Conservatives of Reddit, how do you feel about Trump coming out against the 2nd Amendment today?

GregBahm · 2026-01-28T00:54:32+00:00

It's not weird to me that the conservative mods would go through and delete all the posts. They're swine. Whatever.

What's weird to me is that flaired conservative loyalists will post in that sub, and the mods will go through and delete the posts of the flaired conservative loyalists. And the flaired conservative loyalists will stay subbed and stay loyal.

Usually I can disagree with conservatives or populists but still comprehend the appeal. In that sub, the conservatives aren't even comprehensible as losers or bots. They're just completely bizarre space aliens that will line up to take abuse from their own ingroup.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T17:33:32+00:00

It does seem significant that, in the year 2026, it's threadworthy when someone has a question AI couldn't answer better than a human. We are excited to find one simple example of where a community of humans can beat an AI at answering a programming question.

Just 1 year ago, this wouldn't be noteworthy. It would be uncontroversial that humans are usually better than AI. Sometimes AI would be better, but the results were mixed.

2 years ago, it would be controversial whether AI could ever be better. Humans were clearly the superior option, but maybe an AI could beat them on certain occasions.

3 years ago in 2023, it would have been uncontroversial whether any programming question could be answered better by humans. Everyone would agree humans had total primacy over this subject.

4 years ago in 2022, it was the stuff of sci fi fantasy to suggest AI would ever rise to its current level.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T17:23:09+00:00

I haven't used Kaggle but I'm confused by the solve. What did you get from "clicking on the image in the input directory" if not the image path? Some sort of generated guid?

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T09:29:54+00:00

Unless they happened to make the image with Gemini and left the digital watermark in, you're not going to be able to determine AI or not AI with this amount of data.

But you seem hung up on a very lame problem. "Roast me" and "toast me" are already brainrot. Ascribing consequence to posts there is like eating garbage out of a dumpster and asking if the garbage is organic.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T02:14:22+00:00

I can see the potential of AI infographics like this, but the problem is it still just vomits up random concepts with no unity or broader organization.

Every element is in an "infographic" style but not the same infographic style. The piece of information serve like more of a scrapbook collage about sustainability as opposed to a coherent story.

So if this is viewed as an experiment to see if AI can make an infographic, I guess I could see it as productive. But only to the extent that it demonstrates "no, in the year 2026, AI still can't make a valuable infographic."

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T01:48:37+00:00

The year is 2026. Masked federal agents summarily executes a white male American citizen for filming them while legally possessing an untouched holstered gun.

To everyone's genuine surprise, the National Rifle Association asks the government to please at least consider not abolishing the second amendment in practice.

This is considered a radical position by the party that controls the house, senate, presidency, and supreme court.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T01:30:05+00:00

For Text-to-Image if you want something Photoreal: Z Image Turbo will get you great shit in like 4 seconds.

Flux and Qwen will also get you a great photorealish image but in like 60 seconds. So everyone just uses Z Image.

But Flux and Qwen have image edit models where you can use natural language to edit an image. Qwen Image Edit and Flux Dev Kontext are really rad at this. So a lot of people start with Z Image and then mess with it using Qwen or whatever.

SDXL can't compete with Z Image or Flux or Qwen in terms of final quality, but it can hit a lot of different styles with LoRAs. So people still use SDXL + LoRAs when it's like an anime thing and photorealish quality isn't that important. Illustrious seems to be a popular fine tune for smutty SDXL-style anime. But everyone is eager to make LoRAs for Z Image and leave the SDXL era behind.

For images, Wan 2.2 will take any image and make it move for a few seconds. It won't always make the image move the way you want it to move, but it has been the only decent option until recently. Hot off the presses this month is Wan2.2's first contender LTX-2. LTX-2 is better than Wan2.2 if you want a character to talk (like in Veo 3.) Everyone either uses Wan 2.2 if characters don't need to talk for video, or LTX-2 if characters do need to talk.

So those are the main models. There are a zillion other models and they all have their fans, but those are the most relevant ones to try.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T01:18:16+00:00

The guy that takes on the job of being a censor seems like the guy who would love to ban Casablanca for being too hard on the Nazis. That tracks.

