If I spend 2 hours designing the domain model, 1 hour slopping out a rough implementation, and 5 hours polishing it with a combo of handwritten and vibed refactorings, I will get a better result than if I spent 8 hours writing everything by hand.

So my point is not that vibe software is lower quality, as my experience has shown the opposite. It is simply that the spirit of sharing my work was done with the idea that I was sharing it with others who toiled in the same craft, not sharing for consumption by machine. Not that I ever contributed anything very important to the open source world, that anybody depended on. Just personal projects I thought were neat or educational.

In hindsight I would probably still have open sourced what I did, because I think it's valuable to have on record that I competently programmed stuff before AI even existed, like pre-atomic steel. But I don't know if I will open source any personal code going forward.

====

To put it more succinctly: if somebody "ripped off" my open source code in 2018, I wasn't mad about that. Even if they didn't bother to attribute me, well, at least they saw my stuff, had a human brain cell light up appreciating it, and thought it was worth stealing. I'm flattered. But with LLMs my work can be reappropriated without a single human ever directly knowing or caring about it.

Few people ever actually read open source code, but I'd like to think on the rare occasions they do, they share a connection with the author. I know when I read somebody else's code, for me to understand it I have to be thinking about the problem the same way they were when they wrote it. I feel empathy with them and can sometimes picture the struggle, backtracking, and eureka moments they went through to come up with their solution.

Somehow I don't get the same warm fuzzy feelings about a machine powered by investor money ingesting my work automatically, in milliseconds, and coldly compressing it down to a few nudges on a few weights out of trillions of parameters. All so the machine can produce outputs on-demand for lazy users who will never know of me or appreciate my little contribution, and ultimately for the financial benefit of some billionaires who see me as an obsolete waste of space.

I guess I'm just irrational that way.

What seems to actually be happening for white collar workers is that the price they can charge for their labor is dropping, but the price of their expenses (housing, food, gas) continues to rise.

You won't get 10k stars and a blog post out of that. Obviously you need some Stoats who have Conferences with the Stump Lord to determine whether they are needed at the Silo or the Bilge. They'll then regroup at the appropriate Decision Epicenter and delegate to the Weasels and Chipmunks who actually do the coding (antiquated term) in the Salt Mine.

The Stump Lord is an owl.

Of course, intelligence will be a solved problem so "20 years of training" won't be needed. You'll just be the hardware. AI will tell you to pick up that box, place it on that conveyor belt, place the autowelder at that seam and wait for the green light, turn the wrench to install bolt B in part C. If you don't wish to, or no longer can, so be it. Another, hungrier human will replace you. After all more are made every day, and they are capable of doing this type of labor by age 10 or so. And what else would they do with their time, go to school and get a completely useless education?

All of this will of course be in service of our technofeudal lords, the owner class. Some robots will be needed for heavy lifting and for the jobs that are too sensitive to trust a human in, like personal security and strikebreaking. Can't risk trusting a serf for those tasks. But for most physical grunt work humans will be cheaper. Shockingly cheap, when they have no other options.

Did that make you less depressed?

Me too. I also miss the days when I was proud of my little open source projects. Now I just regret donating fuel, even a miniscule amount in the grand scheme of things, to the soulless lawnmower that has already chopped down so much of my joy in work and promises to eventually shred the paycheck, too.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LtT0xZ11wM

One thing I took full advantage of as a kid was that both games had some cheesy behavior with the sniper rifle scope implementation.

In the first game, while zoomed in with the scope you could use the D-pad to move your view a few clicks left/right/up/down to refine your aim. However, this was not really turning you, it acted more like you were a ghost side-stepping and poking his head up and down. So, you could crouch behind a box, scope in on the box, then D-pad up to look over it and shoot an enemy mob who still couldn't see your character and wouldn't engage you. Or stand just slightly behind a corner, scope in, and D-pad right to shoot around it.

The last level of the first game involves fighting a boss character who has a powerful weapon and a ton of HP, and is surrounded by his infinitely-respawning goons. There's no way kid me would've beaten it without abusing this trick, which reduces the challenge to avoiding his attacks while fighting enough lower-tier enemies to obtain their precious sniper rifle ammo.

In the second game, the D-pad moves a crosshair around a fixed viewport rather than shifting the whole viewport around. So the trick doesn't work exactly the same way. If you zoomed in staring at some obstacle right in front of you, you couldn't move the viewport to see around it like you could before.

