I think it has some valid use as a tool in programming, though relying entirely on it (“vibe coding”) just produces a mountain of difficult to maintain crap.

What works for me is using it as tool like one could delegate to a junior programmer. I can write the signature of a method that it will complete the contents of; for example I’ll write “function reverseTextInSentence(string: text) {}” and tell an AI to implement that method. It saves me a little time and I can keep thinking about the larger picture rather than the details of reversing a string of text.

That said: do not let it organize the structure of your project, don’t let it name things for you, don’t use in place of critical thinking, don’t ever think it can actually use logic and reason besides repeating things it found on online forums, and don’t let it write projects wholesale. It’s a tool that can be useful, and you need to know when to use it and when its use will just make things worse.

Also fuck the AI corporations, run a free model on your own hardware.

I’ve had this experience myself; I’m an American living in the Netherlands and sometimes just don’t know the name for the thing I need nor where to buy one. LLM bots are fine for the translation part, but they will make wild assumptions like telling me I can buy a kitchen strainer at the hardware store or food spices at a place called Kruidvat which translates to spice-bucket basically but is actually most like CVS without the pharmacy and does not sell any food besides some candy and chips.

It’s hilarious how quickly these bots can swing from super useful to actually harmful to trust.

“But how about I just summarize it for you instead… poorly and with a few lies added in?”

If you are in Europe just get a Dutch bicycle. Cheap (you can find them in any canal in Amsterdam, just hop in and grab one!), repairable, and will last for years post-canal treatment.

• vlc
• vim
• tmux
• neomutt
• FreeBSD / Linux
• IntelliJ IDEA
• Firefox
• KDE’s Dolphin
• SwayWM
• pass

Of course, that was just for demonstration.

Though after a campaign has hit level ~8 or so it can be a fun reward to players to let them just squash a group of 1st level mooks as a kind of reminder of how far they’ve come since 1st level. At 9th level it’s reasonable to have +20 to your attack, and an NPC only has an AC of 10…

AC is only line of defense; don’t forget your reflexes and will can be targeted to do much worse things than just hurt you.

In Pathfinder 2e it is not true that rolling a 20 means an automatic hit. Rolling a 20 only automatically increases the degree of success by one. For example; if a character with +0 to their attack rolls a 19 versus an AC of 30 it results in a critical miss (19 is more than 10 below the target number). If they roll a 20 however it gets upgraded by one level and becomes a regular miss.

At some point you have to assume that even if they can walk on the seabed that the physical pressure would just disintegrate their bodies. If the powers of necromantic reanimation can be overcome with a sword or a shotgun then surely several atmospheres of pressure applied across the entire body would do it.

I was an atheist, socialist learning, bisexual pacifist in a family of young earth creationists that even in the mid 90s would get frothy mouthed angry at the history of Vietnam veterans being spat at.

I enjoyed learning, my step father hadn’t read a book since he was 17. I wanted to live in a pedestrian friendly city, my parents encouraged me to yell “jap-junk” at people riding japanese motorcycles.

I started learning how to code when I was 10, and my homeschoolimg books were bought from a fundamentalist church in Florida that required memorizing bible verses for math and history class.

It was a choice of leave or suicide.

I absolutely prefer working from home.

I’m a programmer; my ability to work is heavily dependent on my ability to focus and think.

At home:

• I decide how quiet it is
• I decide when to look at or even think about interruptions from email or Slack
• I have a nice chair, a fancy ass keyboard and expensive mouse
• I also have a nice 27" monitor and a 34" ultrawide
• I decide when (or if) to eat lunch
• If I am eating lunch I have my own fridge, pantry, and numerous restaurants in a short walking distance.

My office, by comparison:

• I cannot control the volume of the radio or what it plays
• I cannot stop people from saying “Hey BozeKnoflook, what…” and just fucking ruining my last two hours of condensed thought and making me waste time getting back into my prior line of thought just to resume my previous state.
• The chair is acceptable, but I fucking loathe typing on a laptop keyboard
• The office only offers a 23" monitor to hook my laptop up to
• Everybody goes to eat in the building’s cafeteria at noon, because that is when lunch is served. There are no restaurants or food spots in a short walking distance that are a viable option. I can only eat what the cafeteria offers (and while okay, it’s not great food).

Throw in the time it takes to commute back and forth and… why the hell would I want to work in the office? Sure, throw an occasional event (quarterly meetings, occasional dinner parties of the various teams, whatever) to build personal relations but I am easily far, far less productive in the office than at home.

Police have had, since the late 90s I think, the “Hotplug” which is a special battery pack / generators that provide a special power plug where you can gently loosen the existing plug, slide the generator’s plug in place over it, then remove the computer from the main supply while keeping it powered on.

Power plug locks only buy you time or prevent casual mayhem; the police can work around those.

QNX could qualify, but it’s not as easily available as most other OS.

Solaris is nearly dead for new development, but it’s still receiving updates (last release was 16 days ago) and can run GNOME and a browser.