These days however it feels a bit neglected, and somehow poorly bolted on to GCP. I still have a few production apps running on it and news like this reinforces my belief that it’s in decline.

What are folks using these days that (ideally) is open source and self-hostable? I don’t want to lock in with another platform. Some of these apps use the offline sync feature of Firestore (apps used in basements and other low-connectivity areas).

I wish it was just AI researchers. I recently recommended a non-fiction book to a friend, and they said they don’t have time to read anymore. They read an LLM summary instead (popular book, probably in the training data), and said they agreed with the core concepts. I was honestly stunned. The whole interaction felt completely foreign to me.

In TFA the comment about GPT-X finishing George R. R. Martin’s series without involving the author felt extremely dystopian to me. I felt enraged for hours afterwards. Have these people never read a book themselves for the pure joy of it? Were they only interested in the outcome or the “takeaways”?

Not at all :-) But at least this process doesn’t lead to pain and suffering because either the ScreenTime notification doesn’t arrive on a parent device, or the “Allow” action isn’t picked up by the child’s device. The whole messaging part to get permission to do something is really unreliable, at least in our household.

My only plausible explanation is that no one who works at Apple has kids.

One thing I personally have noticed is that very result-oriented people seem to be vastly more optimistic about AI since for them it’s all about getting from A to B as quickly as possible, and AI broadly seems to promise that.

Conversely, the people who find joy in what they do, and see the journey and its frustrations as fulfilling and full of learning, tend to be more pessimistic or disillusioned.

(sample size maybe N ~8-10, all SWE)

My humanity is not paying my bills.

But I do see other swimmers use a snorkel mask for a few of their sets.