Internal corporate tooling can be greatly improved by promoting scheduled "water cooler chat on steroids" calls between engineers/designers/product/tpms/managers and the actual users.
What's nice is that these sessions bleed into everything. You don't need to look through users' eyes that many times to find great improvement in UX sensibilities.
Since scheduling is the biggest pain point here, I just built a scheduler and a signup form at work. Everyone who gets a session walks away with positive feedback, the company as a whole becomes more interconnected, and now I'm working to get more and more folk on board.
My goal is to unleash a whole flotilla of white collar workers who understand the value of talking to the users such that they too push for lightweight, no action item, scheduled sessions which becomes standard practice as part of our careers and we all end up with better software as a whole.
That is _nuts_ that the basketball season is longer than the MLB season. I never would have guessed that.
Let's go Jays! Looking forward to this World Series.
Also not a fan of the constant inundation with gambling ads even if they have literally no interest to me. Just seems like a net negative for a society that realized cigarette ads are bad, but can't seem to figure that out for alcohol or gambling.
At least the public education campaigns have started earlier, I definitely see ads talking about where to get help if you're having an issue fairly frequently.
Public education is one thing. But kids aren't protected from the ads and can't even have reasonable discussions about it. They're just being brainwashed around it. They see superstars and celebrities endorsing it all. Then all the language around it is "play" and "game" and "fun" and "win" which has very specific appeal to children. The prominence also makes it seem vetted and okay in a kids eyes (if it were bad, it wouldn't be in these places). I'd legitimately rather my kids see ads for smoking cigarettes. The conversations to be had around it are much much easier. Gambling and other psychological addictions are tougher to convey, but potentially very damaging nonetheless.
I understand, and am against the constant advertising of it.
But it's also important to remember just how successful the smoking psa campaign has been. Especially given the cost! Rates have fallen dramatically, just by telling people to "watch out!" in public spaces that reach young folks ears.
I don't think it's easy to attribute it to any specific part of the 'campaign' -- it's multifaceted. Making it illegal to smoke in public spaces may be the single most important part of reducing smoking in subsequent generations. There's also taxes. And removing it from media (we hardly see people smoke on camera unless it's for a 'period piece'). And just straight up treating it like a health issue.
We could be doing equivalent things for gambling (and we have in the past) so this erosion will have consequences for decades.
All these comments assume that 30 million is _all_ the mob has made with these machines, and that the tech must be very expensive.
Usually when they pull out the big piles of drugs for the TVs, I assume that's the tip of the iceberg. So why is it that here, with four families involved, we think the only money they've made is what's been shown to us?
Also, x-ray tables, rigged card shufflers, and funny glasses don't necessarily sound like they're the most expensive things in the world.
So my guess is...
Combined with these fellas other hustles this was probably a nice chunk of change to bring in for a relatively low amount of work post initial set up. I mean, you're sitting around playing rigged poker with a bunch of millionaires and basketball players or whatever. Probably having some drinks, I'd imagine there's pretty ladies around, cigars, cocaine. Whatever.
Sounds more relaxing than extorting deli owners block by block like all those movies about the 70s show.
And the best part? The people you're robbing are probably much less likely to resort to violence as recourse.
To every billionaire in America right now who can read this...
I haven't used any of the AI stuff that's been released so far. It doesn't appear to have affected my day to day in any manner but I'm not particularly connected in the first place I suppose.
But this browser, with the AI on the top of it? I haven't used it yet. But it sounds life changing. I'll be surprised if I have a job in three weeks now that this is out. And coming off that Sora drop? DAMN! Haven't used that either but I heard it's a really expensive tic tac that gets boring after 10 minutes.
Anyways, please give all your money to Sam Altman. He needs 7 trillion dollars. And with results like these, the path forward must be paved with gold. So pour, all of your money, right into this one, please.
I don't know if this is true. A pack of cigarettes in Virginia costs... what 4 bucks? 5?
Those Virginia taxed cigarettes are sold in NYC for 10 bucks a pack now or 1 dollar a loosey (a... friend told me). That's 2x on packs and 4x on looseys.
That gives you a pretty healthy margin before busts could impact your profits.
Presumably you're also buying them in bulk in Virginia for cheaper than the 4 or 5 dollar store price too.
Cigarettes are probably a nickel a piece coming off the line?
A nickel!?? Good heavens probably the whole pack full doesn't even cost a nickel to manufacture. Manufacturing cost per cigarette must surely be waaay under a penny. Disregarding marketing and distribution expenses of course.
They just use prevailing wind routes, and toss tons of balloons up, and have 'em float over the border cause cigarette taxes are so high in Europe that it's worth it.
And then there's people waiting along the wind path to pick up the balloons as they come down.
