> Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time.
I had a similar realization. My team was discussing whether we should hook our open-source codebases into an AI to generate documentation for other developers, and someone said "why can't they just generate documentation for it themselves with AI"? It's a good point: what value would our AI-generated documentation provide that theirs wouldn't?
It isn't valuable if you generate and toss it over the fence. Where the value comes in is when the team verifies the content. Once that's done and corrections made, the words have the assurance that they match the code.
If you aren't willing to put in the time to verify it works than it is indeed, no more useful than anyone else doing the same task on their own.
Having used AI to write docs before, the value is in the guidance and review.
I started out with telling the AI common issues that people get wrong and gave it the code. Then I read (not skim, not speed, actually read and think) the entire thing and asked for changes. Then repeat the read everything, think, ask for changes loop until it’s correct which took about 10 iterations (most of a day).
I suspect the AI would have provided zero benefit to someone who is good at technical writing, but I am bad at writing long documents for humans so likely would just not have done it without the assistance.
The largest cancelling brigade in the history of cancel culture was done by the right after the Charlie Kirk shooting, where more than 600 people were doxxed and lost their jobs for "social media posts that celebrated Kirk's assassination or were seen as disparaging of his legacy". [1]
> “It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.”
> FDR
It was supposed to be a "living wage".
Letting companies pay less than a living wage and providing a robust government safety net just subsidizes businesses using government tax money. The biggest beneficiaries of this are companies like Wal Mart, who gets effectively subsidized to the tune of $6B+ a year because so many of its employees are on SNAP and similar low income programs[1].
So I ask you the same question, should the minimum wage be $35 in Forsyth County for a single person and should they automatically get a raise to $45/hour if they have a child?
Everyone loves bringing up Walmart. But should that franchiser who is only netting $70k a year now also be paying $35 an hour?
And again, I find it rich that tech workers living off the tits of VC funding can tsk tsk about companies that need to actually have a profitable business model can’t pay their workers $75k a year (the living wage for Forsyth county, GA) no matter what their job is.
Looks like Forsyth County is the richest county in Georgia and has a median household income of apparently $140k/yr (and median home price of ~$500k), so ballpark something close to that hourly rate does seem necessary if you want to have a median life *within that county*.
But nobody is advocating for setting the minimum wage equal to what it would cost to comfortably live in the wealthiest part of a state.
So now we want to set it to the poorest county in the state? The middle? Where there are no jobs? Do the people who work at the Walmart in Forsyth not deserve to a “livable wage”?
I didn’t randomly choose Forsyth County. I use to live there.
Or should they have to do an hour commute from a lower cost of living area in metro Atlanta?
What is living wage based on single? Head of household with kids?
Before now, ICE was primarily paperwork police. Border patrol and occasional visits to round up undocumented immigrants at factories still existed, but the vast majority of their job was related to like customs and visa forms. It's like hiring 10x the postal workers and giving them guns and "qualified immunity" -- you're going to get some new problems.
AGPTEK makes decent and affordable MP3 players that still have buttons, and the battery life is really solid (~40 hrs!). I think they also use a dedicated MP3 player OS rather than an Android reskin. That's my recommendation if you want a 2007-style MP3 player with more modern hardware.
I looked that up. This does not have the smooth textual UI of an iPod. It does seem better than many things. AFAICT those are buttons in a circle, not a jog dial, which is the key affordance.
I'd be awesome if ModRetro made an mp3 player that mirrors the iPod similar to the Chromatic's GameBoy.
I had a few. They advertised ogg support but it didn't actually work. The directory ordering was random, and it would lose metadata or not show tracks with non-ascii characters in the filename. It didn't remember position on stop. IIRC the sorting didn't work either. The buttons were awful, it felt cheap. It was typical Chinese manufacturing slop. But it had solitaire or some other game installed.
Hey! Just wanted to say it's really cool to run across someone that worked on those games. NFS is one of my favorite franchises, and Payback was my favorite in the series. Good work!
Every time I hear someone likes a game I contributed to I feel quite happy. After all, giving joy and escapism to people who need it is why I always wanted to make games.
For Hurricane Helene specifically, my team at Newspack actually worked with Blue Ridge Public Radio and a number of other news organizations in the affected area to set up text versions of their websites for low bandwidth readers[1] and get info to 10s of thousands of people[2].
In fact, it was so successful (maybe not at reaching you specifically though), that we got a grant to roll out a general purpose plain text web solution for breaking news situations to news organizations across the country![3] So I think there may have been a mismatch in that you didn't know about all of the plain text versions of news sites available in your area during the disaster -- that's something we'll have to keep in mind.
I simply live with this, but if I need to download it in a compatible format from Google Drive, I just screenshot the photo from Google Drive instead of downloading it. That solves the problem for me but from a different direction.
reply