it's not "productive", of course, but i don't see any issue with expressing this opinion whatsoever. and i say this being about as starry-eyed a techno-llm-utopian-esque dreamer as they come... sure, the "google" version of LLMs paving over industry has already crossed the rubicon, but everyone should have to reckon the value that they are truly providing not just for consumers but for producers as well... and no one should be offended by showing up in someone's robots.txt... just as i'm sure this commenter is realistic enough to know and understand that putting entries in one's robots.txt is nothing more than a principled, aspirational statement about how the world should be, rather than any sort of real technological impediment.

(but we'll just ignore the obvious irony in that end bit about detection of bots getting smarter... wonder where all this "intelligence" will come from? probably not some natural source, but possibly some sort of... Antinatural Intelligence?)

I thoroughly enjoyed this article. I had no idea that Nolan Bushnell / Atari was behind the original Chuck E. Cheese, but in retrospect it makes so much sense. What an amazing playfulness and somewhat crazy thing for them to do-- i don't think having the kind of success Atari had was an accident when you read about visionary, long-term stuff like that (even if the venture itself didn't technically work out that well for Atari / Bushnell _this_ time...).

anyone else having trouble giving them money? i desperately want to consume this product and they won't let me...

i had a sense from afar that this was the reality, but if even half of this stuff is true it is very, very damning. and, sadly, highly unsurprising.

Have you read the paywalled content? Can you summarize?

well true to your name you are reducing it to a boolean dilemma

this sounds more like citing chapter and verse in an exegesis than anything of direct relevance to the Mortal Plane...

"worked"

(not that i don't get the sarcasm)

or installing software to jiggle the mouse every so often so that the computer with the spreadsheet that runs the company doesn't go to sleep

Still infinitely cheaper than rebuilding the spreadsheet tbh.

Sure, you worship the God of Quality until you realize that memory leak is being caused by a 3rd party library (extra annoying when you could have solved it yourself) or a quirky stdlib implementation

Then you realize it's a paper idol and the best you can do is suck less than the average.

Thanks for playing Wing Commander!

>> Thanks for playing Wing Commander!

captain america voice I got that reference :-)

> "certain kind" of discipline, indeed... not the good kind.

Not OP but this is a somewhat normal case of making a tradeoff? They aren't able to repair it at the moment (or rather don't want/can't allocate the time for it) and instead trade their ressource usage for stability and technical debt.

that's because the judge(s) and executioner(s) aren't engineers, and the jury is not of their peers. and for the record i have a hard time faulting the non-engineers above so-described... they are just grasping for things they can understand and have input on. who wouldn't want that? it's not at all reasonable for the keepers of the pursestrings to expect a certain amount of genuflection by way of self-justification. no one watches the watchers... but they're the ones watching, so may as well present them with a verisimilitudinous rendition of reality... right?

but, as a discipline, engineers manage to encourage the ascent of the least engineer-ly (or, perhaps, "hacker"-ly) among them ("us") ...-selves... through their sui generis combination of learned helplessness, willful ignorance, incorrigible myopia, innate naïvete, and cynical self-servitude that signify the Institutional (Software) Engineer. coddled more than any other specialty within "the enterprise", they manage to simultaneously underplay their hand with respect to True Leverage (read: "Power") and overplay their hand with respect to complices of superiority. i am ashamed and dismayed to recall the numerous times i have heard (and heard of) comments to the effect of "my time is too expensive for this meeting" in the workplace... every single one of which has come not from the managerial class-- as one might reasonably, if superficially, expect-- but from the software engineer rank and file.

to be clear: i don't think it's fair to expect high-minded idealism from anyone. but if you are looking for the archetypical "company person"... engineers need look no further than their fellow podmates / slack-room-mates / etc. and thus no one should be surprised to see the state of the world we all collectively hath wrought.

I dig your vibe. whaddya working on these days?