Before AI was a thing, I tried a few times to post a question on reddit. Something like "Any recommendations for solving X? I've already tried Y, and it didn't work because of Z".
Most of the responses were to try Y, even though I clearly stated I had already tried that.
The others were telling me I was wrong about Z (I wasn't), or silly for even wanting X.
I don't consider AI in its current state a significant downgrade. But it seems inevitable that it will get worse.
Online user groups are falling apart because AI gives better answers, isn't looking for an opportunity to condescend to new users, doesn't try to gatekeep by scaring away new users, and doesn't just point you to the FAQ regardless of if your question is answered in there or not, along with the "XY problem pathological case" you noticed. I think AI is only going to get better (unless they enshittify it intentionally).
Just last week, I was with one of my kids trying to kill some time before an appointment. I noticed a toy store in a strip mall, and I asked him if he wanted to check it out. His response was, "What's a toy store?"
We did check it out, and he was pretty disappointed. Even though it was advertised as a STEM-oriented store, half of it was stress balls and jigsaw puzzles.
Recently in La Jolla, where presumably you have high wealth and IQs and tourism, and experienced the same thing—mostly fidget stuff, puzzles, and Lego resellers. The kids were so excited to go in but pretty quickly realized it’s effectively just a physical Amazon home page of mediocre plastic stuff.
2001 set tech jobs back a few years. 2008 wasn't nearly as bad for tech because as money got tight, there was an impetus for companies to invest in tech to cut costs. I think a similar thing might be unfolding now with non-tech companies investing in AI to streamline processes.
I use Cloudflare for a lot of my side projects. It's a pleasure to use, and I manage to stay under the free tier. It does feel like they should be bigger in the cloud space, but I imagine the major players get a lot of revenue from VMs, which is a space Cloudflare has avoided.
Keep them quiet so they do not signal to passers-by that your house is unguarded (especially with the open doors and windows)? Thus make your house safe from unwanted intrusion?
I too had construx. I probably used them more than Lego because they were better suited for large structures. It's a shame they don't make them any more.
Regardless of the debate of whether climate change has intensified hurricanes, it seems odd to blame hurricanes for being a vector for spreading the bugs. Wouldn't the bugs have spread via wind even if it wasn't climate change induced hurricane winds?
The hurricanes spread the insects rapidly over a very large area, within a few days. With so many hurricanes coming so frequently the areal coverage overwhelmed what could have been a response.
It reminds me a bit of one of the reasons Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes didn't catch on. It's difficult to make rectangular furniture work efficiently in a non-rectangular space. Likewise, it's difficult to efficiently use a non-rectangular window on a rectangular monitor.
I'm currently working on an app that needs offline support, and I wish I had something like this when I started.
One of our requirements though is to be able to completely host in our own infrastructure. I know this is open source, but it would be nice if there was a simple path to self hosting.
I'm confused by the messaging that instantdb has been open source... but we haven't been able to host it? What's the story here, and what's the change happening here?
From skimming the linked PR it looks like it's all been open source, but has been tightly coupled to their deployed instance. The PR appears to be decoupling things completely by making all hard coded values configurable.
Most of the responses were to try Y, even though I clearly stated I had already tried that.
The others were telling me I was wrong about Z (I wasn't), or silly for even wanting X.
I don't consider AI in its current state a significant downgrade. But it seems inevitable that it will get worse.