turboSnail

It’s very easy
Anyone can do this now
Even you and me

Same with industrial automation, power grid, production management, etc. Most people don’t even realise how much critical software is Windows-only.

LOL. Now this acronym actually makes a lot more sense.

Thanks!

LE and ND?

Not everyone lives in the acronym country.

That’s generally true. Personally, I enjoy using a laptop way more than using a mobile device of any kind.

However, modern life is beginning to require mobile apps (Android or iOS). More and more things simply aren’t available as a website or FOSS. You have to have a vanilla mainstream mobile device to do certain things like using your bank account. I really hate that.

Hardware peripherals are another area that really sucks. If you want to enjoy the comforts of modern life, many people just bow down and use one of the two mobile platforms in order to use their smart ring/scale/lights/curtains/heating/car, etc.

Resisting all that is getting increasingly difficult, because there’s so much to resist. On the other hand, resisting is also becoming increasingly appealing as enshittification intensifies.

Likewise, climate change isn’t really a technological problem. Governments don’t motivate companies stop destroying the planet, so they don’t. Obviously, there are some technological issues too, but for the most part, it’s a political issue.

If there’s a way around the legislation, they’ll definitely take it. If you know of an exploit in the system or if you’re best buddies with the local king, laws suddenly cease to matter.

Very interesting… I guess my calculations can be supercharged while still technically remaining in the realm of a spreadsheet.

Hopefully Python still runs with its usual consistency. VBA is a total nightmare in this regard. The code can randomly throw some useless error for no obvious reason. You can run the same code a few hours later and everything works perfectly even though you didn’t change anything. Can’t really use anything that unstable for anything serious.

“Don’t Bite The Hand That Feeds You”. LLMs seem to have internalized this rule pretty well. I can imagine that this idea can also be taken much further. Basically like trying to search “Tiananmen Square massacre” on the wrong side of the Great Firewall of China.

Well, what if LLMs were instructed to not talk about “sensitive topics” like that? After all, more and more people are already using an LLM as a search engine replacement, so it’s only natural that Microsoft and OpenAI might receive some interesting letters about implementing very specific limitations.

No need to add any more than you usually do. Just leave the ones you are unable to see. Besides, LLMs tend to write in overly grand style, whereas humans can’t be bothered to use every trick in the book. Humans just get to the point and skip all the high-impact language that LLMs seem to love.

Yep. Money steers the decision making process. Politics determines how money works, and companies just go with the flow.

LOL. So true.
On top of that, an LLM can also take you on a wild goose chase. When it gives you trash, you tell it to find a way to fix it. It introduces new layers of complication and installs new libraries without ever really approaching a solution. It’s up to the programmer to notice a wild goose chase like that and pull the plug early on.

That’s a fun little mini-game that comes with vibe coding.

Super lazy job applications… can’t even bother to put two minutes into vibing.

I totally agree with you. Politics is the correct arena for this.

Those who work at the IT department of a company have some authority in this matter too, and they can convince the executives to channel the resources for the migration. If you’re in any other part of the organization tree, your words have less weight.

If laws are written first, and companies react after that, it’s not going to be a very smooth landing, but I still think this is the most likely outcome. Ideally, smart IT people in various companies would bring this up as a potential risk to daily operations. This way, companies would have more time to react before the laws are enforced.

My guess is, most executives won’t give any money to a migration project of this magnitude unless the future of the company depends on it. There needs to be some sort of impending doom in the horizon, before they start reacting. Maybe massive fines or a total collapse of the IT infrastructure would do it.

How about asking it to write a short political speech on climate change. Then, just count the number of rhetoric devices and em-dashes. A human dev wouldn’t be bothered to write anything fancy or impactful when they just want to submit a bug fix. It would be simple, poorly written, and filled with typos. LLMs try to make it way too impressive and impactful.

That’s how you know who never even tried to run the code.

Alternatively, sell your account to spammers, and they’ll get your account banned in no time. Your comments get deleted, you’ll get paid for it, and Reddit becomes worse for everyone. I see no downsides in this arrangement.

Can confirm! Calc is fine as long as you’re not trying to do anything too advanced. Then again, when you bump into those limits, you might want to consider switching to R or Python anyway. Excel just allows you to delay that inevitability a little bit longer.

Now there’s a business opportunity. When companies are that screwed, they’ll start the project immediately. That’s when system migration consults get rich.