You started with a straw man tho?

Since we’ve turned this into a gish gallop

1. (original comment) this has nothing to do with Hieronymus Bosch: never countered ergo conceded; whole premise is pointless
2. (original comment) genAI slop is bad: you say capitalism is bad not genAI, I say tech isn’t there and wasting energy is bad; you’ve yet to prove that capitalism being bad (your core argument) means genAI can actually work or that since capitalism is bad burning energy is okay
3. burning any energy for the current model is bad: you say capitalism is bad; this addresses nothing
4. NFTs are bad: we agree
5. making fun of people that swallow genAI proganda is always correct: you conceded the original point and also dropped when I pointed out that making fun of NFTs made things better
6. there is a fundamental misunderstanding about how capable the tech is, proganda aside, and a basic review of genAI art slop highlights this: you do not provide any analysis here; general tech consensus is that AI is very far from doing anything useful
7. your blog contradicts your online persona: you’re trying very hard to be mean here so either you’re writing your blog understanding you’re the asshole in the room that no one disagrees with or you’re incapable of self reflection.

We both agree that capitalism is bad, you provide no evidence aside from ad hominem to contradict the most superficial analysis of your midjourney, and you have swallowed way too much genAI propaganda (coincidentally called out many times and left unanswered) without applying any of your development critical thinking skills. You want to burn energy on dumb shit to support billionaires while saying billionaires are bad, I think that’s stupid and enjoy poking fun at any engineer stupid enough to miss the forest for the trees.

Oh my goodness simpler words would be nice since we’re struggling with “non sequitur” and “strawman” and “basic connections to underlying language.”

I appreciate your summary! Here’s mine:

• (original comment) this has nothing to do with Hieronymus Bosch
• (original comment) genAI slop is bad
• burning any energy for the current model is bad
• NFTs are bad
• making fun of people that swallow genAI proganda is always correct
• there is a fundamental misunderstanding about how capable the tech is, proganda aside, and a basic review of genAI art slop highlights this
• your blog contradicts your online persona

Why is this hell? This doesn’t look at all like any of the representations of hell that Bosch has done so we’ve got a different hell maybe? Maybe the issue was that the midjourney prompt had nothing to do with your joke?

It is crucial to recognize that disagreements generally arise from individuals approaching the problem from different perspectives. I presented my perspective and you went after some straw men. Are there personal insecurities that hinder the expression of contrary opinions here?

The path to comprehending the complete picture involves engaging in dialogue to grasp the trade-offs considered by each person. This only works if everyone is actually engaging in dialogue, though.

What’s the joke? What’s the story? Why am I exhaling through my nose?

Thanks! Your 4D chess was my inspiration. Either you have no understanding of the tools you use, the content they generate, and the billionaire propaganda you’ve swallowed while ignoring every single piece of technical knowledge you have in theory or this whole this was a masterclass we all can learn from. Immediately responding to criticism with strawmen, linking the current tech con to the last tech con, losing track of your personas, all fantastic work!

Should I quote your comments about the same? I love this discussion because the original non sequitur you made seems to apply to these responses! It’s great feedback. I also liked the “tilting at windmills” joke; how clever to ironically misuse a quote from around the same time as the ironic mislabeling of the artist!

Thanks! It’s always better to try to make the world a better place than it is to peddle billionaire vaporware while mislabeling the most basic concepts of art. I’m so glad we agree this prompt engineer is a witless dishcloth.

Zero energy wasted calling out dumb shit. It’s never a bad idea to rip into AI slip, especially in the context of things we can spend less energy on. Browbeating was incredibly influential in the dismantling of NFTs, which you correctly pointed out is just as bad a citizen as genAI turds.

Absolutely! Hyped-up vaporware like genAI and blockchain speculation should be nuked from orbit. Glad we agree this all garbage.

Shit, why not start with all the wasted energy generating the slop first? You’re solving the wrong problem.

I don’t normally get mad at genAI art. This one makes me mad. A huge part of Bosch is the tiny detail. There’s scholarly debate about how we interpret the detail; it’s incredibly wrong to say something is in the style of Hieronymus Bosch without clever little details. This AI garbage just has a bunch of repeated lens flares, age marks, and blobs. Also in the style of Bosch implies something we can interpret, be it a dark take on office work or capitalists teaching us lessons. I don’t know what the fuck we can take away from this.

This is more “someone with the title ‘prompt engineer’ spent three minutes hunt-and-pecking the name ‘Hieronymus Bosch’ into midjourney and grabbed the first image that was sort of muted earth tones” than “remotely in the vicinity of the style of Hieronymus Bosch.”

This is pretty far from a proof of any variety. I think the spirit is there and the ideas are great. Spend a little more time on the execution, maybe tie in some Quine, and I think you’d have something.

He reads like an academic. This is a really interesting perspective; I’ve never thought anything of his writing because it’s what I’m used to from normal journals. There is a style, good or bad, that comes from this stuff.

I have not actually been able to use any Reddit results for awhile. It might be that I force old[.]reddit[.]com and Reddit has finally cracked down on that?

For #2, how are you checking if they’re busy or not? I got frustrated a lot in office because someone would see me spinning in my chair, incorrectly assume I wasn’t busy instead of thinking deeply about a problem, and come up to break my concentration because “I wasn’t busy.”

If you don’t have a team working agreement or regular conversations about communication patterns both in-person and remote you’re possibly contributing to the problem. I prefer Slack messages because I can consume them when I need to and ignore them when I need to focus. If someone absolutely needs my attention they can Slack/Zoom call me to break my focus.

Of course you should also never just say hello.

I was doing some Jinja templating in a Flask app the other day and VS Code would not respect my explicit file typing through the GUI over restarts. I had to change my file extensions and install an extension for Jinja syntax highlighting to get that to work.

I feel that pain.

The problems you’re facing aren’t very clear. Can you expand a bit?

Lots of things in VS Code just work if you use the non-FOSS version and don’t need to install any system dependencies. For example, there are a ton of code formatters that you can install and run without tuning (eg I installed a SQL formatted last week with nothing else to do). There are also some that you need underlying dependencies for (eg if you want Rust extensions to work, you need the Rust toolchain; same for LaTeX); however this is true in any editor based on my experience (although some editors eg JetBrains might mask that through their GUI). Across both options, you often need to tune your extensions based on your use case or even hardware in some cases (eg setting up nonstandard PATH items).

YMMV for VSCodium, the FOSS version, primarily because it relies on a different extension registry per the terms of use. You can get around this as a user; as a vendor they cannot. Outside of tweaking the registry I’m not aware of anything else you need to do for parity.

Edit: forgot to tie all this back to my opener. What do you mean when you say it requires all sorts of work? Are you experiencing other issues than something I called out?