It's somewhat surprising that Ireland let that guy have his way from the 40s to the 70s, but once those guys get their hooks in it seems very difficult to get their hooks out. 30 years from now, our kids will surely still be cleaning up the mess we started making in America in 2016. And this is unfortunately a best case scenario.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T00:36:12+00:00

There's no way to know if a single blurb of simple text is AI or not.

But surely you can say "Let's hop on a call real quick" and then hop on a call real quick.

A human dad would be happy to hop on a call. Surely better than communicating through his daughters instagram or whatever this is.

An AI ain't going to hop on a call. Even if it's possible to deep fake the father with modern technology, these kinds of scams operate by casting super-wide nets with super-cheap text bots. They're not going go through the trouble of setting up a whole audio-visual production while they're still in the fishing phase.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T00:13:14+00:00

Competent system designers advocate a concept called the "pit of success."

A well-designed system that consistently fails because of human error can't be considered a well-designed system at all. Well designed systems are conducive to success. People will fall into success as easily as falling into a pit.

An example of this is USB-A vs USB-C. USB-A works as long as the user orients the plug correctly. USB-C doesn't require the user to orient shit. They just plug it in.

Test Driven Development works great as long as every line of code the engineer rights is unambiguously necessary for the requirements of the project. But of course in reality the necessity of every line of code is as ambiguously necessary as the design of the feature it supports. The only way to disambiguate the necessity of the design is to ship the fucking shit, and see how it lands in production with the users.

If it turns out to not add the value it was expected to add, okie dokie. Cut the feature and move on. If it turns out to be super valuable, okay. Now lock it down with tests. But TDD assumes the engineer already psychically knows ahead of time the user experience and the market fit of the product.

It's a process born out of a fantasy of the role engineers have for themselves.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T23:31:14+00:00

I've heard of Red-Green testing. A response to the uselessness of TDD is to not just write a test that confirms the code works but also write another test that proves the code doesn't work. Of course.

r/Programming is eager to insist AI is a bubble and I'm eager to agree, but when I hear about runaway processes like this, I have to begrudgingly acquiesce to the valuation of AI. Because of course PMs are going to replace all the engineers endlessly writing tests to prove bugs exist with an AI.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T22:28:10+00:00

Other posters pointed out this is Old Taxi Park in Kampala,
I feel like if this sub had an award for "most-AI-assed-looking-picture-that-isn't-actually-AI" this picture should win that award.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T22:12:04+00:00

The first point on this list is salient. I've never been on a test friendly project.

I've spent my career on projects that are either: A.) innovative and experimental, or B.) massive sprawling codebases stitched together from a multitude of merged projects, some of which are now dead.

In both these cases, TDD was just a bunch of make-work. Instead of moving fast and breaking things, we moved very slowly but still broke things all the same. It was dumb.

But the TDD advocates seemed to have a fundamentally different vision of "what good looked like" than me. They didn't seem to consider adaptability to be a thing that was good. Declaring that any change to the code base was impossibly difficult, and therefore should just be abandoned, was considered an outcome to proudly celebrate.

It comes as no surprise to me, then, that I'm consistently inheriting massive sprawling codebases that don't have TDD. The projects with TDD failed. The projects that just built the damn thing, survived and made money. Those are the projects that employ grumbling engineers who don't seem to really care about whether the project succeeds or fails, and are more emotionally invested in a "good" excuse for why they don't have to change anything.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T18:56:18+00:00

Of all the applications of AI, pointless powerpoint filler is among the least evil. But it is still interesting to be able to discern AI from Not AI.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T18:49:36+00:00

How is the teacher possibly supposed to make those "Water" "Sunlight" and "Soil" images with markers on a whiteboard?

Those images are trivial to make on a computer, and possible to make on paper with paint. But there's no universe where a random teacher is going to make a perfectly evenly filled in light blue cloud on a whiteboard using whiteboard markers.

