I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.

My daily driver is a pure EV, but while I was on holiday a few months ago I was driving a Yaris Hybrid as a rental (which to my understanding is basically a Prius drivetrain in a Yaris body).

Fuck me it was terrible. Every time I applied even mild acceleration it sounded like the valves were going to eject out of the engine, meanwhile it had about as much get up and go as a sedated elephant. 0-60 in four to six business days. On ramps were an interesting experience.

The only saving grace was that we only used about a third of a tank of gas during our week long trip.

I’ll stick with pure electric thanks. No complicated drivetrain with multiple systems to go wrong, no compromised performance, enough range to get me everywhere I need to go, and good enough charging infrastructure (at least in my country) to make longer journeys trivial.

You might have seen a quest, where if you stream a specific game to your friends you get a free in-game item, but these are not advertisements.

…

Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers

I have no interest in streaming “quested” games, and whatever deal Discord has done with the developer to encourage users to engage with such games (and by extension the game’s microtransaction economy), and regardless of what they call it, is by definition an advertisement. If you can’t see that, then you are an ad campaign exec’s wet dream. Either that, or a troll.

Discord enshittification is well under way, just this week I have started seeing ads in the client just above the voice channel status in the bottom left. Cancelled my Nitro immediately, no point if they are going to shove ads in my face anyway.

Currently looking at alternatives, Revolt looks promising, and can be self hosted.

I grew one during lockdown, decided I liked it and kept it. I suspect I am not an anomaly in this.

I use both. Pi-hole running in a docker container on one of my home servers which my gateway is configured to assign as the default DNS for all clients, and uBlock Origin on all my browsers to catch everything else.

Pihole is pretty good at catching ads on platforms that are not suited to browser based blockers (IoT devices, streaming boxes etc) but it isn’t perfect and is best used in conjunction with another solution.