Al Sweigart

The thing I never liked about https://xkcd.com/1205/ "Is It Worth The Time?" is that it doesn't consider the fact that the time you spend automating a task is time spent practicing programming and getting better at programming. As devs lean on LLMs to code for them, we're going to learn this the hard way.

Emergency protests against war on Iran in cities across U.S.

Find your local details for today's protest.

https://www.answercoalition.org/iran

How much would it cost to make a search engine company that crawls the internet, use an LLM to generate a Q&A list from that page, and then create a database of brief questions and answers? Could it be done for as low as $10 million?

RE: @VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social

The term you want to google is "buy borrow die strategy" and all billionaires do it to evade taxes.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=buy+borrow+die&ia=web

I am looking for investors for my Sun colonization project.

The Sun provides near infinite amount of power, and a Sun colony has several opportunities for data centers, hydroponics, and smelter factories.

There are technical challenges, but those will be solved within the next five years.

AIs writing hit pieces against open source maintainers will continue for as long as there is no cost or punishment to doing so.

AI can BS at scale.

Should I just use "phone" instead of "smartphone" in my programming books? Do teenagers and twenty-somethings say "smartphone"?

If voting actually changed anything, they would make it illegal.

Oh wait...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/02/trump-wants-to-take-over-elections-save-act-voter-id-suppression/

I have to be reeeally careful with Chris Kohler's short videos because they are funny and informative and that's a perfect way for me to get played into believing inaccurate thing.

It doesn't help that he explains things well and mostly stuff I kind of already thought was true.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HBiWxEPCiWk

This is a big ask:

I'm the author of popular Python books and currently writing a book on AI and learning to program. Is anyone willing to export their ChatGPT or other AI accounts to let me see the raw prompts they give? I will give absolutely every privacy and judgement-free accommodation I can give and will not share this with anyone, nor submit any prompts either. But I'd like an unfiltered look at how people use AI. DM me for more details.

It will never stop being funny to me that the whole "you can't trust Wikipedia because anyone can edit it" scare happened and now Wikipedia is the only trustworthy website because it turns out profit motive is the reason things turn to shit.