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Just some thoughts by a guy you don't know.
Also, you should definitely hire me!
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Weeklog for Week 41: October 05 to October 11

Progress

It was a good work week.

We talked about AI at work, and one colleague remarked that we have a professional obligation to incorporate AI into our workflows. So I did a bit of that. Built some tools. Had it do a few things. The outcome is generally... not remarkable. But there's a feeling of power there that's intoxicating, and I certainly understand why everyone feels like they're going so much harder now. And, sure, there are lots of things I wouldn't be able to do as fast on my own. Quality (and ethics) notwithstandingI am annoyed by people who misunderstand that phrase. It does not mean something like “I will ignore ethics...“, instead it means “this thing is shit and ethically bad”., I can have it create things that would be hard for me to do, but not that much faster tbh, since it usually takes three or five or ten iterations until I get the result I want. Can I evaluate the results? Absolutely not. I had other AIs do review, and it was, let's say, mixed. Amongst the 20 review results, there were one or two items that are genuine issues. Will someone without expertise find them, even ask for them, even think to do evaluation? Probably not.
And then there were the other things that I absolutely can do by myself. With the number of iterations it takes, they absolutely took about the same time as hand-coding them, and their quality was shit. I'm not even going to comment more than this: every time I can actually determine the quality of the result, it was bad. The one good thing that came out of it is that I wrote really detailed documents explaining what I want. These are worth a lot, so I'll try and keep doing that.
Then I used it for some thinking tasks. Like, “find ten recipes for sourdough bread, summarise them in a table and give me the optimum middle solution”. Yeah, could've done that myself. And I also did, and better. Having it do the figuring-out for you just robs you of the thought processes and will drop you at the end. You will not know anything, but the documents sure do look pretty!!
So yeah, that went well. My stance continues to be unimpressed. The tools are driven by laziness. And they will make you real dumb real fast. So I'm going to continue using the tools as I did before: guiding, finding, showing. But in the end, I'm going to be the one who decides and who makes.

In the kitchen, I experimented with sodium citrate. Wow, that cheese sauce is soo smooth, I ate way too much of it.

Articles

Libraries, programming, etc

Books

  • Bottle Grove by Daniel Handler: ah, so after a few chapters the book finally reveals what it is about. Well, let's see where it goes...

Games

  • Trackmania 2: I tried The New Trackmania That's Called The Same As The Original But Is Very Enshittified, but Ubisoft patched out compatibility with the Steam Deck, so good riddance to that.
  • Reka: A game about a witch. It's rather unpolished, and after an hour of running around in the woods, I gave up on the silly “find my brother“ quest. There are lots of unexplained UI things, lots of unexplained game things. But meh, I'll have to try out the walk-around chicken house at least one, now that I have it, to get a feeling for it.
  • Walkabout Minigolf with a newly-released course and on Steam Frame, just fantastic.

Backlog

  • Terrascape (free from EGS)
  • The Artisan of Glimmith (from waitlist)
  • Dream Engines: Nomad Cities (from waitlist)

Board games

  • Ultimate Railroads

Other media

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