it'll get published for free after some time.
Anyway, hopefully this makes the post more searchable :)
It gets wayyyy worse in part two.
Why do people use apps that are made for reading, and then complain about a long read?
If I had to guess, maybe the average post contains an amount of text that is within a comfortable range, and posts that greatly exceed that range may be undesirable.
Alternatively, maybe some of them read some of the text, then decide that it's not interesting enough to read the rest.
Just guessing though.
Why would people listen or trust someone who probably can’t finish a book?
I may have missed some context here. Did someone who probably can't finish a book ask you to listen to or trust them?
Let alone a few paragraphs in an app made for reading, literally. I don’t get it.
Many other social media platforms are also text-based, and long-form text is consumed less. That's just how a lot of people are.
It’s such a MAGA thing to do.
MAGA people also breathe air and drink water. Not every human trait is political; that would be silly.
Ah that sucks. Honestly, with their sales volume, it would have been worth it to raise my prices on the other platforms to comply with Amazon... Which sucks.
Good to know though. I've been somewhat considering getting back into it if/when AI kills my current career.
This is just a statement of faith in your ability to judge these things accurately. Nowhere in here do I see any evidence that you’ve even considered that the reason you’ve changed your attitude towards the tech is that it’s just gotten so good at fooling people that it’s finally got you.
Yet in all of your replies, you seem to have assumed early on that I've been fooled, based on outdated data. Do you just assume that newer data just doesn't exist anywhere, and I'm lying about it? (To be clear: I wouldn't blame you. There's an old proverb: "Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see," or something like that.)
you could gain a lot from being more sceptical
Another assumption that I wasn't skeptical.
Anyway, the rest of your reply continues with the assumption that there was no data or objectivity on my part, so I won't keep beating a dead horse. Just wait for newer data. It might be old by the time you see it, but still useful.
Edit: I suppose the number of recent layoffs might be useful (or at least interesting) data. Suddenly many different, unrelated companies had too many engineers – quite a contrast to the engineer shortage just a few years ago. Correlation ≠ causation and all, but interesting nonetheless.
Edit 2: I just noticed this paragraph in that link you shared:
And even for complex coding projects like the ones studied, the researchers are also optimistic that further refinement of AI tools could lead to future efficiency gains for programmers. Systems that have better reliability, lower latency, or more relevant outputs (via techniques such as prompt scaffolding or fine-tuning) “could speed up developers in our setting,” the researchers write. Already, they say there is “preliminary evidence” that the recent release of Claude 3.7 “can often correctly implement the core functionality of issues on several repositories that are included in our study.”
Claude 3.7 was released in February 2025. Also, I highly doubt 3.7 was good enough to make engineers more productive, overall (though I don't have data on those old models). Relative to the speed of evolution of LLMs, harnesses, and people's skills in using them, the data behind this article is ancient.
Edit 3:
In that article you shared, they link to the study in the second paragraph. Follow that link, and you'll see this at the top:
Update: In February 2026, we published new data on the productivity impact of late-2025 AI tools.
There were selection effects in the follow-up study, but seemed worth mentioning anyway.
Having different prices for different marketplaces? No, I think that was fine back then (almost ~10 years ago), but not sure about now. And if it wasn't I guess I just didn't get caught 🙂. My prices were highest on Amazon, lower on eBay, and lowest on my site. Amazon had the highest sales volume by far though.
You couldn't directly advertise your website to Amazon customers though, if that's what you mean. Some sellers had other ways... I think I remember some sellers including a small card in their packages that would say something like "Register your purchase at https://... to extend your return period" (or activate a warranty, receive a coupon code for another purchase, etc.). Or maybe it would ask them to send an email instead of going to a URL (Amazon sellers can't see their customers' email addresses). Something like that.
When I was an Amazon seller, I loved when people did this, and my website prices were always lower. Amazon takes such a large chunk from each sale.
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I'm kinda happy that this is possible in Linux now. I remember when even the "easy" distros were still not user friendly enough for mass adoption
You’ve been given evidence that people cannot trust their own perceptions of what these agents do, and you replied by telling a bunch of stories about why you think you personally can trust your perceptions. My 12-year-old did the same thing when I tried to explain this to them.
You asked for data. I (probably) can't give you the data, so I gave you what I could: a few things gleaned from both objective data (collected from a significant number of engineers) and my own anecdotal experience. You are free to disregard it, and I wouldn't even blame you. There are lots of fools on the internet, and there's a decent chance that I'm just another one 🙂.
