Sorry you're struggling. There are tons of resources out there from people who've been through the same pain and built up techniques to mitigate them. Matt Pocock's YouTube channel is one good starting place, there are many others. One key tip though is - you own the architecture of your application. If your files have become bloated over several rounds of LLM-generated code, that is primarily your responsibility to observe and push back on that, to ensure your repo as a brief but firm AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md to describe architectural non-negotiables and some kind of /code-review skill that you give to a second agent to review the first agent's work against those standards. Worried about LLM changes introducing regressions? That's why you have a test suite, and you read what the agent changes to ensure the tests themselves are still checking for correct behaviour.
Don’t they have Haftpflichtversicherung in Germany? Set up as a sole trader, get good-enough liability insurance, send invoices on Day 1, earn actual money while you wait for however long it takes to get that elusive company registration set up. In Austria as an IT Consultant you get liability insurance under a very reasonable group deal through the Wirtschaftskammer. Pay a bit more to get a private policy with more coverage of that’s important to you. I’d be really surprised if similar options aren’t available to our friends across the Alps.
As soon as you work in a team, it’s irrelevant whether the project actually needs it. There will be someone who convinces stakeholders that it is necessary and then you just have to fall in line and learn the skills knowing that it is most likely one of the 99.9% of projects where it is just overkill.
I guess if you have a subscription with a token allowance that you are not going to use up this week, it’s better to let someone else use those tokens rather than throwing them away. So using the food analogy it’s more like a store giving away unsold sandwiches to the homeless at the end of the day instead of throwing them away.
Absolutely true - witness the enormous upheaval in the north of England’s coal mining communities when all the pits got closed in the 1980s. It wasn’t just individuals but families across generations and entire villages who had defined themselves by the work they did. It was easy for those in Westminster to say it was a sound decision for the national economy as a whole, but apart from leaving the workers high and dry with no other visible opportunities they absolutely failed to reckon with the cultural impact of taking away the very source of people’s sense of identity.
Off topic but: the scroll mechanism on mobile is so horribly irritating and unpredictable that I just can’t be bothered fighting against it to read what sounds like at least a mildly interesting article.
> Where so many see it as the key to a bright future, unlocking untold troves of wisdom, it simply regurgitates…
This needs one of those Wikipedia style [Who?] tags in superscript. I don’t think anyone, at least here on HN, sees AI as anything other than statistical regurgitation of knowledge already produced.
> baptismal parish is the official keeper of your sacramental records
Interesting fact that I (as a Catholic) was not aware of, though I've observed it happening in practice when preparing to marry my wife, who did get all the relevant records from her home parish in a different part of Austria from where we were living at the time.
I'm curious about two things though, if you happen to know them: first is this "offical keeper" thing a Church-wide policy in all countries, not just a de facto tradition in some, and if so is it stated anywhere e.g. in Canon law as a universal practice? Secondly, how does the policy apply to those who were baptized in a non-Catholic church and later converted? Obviously an Anglican (or whatever) parish isn't going to take on the duty of being the official record-keeper for any Catholic sacramental requirements.
Yes but Anglo-Catholic doesn’t mean an Anglo who is Catholic. It means an Anglican who is pretending to be Catholic but without acknowledging the pope’s authority.
That was my initial thought too on seeing the title, having never heard the term before. So I decided to look it up and it turns out there is a whole separate genre called “ANSI art” based on a different tech stack and a naming mistake from history:
- ASCII is a real ANSI standard, the 7-bit character set that we all know and love
- Microsoft, IBM and others extended this to many different 8-bit sets, each with its own “extended” characters in the 128-255 range, often including both graphic symbols and control codes
- one of the more popular ones, windows-1252, became informally known as ANSI because Microsoft hoped that this (and others) would become new ANSI standards (they didn’t)
- people on BBSes and then early websites used this encoding standard to create art using graphic symbols and colour codes that are not available in ASCII art
- due to the optimistic, but ultimately incorrect, naming of both charset and the supporting library, this became known as ANSI art
Who creates value in the art market? Is it the artist who creates the work? Or the dealer who persuades the buyers that the work has value? As a builder I’m attracted to the fantasy that I can create value with my bare hands just by writing code (or telling the AI to write the code), without needing any of those horrible slimy people in suits to build a business around it. Rock n roll man. If you build it, they will come. Is that the reality though? Or just survival bias based on the fact that a few geeks got lucky during the original dotcom boom when they had no competition from actual businessmen?
I find one possible answer to the question “How to make yourself actually do it” is to start by getting into the routine of keeping an engineering notebook - if you are already in the habit of jotting down stream-of-consciousness notes on whatever you are working on at a given time, then Obsidian’s feature to “extract highlighted text into a new note” feature makes it blisteringly easy to file away things you are likely to want to repeat in the future.
No it's not. It's because the meaning of the English word "prove" has changed. It used to mean "test", which could of course have a positive or negative outcome. The modern sense of "successfully demonstrating truth" has caused this phrase to have the opposite of its original meaning.
While you’re at it call Netflix and tell them that marrying a European prince at Christmas isn’t a viable option for most big city career girls. Fiction must be realistic at all times with no idealism or escapism, got it.
Flashback to the days when literally every MS product had “.NET” shoehorned into its name somewhere because they had to show they were hip to this newfangled information superhighway thing. The development platform that still has that name 20 years later was just one of a zillion confusingly named marketing initiatives back then.
I think that campaign followed on from everything being named "Enterprise" something. I still miss the days when SQL Server Management Studio was called "Enterprise Manager"...
Oh jeez, I've literally just typed out a message on Teams to describe a situation where someone deployed breaking DB changes without the accompanied app changes as "a less-than-ideal scenario". Sometimes I forget I have to translate from British for the benefit of everyone else on the team (half in India, half in US, one German)