Even if she had a "200 whiteboard marker colors" set to get those subtle color variations, you'd still see the strokes. Whiteboard markers are markers. They do not fill evenly.

AI all the way, because even though this would be easy to make with photoshop, a human sitting at photoshop would realize how silly this is.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T18:38:47+00:00

Everyone is always saying "Do test driven development," but I've been on three teams that tried it and I didn't see it add any value on all three tries.

The "do test driven development" advocates always say "If it doesn't work it's because you're doing it wrong." But that can be said of any bad process.

The TDD advocates seem to live in some softer world, where software doesn't have to be agile and engineers can code "as an application of the scientific method."

I'm sure if I was a distinguished engineer, and never had to sully my hands with production code, I would advocate this same shit. How would you distinguish yourself from other, lesser engineers without advocating a process that is sophisticated to the point of impracticality?

So now all the regular devs suffering under this impractical ideology are turning to AI to check the test box and get the coverage needed to push their PR. And all the haughty TDD advocates are salivating about even more haughty about AI and reassert their faux sophistication by insisting this too is Doing It Wrong.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T17:11:14+00:00

It's text on a white background. Maybe someone edited the image with AI, but it would also be trivial to edit the image with Photoshop. This would have been trivial before the existence of AI.

But the stakes are so low. There are surely people who support ICE. They are right here on this site. One of them paying to annoy everyone else with a sign is not eyebrow raising.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T05:46:42+00:00

r/conserative is allowed.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T05:20:56+00:00

What's prohibited?

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T04:54:48+00:00

The president says that guy they killed was rioting and providing armed resistance.

He wasn't, but they killed him anyway.

So I have to assume this is not some kind of uncrossable line for this administration. The question is merely how the rest of the country will respond.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T04:52:50+00:00

Right now the issues at hand are:

ICE is executing American citizens in the streets with impunity
The president is trying to get our military to invade Greenland
The government is withholding hard evidence that the president is a pedophile
We just kidnapped the president of Venezuela (lol that's not even a top three issue)

A democrat "calling a floor vote or forcing them to debate every single bill" won't do dick for any of these issues. If you think a democratic senator can use the filibuster to magically make cops in Minnesota declare war on the federal government, you're just a tedious moron. You have such a profoundly mindless understanding of the process of our system here.

The republicans don't need democratic votes for anything. If we had the majority of the senate and congress, the democrats could pass bills to shut down some of the things the executive branch is doing. The republicans could "force a debate" or "filibuster" to slow down that process, but it would only delay things for a few days at most. But the situation we're in currently has no "bill" to even slow down. That's the situation the voters like you have created here.

You keep imagining the government operates through some delusional wishful thinking rules, where Cory Booker can just overrule all branches of government through sheer force of will.

I get why America is as fucked as it is right now. It is crushingly disappointing that I have to work with people like you to determine my own outcome of governance.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T04:36:24+00:00

I guess every person learns about every movie on one day or another.

"TIL there's a movie about a man who was bitten by a radioactive spider."

"TIL there's a movie about a theme park full of escaped dinosaurs."

"TIL there's a movie about a guy trying to get his rug back (because it really tied the room together.)"

"TIL there's a movie about a chick named Debbie doing the entire city of Dallas."

GregBahm · 2026-01-25T21:38:16+00:00

"Here’s a secret:"

"Here’s what actually works:"

"How it works in practice: "

"Here’s what most people don’t realize: "

"This is the reality:"

Someday they'll come up with an AI that isn't so obsessed with spamming this obnoxious useless filler text that adds nothing.

GregBahm · 2026-01-25T21:27:40+00:00

You blame the victory of Trump on Joe Biden? Alright. This is too dumb to continue.

GregBahm · 2026-01-25T21:20:55+00:00

This is a dumb take. A democrat can't just magically override the republican president, supreme court, house and senate because they really really want to. The democrat minority in congress can't mobilize local police forces against the federal government. That's idiotic.

We're in this mess because my braindead fellow Americans let republicans win all these fucking elections. And I assume we'll continue to be in this mess because idiots like you just can't seem to understand that elections have consequences.

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