Engineers being spread thinner to manage a wider number of tasks whilst reviewing shitty LLM noise that they didn’t write is inevitably going to make horrible code that’s impossible to maintain and will cost massive amounts of time and resources in the long run.
This was true a year ago. Even like seven months ago. Hell, even three months ago, I would have agreed with you a LOT more than I do today – mostly because I was just forced learn these things more in-depth quite recently. "Shitty LLM noise" is a very early part of the learning curve. In a way, it's similar to "Hello world." Discard it and figure out how get more useful results.
In many companies that have adopted AI, engineers are still responsible for their code. Any slop in the codebase is the fault of the engineer that introduced it (and the engineer[s] that reviewed it), regardless of whether it's hand-written or generated. So far, I have not seen anyone merge unmaintainable, "shitty LLM noise" into enterprise codebases – that would be very risky. (It probably happens in other places like Microsoft, I just haven't seen it myself. It would be unacceptable.)
Anyway, you'll see all this eventually, when some data gets published. I'd gain nothing by convincing anyone of this, so I won't try 🙂.
I can’t get into the heads of it’s creators
That wouldn't be necessary anyway. A lot of that history is still on the internet today. You can even go all the way back to when the original creator first introduced it in some old newsgroup/mailing list.
addresses the wrong problems incorrectly, to the detriment of what needs to be addressed
Maybe it wasn't intended to address the problems that you have in mind? (Care to share?)
zero error-protection
I'm curious what you mean by this. I mean, taken literally, it's just simply false; there is a non-zero amount of error protection. Are you thinking of like a specific type of error or protection?
For criminal usage those cons are outweigh by the fact that it’s anonymous and is outside of the laws. For running scams you couldn’t create better environment.
It's very traceable... because of the way that it is (it's a public ledger). You could absolutely create better environments for nefarious activity. Don't use Bitcoin if you want privacy.
You can also gamble on it’s volatility.
Yeahhh... Not like it used to be though. It was WILDLY volatile, years ago. I don't think we'll see any more people going from middle class to having hundreds of millions of dollars worth of old bitcoin they mined years ago. (Though I'm sure people will still continue to lose plenty when the value spikes then crashes again.)
Whether or not it was created with crimes in mind or not is not even that relevant.
Oh. Maybe I misunderstood your analogy then.
Just to clarify: I don't even want to defend Bitcoin. I'm not a fan of it, it's environmentally nasty, and I really don't know why the Nostr people love it so much (though I'm sure they'll happily explain if asked). I just prefer information to be accurate. It kinda bums me out how much info on the internet is inaccurate due to people who aren't an authority on a topic, speaking with authority on the topic. It's perfectly fine not to know stuff. We were born not knowing stuff.
Unfortunately, I don't know what data I can share, so I'll err on the side of caution and share none 🙂. But I suppose I can share a little more general insight:
Modern "agentic" (yeah I'm tired of that word too) techniques, patterns, and tools, paired with modern LLMs allow for much more autonomy than what was available a year ago.
Are agents faster than skilled engineers per task? No, not in most cases. But they allow engineers to scale horizontally, knocking out many tasks in parallel.
That's the performance gain: Foster autonomy for horizontal scaling. Build/optimize projects'
AGENTS.mdandSKILL.mdfiles[^1].Agents can work for some long runs (some engineers even run them overnight), given a safe environment/project with guardrails — mostly the same guardrails that human engineers have had for years: Statically typed languages, TDD, good test coverage, code reviews (both agents and human[^2]), CI pipelines, etc.
They still need human engineers to operate them; the workflow is just different now, and there's a learning curve for it.
Whether we like it or not (personally, I miss the old days), this is just how it is now. We have not even reached the peak yet. This is the least autonomous that agents will ever be.
[^1]: The bigger the repo, the more important this probably is. Structure them so they don't bloat the context windows with unnecessary info.
[^2]: I usually wait for the AI agent review cycles to settle first — no need to spend human engineering time on potential slop that will probably get fixed autonomously.
I've been curious about self-hosting email, but I heard it's a big hassle and outgoing mail often ends up in the recipients' spam folders. Did you have to deal with that too?
That's from almost a year ago. I'm sure it was accurate at the time, but LLMs got a lot more useful around December 2025 or so. Tooling for them has also evolved a lot since then.
Factorio @lemmy.world Public multiplayer games?
Dogs @lemmy.world I had to say goodbye to my closest companion today.
Most agent harnesses do something called "compaction." For example, here's how Pi does compaction