However... when you zoomed in, it worked like you were a ghost moving forward in space, instead of narrowing your FOV from your original vantage point. So you'd instead stand about 10 feet back from a corner, zoom in past the edge, and voila: you were able to see more around the corner just as if you'd walked up next to it. Sure enough, you could slide the crosshair over and snipe the enemies now visible in your viewport despite your player character still being safely 10 feet back around the corner.

Good times. They were still great GBA games even with this exploit, it just made the (scarce) sniper rifle ammo even more valuable to the player.

Bad enough that their flaws are evident even to novice practitioners.

Good enough, entrenched enough, that they will be around for the next 50 years too.

> Stripe does have some strict rules over the types of businesses we can and cannot support. Firearms accessories is an area that we split into two. Businesses selling firearms and parts required for the functioning of the firearm are restricted from using Stripe. Businesses selling firearms accessories and parts not required for the functioning of the firearm can be fully supported.

> As your business falls into the second category, I'm pleased to say that you would be able to use Stripe.

In 2022 my Stripe account was closed. I entered an "appeal" quoting that original response and asking whether their policy had changed, or their assessment of the products I was selling. The response I got did not answer that and simply said "we are unable to accept payments for weapons, ammunition, and related products, as mentioned on our restricted businesses list."

To be honest I was kind of done with it anyway, it had gotten to that "not fun" point where a hobby becomes a chore. And it wasn't an income stream big enough to make any difference in my quality of life. So I didn't bother appealing further or even seeking an alternate payment provider. But I was still annoyed that they didn't tell me what changed between when I got approval and when I got shut down.

Also if you relied on lazy loading properties after the DbContext had been disposed (after the using() block) you were out of luck.

With old EF we would turn off lazy loading to make sure devs always got an exception if they hadn’t used .Include() to bring the related entities back in their initial query. Querying the database should always be explicit not lurking behind property getters.

Fortunately with EF core MS realized this and it’s off by default. EF with wise use of .Include and no lazy loading is a pretty good ORM!

Problem 1. There are two opaque, externally identical bags, each containing 2 marbles. One bag contains 2 black marbles. The other bag contains 1 black marble and 1 white marble.

You choose a bag and draw a marble from it, without looking inside. The marble is black. What should you conclude are the odds that the remaining marble in the chosen bag is black?

Answer: .elbram kcalb dnoces a dnif ot ylekil sdriht-owt era ew oS .gab etihw-dna-kcalb eht morf si eno ylno dna ,gab kcalb-lla eht morf era elbram kcalb a werd ew hcihw ni soiranecs elbissop eht fo owT

Problem 2. There are three opaque, externally identical bags. One bag contains 2 black marbles. The other two bags each contain 1 black marble and 1 white marble.

Again you choose a bag and draw a marble from it, without looking inside. The marble is black. What should you conclude are the odds that the remaining marble in your chosen bag is black?

Answer: .tnecrep ytfif era elbram kcalb dnoces a gniward fo sddo ruO .gab kcalb-lla eht nesohc gnivah fo sddo ytfif-ytfif ta won era ew oS .sgab etihw-dna-kcalb tnereffid owt eht morf era owt dna ,gab kcalb-lla eht morf era elbram kcalb a werd ew hcihw ni soiranecs elbissop eht fo owT

You can connect Problem 2 to our random door opening and a goat being revealed, in the Monty Fall (with an F) problem.

I think we can agree that these are the six possible, equally likely, configurations of the problem starting from me having chosen door 1. G1 here is "goat 1" and G2 is "goat 2". For each possible prize behind my chosen door, there are two possible configurations of the remaining prizes.

    My Door | Door 2 | Door 3
    Car     | G1     | G2
    Car     | G2     | G1
    G1      | Car    | G2
    G1      | G2     | Car
    G2      | Car    | G1
    G2      | G1     | Car

    My Door | Door 2 | Door 3 | Monty Reveals | Switch Result
    Car     | G1     | G2     | Either        | Lose
    Car     | G2     | G1     | Either        | Lose
    G1      | Car    | G2     | G2            | Win
    G1      | G2     | Car    | G2            | Win
    G2      | Car    | G1     | G1            | Win
    G2      | G1     | Car    | G1            | Win

Essentially, you are blindfolded and throw a dart at the 2x6 grid of cells under the headers "door 2" and "door 3", and I tell you that the cell you've hit is a goat. What do you know about the row you hit being a switch-or-stay row? Well, half the possible goats you might've hit are in the first 2 scenarios where you should stay, and half the possible goats are in the last 4 scenarios where you should switch. So you're at 50/50. You don't have any new information to switch on.

