You might be screwed. I had an instagram acount, wasn't using it for a while so I uninstalled the app from my tablet, now wanted to check something there and got hit with the same thing. I did not manage to recover that account. Can't even delete it and make a new one, it's just stuck in limbo. I don't care much since I was only lurking there, but it's really scary how Meta can just randomly cut you out of your digital life. And all support was of course delegated to an incredibly stupid chatbot which can't do anything.

Good luck and uhh let me know if you solve it?

...which improves the metaphor even further, genius!

• Disco Elysium
• Outer Wilds
• Morrowind
• Rimworld
• Subnautica

...I'm so sorry, and it's good (???) to know my company still has a few steps on the AI delusion ladder to climb. I guess with the way it's been going I need to mentally prepare for the same thing you're going through to come in a few months.

Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko. Really weird, abstract and interesting. Anyone labeling it as Dark Academia or a magic school book is both completely correct and dead wrong at the same time.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar both have very interesting concepts and great executions.

When it comes to interesting concepts in fantasy/sci-fi, Adrian Tchaikovsky has some bangers. Elder Race, Children of Time, or Alien Clay are some random example recs.

China Mieville's New Crobuzon trilogy is really out there too. 2nd book is the best and can be read independently but does spoil some things from the first.

...the house elves are in Hogwarts too. They are not staff, they are school property. Harry owns a house elf after book 5. The books openly ridicule Hermione for being the only sane person and trying to end house elf slavery because apparently the house elves like being enslaved and she's just overreacting. Need I go on?

Spec-driven development is when you take these AI generated design docs and make it all you as a dev interact with. It's waterfall but make it stupid and AI.

You give AI some guidelines and a feature description, then you twiddle your thumbs while it generates giant specs and occasionally asks you for some inputs, then you attempt to read the thing, give up, and give it to some other agent. Rinse and repeat until you burn a GDP of a small country in tokens and the agents agree that it's going to work, and then you finally pull the lever and hopefully a feature matching all your specs appears. Or it doesn't! And if it didn't, it's surely your fault because you didn't give AI enough context.

I'm tired, boss.

I feel the need to scream into the void so here goes: my corpo job has certain execs that are very deep into the AI bs, and they've done a full tour of all the stages and iterations of AI hype, following all the new trendy tools because otherwise we'd surely be left behind 🫠

And the current somewhat new hotness is spec-driven development. I've tried it over the last few days since it looks like it'll be mandatory for larger work.

And boy. Boy oh boy.

There are no words in the English language to describe how much I hated it. There may be some ancient curses in R'lyiehian that would do it.

The Copilot mandates were bad enough, but honestly if this is an attempt to make me see the light and admit that in itself Copilot isn't that bad, then it's kinda working.

It's just... idk, I got into software dev because I like logic puzzles (and wanted the money, let's be real). I enjoy making a small thing and then slowly adding stuff to it. I do not enjoy sitting idly while the slopmachine writes a giant spec that I think I'm supposed to read and correct but can't because it's unreadable. It's like a textual white noise. It's pretending to describe a piece of software I want to make while actually describing all the steps of a ritual to summon an Elder God of anxious boredom and machine madness.

I think I'll be defining all of my work as small from now on.

It's perpetually in progress but what's there is already pretty much a complete game, dev just can't stop adding/revamping things. I've played it like 5 years ago, spent 50+ hours and had a great time. There's also an active modding community.

I guess the silver lining here is that "his team" might accidentally discover some actual way to help sufferers of this disease? Unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

Nah, humans are great at pattern-matching, even just being aware that some find 67 funny is enough for you to start spotting it. I started finding some amusement in it just due to exposure from younger coworkers.

I don't listen to this band much but I'm quite partial to Siamés - the Wolf. The animation, limited color palette, and the music all together feel very satisfying.