There's a lot of inefficiencies built into smuggling operations. You can absolutely grab huge amounts of smuggled items in busts and not end up denting profits for the smugglers cause they're smuggling so much (see cocaine, fentanyl, cigarettes in blue states in America).
I wouldn't entirely rule out the Russians or Belarussions doing probing moves, but the Enforcer's been a great source of information for these events as they occur.
I don't think that's really the point of this post; it's all about how LLMs are destroying our craft (ie, "I really like using knives!"), not really about whether the food is better.
I think the real problem is that it's actually increasingly difficult to defend the artisanal "no-AI" approach. I say this as a prior staff-level engineer at a big tech company who has spent the last six months growing my SaaS to ~$100k in ARR, and it never could have happened without AI. I like the kind of coding the OP is talking about too, but ultimately I'm getting paid to solve a problem for my customers. Getting too attached to the knives is missing the point.
Call me crazy, but my guess is that that may not have been able to happen without the decade of experience it took you to get to the Staff level engineering position at a big tech company which has enabled you to gain the skills required to review the AI code you're producing properly.
I thought it's interesting that GPT5's comments (on prompting it for feedback on the article) seem to overlap with some of the points you guys made:
My [GPT5's -poster's note] take / Reflections
I find the article a useful provocation:
it asks us to reflect on what we value in being programmers.
It’s not anti-AI per se, but it is anti-losing-the-core craft.
For someone in your position (in *redacted* / Europe)
it raises questions about what kind of programming work you want:
deep, challenging, craft-oriented, or more tool/AI mediated.
It might also suggest you think about building skills
that are robust to automation: e.g., architecture,
critical thinking, complex problem solving, domain knowledge.
The identity crisis is less about “will we have programmers” and
more “what shapes will programming roles take”.
Absolutely. But, what if the point of using the knives, is to be able to understand how to use the machines which can use knives for us, and if we're not replicating the learning part, where do we end up?
It's both. Speaking as a user, software quality was already declining before AI coding, but AI seems to have put that process on a fast track now (not the least because of all the top management drinking the Kool-Aid and deciding that they can replace the people they have with it).
Configuring editors, dot files, and dev environments consistently adds value by giving you familiarity with your working environment, honing your skills with your tools, and creating a more productive space tailored to your needs.
Who else becomes the go to person for modifying build scripts?
The amount of people I know who have no idea how to work with Git after decades in the field using it is pretty amazing. It's not helpful for everyone else when you're the one they're delegating their merge conflict bullshit too cause they've never bothered to learn anything about the tools they're using.
How dumbed down does everything need to be? Git has warts for sure, but this whole ideas guy no actual understanding of anything is how you get trainwrecks. There is no free lunch, and you're going to pay one way or another for not understanding the tools of the craft, and that not everything can be ridiculously simple.
Git doesn't just have warts, its DX is actively bad. If it was good you wouldn't have so many tools designed to make it not suck to work with 20 years after release. The graph first and diff first design decisions are both bad choices that are probably burning millions of man hours per year fixing things that should just work (to be fair, they were the right decisions at the time, times have changed).
It's pretty great if you understand how to do resets, interactive rebases, understand the differences between merges and rebases, keep your commit history fairly clean, and just work with the tool. I haven't had a problem with Git since I spent a day going through the git book something like 10 years ago.
Meanwhile this is in a discussion about tools which people spend incalculable amounts of hours tuning, for reference. The number of articles on Hacker News about how people have tuned their LLM setups is... grand to say the least.
The issue is with the problem space - version control and reconciliation is hard. The fact we even have software to automate 99% of it is amazing.
Lawyers spend literally hundreds of hours doing just that. Well, their paralegals do.
Git is a legitimately amazing tool, but it can't magically make version control free. You still have to think because ultimately software can't decide which stuff is right and which is wrong.
What about any tool, language, library, or codebase that is unnecessarily complex? Should we never bother to put in the effort to learn to use them? It doesn't mean they are without value to us as programmers. For better or worse, the hallmark of many good programmers I've met is a much higher than average tolerance for sitting down and just figuring out how something computer-related works instead of giving up and routing around it.
Maybe Git is too complicated for hobby users, because it has a steep learning curve. But after two weeks using you now enough to handle things, so it shouldn't be a problem in any professional environment.
What's nice is that these sessions bleed into everything. You don't need to look through users' eyes that many times to find great improvement in UX sensibilities.
Since scheduling is the biggest pain point here, I just built a scheduler and a signup form at work. Everyone who gets a session walks away with positive feedback, the company as a whole becomes more interconnected, and now I'm working to get more and more folk on board.
My goal is to unleash a whole flotilla of white collar workers who understand the value of talking to the users such that they too push for lightweight, no action item, scheduled sessions which becomes standard practice as part of our careers and we all end up with better software as a whole.
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