    My Door | Door 2 | Door 3
    Car     | G1(a)  | G2(b)
    Car     | G2(c)  | G1(d)
    G1      | Car    | G2(e)
    G1      | G2(f)  | Car
    G2      | Car    | G1(g)
    G2      | G1(h)  | Car

This may make it confusing going back to the original. I seem to have shown that both ways make sense but still, how is it different? Imagine it like Monty is doing a random dice roll for which door to open, and he simply juices the outcome by correcting it to the goat door when a car door is selected, since he can't reveal a car and spoil the game. Now we have these equally possible scenarios (a) through (l) for his fair dice roll...

    My Door | Door 2 | Door 3
    Car     | G1(a)  | G2(b)
    Car     | G2(c)  | G1(d)
    G1      | Car(e) | G2(f)
    G1      | G2(g)  | Car(h)
    G2      | Car(i) | G1(j)
    G2      | G1(k)  | Car(l)

    My Door | Door 2 | Door 3
    Car     | G1(a)  | G2(b)
    Car     | G2(c)  | G1(d)
    G1      | Car    | G2(f,e)
    G1      | G2(g,h)| Car
    G2      | Car    | G1(i,j)
    G2      | G1(k,l)| Car

In both cases we were originally 1/3 chance of being right. That is not in dispute.

In the original (fully defined) "Monty Hall", Monty was going to show us a goat no matter what. It's part of the rules, he has to show a goat. So the fact that we see a goat behind the revealed door is no surprise, and no new information. But which of the two unchosen doors was the goat, is valuable information because in 2/3s of the scenarios Monty's hand was tied and he HAD to show that door to avoid revealing the remaining car.

In the "Monty Fall" problem, the fact that we see a goat at all is interesting information. This becomes more likely when we picked the car in the first place, because if we had initially picked the car, and a random other door is opened, it's 100% going to be a goat, whereas if we had picked the goat in the first place, we are only 50% likely to see a goat when a random other door is opened. Let's call the goats Alice and Bob to illustrate this point. We know we DID see a goat, but we don't know which of these equally probable scenarios led to that:

1. We picked the car and saw Alice

2. We picked the car and saw Bob

3. We picked Alice and saw Bob

4. We picked Bob and saw Alice

Notice how "we picked the car" originally had 1/3 odds but represents half the scenarios that remain possible, because there are two ways to see a goat with that start, while only one way to see a goat with the others.

This kind of brings the problem back around to similar territory as Bertrand's Box[0] where the fact that you drew a gold coin is already hinting to you that you're more likely on the "both gold" box than on the "half gold" box.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand%27s_box_paradox

Oh, but it does! See the "Monty Fall" version of the problem, in which Monty accidentally trips and opens a door, which just happens to reveal a goat. In this variant there is no advantage gained by switching, because no more information was revealed about the remaining unopened door.

The information gain only happens in the original game because we know that Monty was forced to avoid the winning door in the (66% likely) case where we didn't already pick it.

For my part I am somewhat sympathetic to jncfhnb's point. The exact phrasing that Vos Savant was asked did not specify the rules that the host was required to open a door, nor that it always must be a goat door. It simply says that the host has knowledge of what's behind the doors, and in this particular iteration of the game, he showed you a goat and asked you about switching.

That does not exclude a scenario where the host is a manipulative fellow, who chose to show you the goat only because he knows you are about to win, trying to convince you to lose. A contestant on the real show would surely worry about this possibility.

Of course, the people who wrote to disagree with Vos Savant almost never said "the problem is not fully stated", they said "it's 50/50 you fool", which isn't right. Additionally, since it wouldn't be a math problem at all if we let the host have agency, it is reasonable to assume the unspoken rule that he does not, leading to Marilyn's correct 2/3rds answer.

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20230706235720/https://probabili...

In the random-open case, you really know nothing new about either of the closed doors. If you can talk yourself into switching, you could make an equally good argument for switching back.

In the Monty-knows-and-always-shows-goat case, you have gained information about one of the closed doors. You haven't gained any information about your initial pick door. But the other remaining door, you know there's a 2/3rds chance that Monty was forced to avoid it so as not to reveal the car. Only in the 1/3rd case where you were already on the car does Monty have freedom to open either door willy nilly.