Oftentimes comically lower. I remember in Chicago the interstates having posted speed limits of 45mph... the average flow of traffic outside of rush hour was easily north of 70mph.
Looking even at normal arterial streets, many streets in Seattle are marked 25, but you'd be hard-pressed to find even a cop going under 30 most of the time.
I truly don't understand US road design. The construction of the road and the posted speed limit almost never are even gently correlated other than on a few select residential side streets in a few select cities who have rebuilt streets based on safety studies.
> I remember in Chicago the interstates having posted speed limits of 45mph... the average flow of traffic outside of rush hour was easily north of 70mph.
This comment seems a bit odd to me. I Google about it and learned (from various sources):
> 45 mph (72 km/h) in downtown Chicago, where all the major interstates merge
This excludes construction or work zones.
That seems pretty reasonable. I've seen a few places in the US where several major interstates merge and the post speed limit is quite low -- 45-55 mph.
While I am with you on hoping, someone shamelessly PRing slop just is not going to feel shame when one of their efforts fail. It’s like being mean to a phone scammer, they just hang up and do it again
Cheap, nearly free voice phone calls killed old fashioned phone service. Once the incoming spam exceeded 95% I shut off the ringer and no longer use voice phone calls.
Once the cost of generating push media drops low enough (close enough to zero) the media is dead.
Pull requests are (ironically) a push media, and infinite zero effort PRs can be generated, therefore PRs are dead.
The proper way to handle the situation is to no longer accept PRs.
In github, enter a repo, "settings" "General" scroll down to Features, then uncheck "Pull requests". Or at least set to collaborators only. Probably need to shut off issues.
It gitlab, (I'm not as certain about this) enter a repo, "Settings", Visibility, "Merge Requests" change to "Only project members"
Its a post AI world, those features cannot be enabled on the internet anymore. Anything that accepts push from the public will get spammed into inability to use it. As a social activity PRs are dead. They were nice, but they are dangerous to leave enabled on the internet now. Oh well thats the cost of AI.
I think some folks genuinely don’t realize how selfish and destructive they’re being or at least believe they help more than they hinder. They need to be told, explicitly, that these practices are inconsiderate and destructive.
We need to develop some ethics, or at least, "community standards" (as they may vary significantly between different use cases) around the some of the things this essay talks about. I know I've really been pondering the mismatch between human attention and the ability of LLMs to generate things that consume human attention.
We are still mostly running on inertia where a PR required a certain amount of human attention to generate 500 lines of proposed changes, and even then, nothing stops such PR from being garbage. But at least the rate at which such garbage PRs was bounded by the rate at which you had that very specific level of developer that was A: capable of writing 500 lines of diffs in the first place but B: didn't realize these particular 500 lines is a bad idea. Certainly not an empty set, but also certainly much more restricted than "everyone with the ability to set up a code bot and type something".
Code used to be rare, and therefore, worth a lot. Now it's not rare. 1500 lines of 2026 code is not the same as 1500 lines of 2006 code. The ceiling of the value of a contribution is in how much work the user put it and how high quality the work is. If "the work the user put in" is 30 seconds typing a prompt, that's the value, no matter how many lines of code some AI expanded that into. I'd honestly rather have an Issue filed with your proposed prompt in it than the actual output of your AI, if that's all you're going to put into the PR. There's a lot of things I can do with that prompt that may make it better but it's way harder to do that with the code.
You know, stuff like that. That might actually be a useful counter to some of these slop posts, especially things that are something that may be a good idea but need someone to treat the prompt itself as a starting point rather than the code. Maybe that's a decent response that's somewhat less hostile; close out these PRs with a request to file an Issue with the prompt instead.
I see plenty of well meaning people use ChatGPT and think they’re being helpful. You’re better off with patience and polite explanation than assuming they’re all cynical/selfish assholes trying to cut corners. Some people just get excited and don’t really think about what they’re doing. It doesn’t excuse the behavior, but you should at least try to explain it to them once. Never know when you might educate someone.
I've seen a variety of approaches used (I'm not usually the one doing the confronting) but I still haven't seen any shame, etc. Which is weird, because it's not like it's one monolithic group? But it's still what I've seen.
It might be that people have their change of heart more privately, of course.
No when people attend courses, paying money for the privilege no less, and get told "Now open a pull request" they don't care about your project - they care about getting their instructor to say they've done a good job.
It's actually a valuable signal to the phone scammer if you're mean, because that means they can stop wasting their own effort of scamming you, and call somebody else.
That is hilarious. I love that you believe that. Being mean to a phone scammer is about your feelings and your time. They do not care. More importantly, the next person who calls you is not gonna be the same person. It’s like slamming the door on some Mormons expecting that that’ll be the end of that, when there’s just two entirely different Mormons that are gonna come by a month later. They cannot have a memory of the thing you did to the other Mormons.
Congratulations for not getting the point. Which was that for the scammer this is a business transaction, and if they can get an early signal that it is not going to work, they can cancel and get to the next one. So they optimize for any potential candidates to get off as early as possible if they figure it isn't going to happen.
To each their own. The OS is easily one of the most frustrating I’ve ever been required to use. It does some things very well, but many things absolutely infuriatingly.
Now, yes, almost everything about Apple’s hardware UX is a light year ahead of most competitors. That’s been true for ages.
It’s quite possible this is running with a reduced color space (chroma subsampling). Degradation happens automatically based on available throughput and most people don’t notice.
I had no idea what it was for the longest time. As it turns out, macOS frequently enables it even when it’s unnecessary, and without any way to override.
You write that in italics as if to imply it’s a law that cannot be questioned. Quite a number of shops do not engineer software like that, or only engineer software like that where it fits the environment the software lives in, or otherwise sit at numerous points along the gradient between “software engineering as it has been known for decades” and “fully computer generated software”.
The laws of scale are stone cold bitches, and so you really don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing. By 2030 writing code by hand in an IDE will almost certainly be a curiosity for retro enthusiasts, like programming a C64 in BASIC is now. The field as a profession will be unrecognizable and, as things become more automated and even self-improving, have far fewer people working in it, by 2030.
I think some or maybe even many of those shortcomings will apply to software, too. Making actual good software is not as trivial as writing “make me an app”, much as making an actual good spoon is not as trivial as throwing an STL at a printer and calling it a day.
VSCode is not a “given” - I certainly don’t use, or ever intend to use, it.
Patch files are excellent for small diffs at a glance. Sure, I can also `git remote add coworker ssh://fork.url` and `git diff origin/main..coworker/branch`, and that would even let me use Difftastic (!), but the patch is entirely reasonable for quick glances of small branch diffs.
Tell me about it. I remember being able to snag a nice room at a Courtyard/Hampton caliber of hotel for like $100 in 2016-18 timeframe. Based on https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2016?amount=100 I would expect that to cost about $135 now if adjusting only for (hyper)inflation. It instead tends to cost something like $175-225/night. WTAF.
Not quite third world country, but yes, the 25-35% built-in discount when visiting Vancouver or Victoria from Seattle or Bellingham is quite nice :) Similar discounts to visiting the Midwest, with none of the Midwest part!
Looking even at normal arterial streets, many streets in Seattle are marked 25, but you'd be hard-pressed to find even a cop going under 30 most of the time.
I truly don't understand US road design. The construction of the road and the posted speed limit almost never are even gently correlated other than on a few select residential side streets in a few select cities who have rebuilt streets based on safety studies.
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