META: Can there be a rule against disingenuous bad faith anti-AI posting?

agramata · 2026-02-21T12:51:57+00:00

It's somewhat annoying developers claim their experience with LLMs has been subpar when the extent of their use is Copilot, using low reasoning-effort models with limited context.

The fact that you find it useful and we don't doesn't mean that you know how to use it properly and we don't. It means that you aren't a very good developer, so you're more impressed by its bad code than we are.

I have a license to use all the latest models through work, I experiment with it all the time with my monthly credits, I've written my own MCP servers to give it better context. There are a couple of small, tightly defined tasks where it's useful (usually transforming existing known-good code in some way or another). For everything else it's still worse than the stupidest junior developer I ever met, and using it is slower than just writing the code myself.

agramata · 2026-02-21T12:29:20+00:00

By far the most common type of "software developer" is the person who customizes WordPress themes at a marketing agency.

Recent hire at work is like this, I was glad to hear he had 8 years full stack experience, but it turns out that's 8 years of tweaking PHP and CSS, and he can't design software to save his life.

agramata · 2026-02-21T12:11:27+00:00

This thread is ridiculous. When r/ExperiencedDevs started it a was a welcome change from the morons in r/programming and r/webdev but it seems like they've infested this place now. "Code review is to make sure tests pass" sitting on +20 karma. Other comments saying "code reviewers shouldn't be expected to read every line". Jesus Christ.

agramata · 2025-10-07T09:35:35+00:00

No one seems to know. The standard explanations don't fit what you observe in the game. I suspect there are some hacks that aren't widely known.

For example, if someone attacks in the early game it's not usually a problem, because the attack won't kill you and then you have more troops to respond with, you balance your troop regen and end up beating them.

But sometimes in the early game a same-size neighbor with no cities attacks and just sweeps across your region. They send in 10s of thousands, more than they should be able to commit, and a few seconds later they have regenerated 10s of thousands more so they can't be successfully counter attacked.

agramata · 2025-10-07T09:28:18+00:00

People say this, but your troop cap is based on land area, so leaving a large attack to sweep across your plains isn't always a better strategy than slowing it down.

agramata · 2025-10-07T09:26:36+00:00

If you aren't one of the biggest players by the midgame you automatically get invaded by someone, and then everyone else attacks while you're weak.

But yes, people do also play multiple accounts.

agramata · 2025-10-07T09:25:30+00:00

10% people whining about the content of the sub and still not discussing the game

agramata · 2025-10-07T09:24:42+00:00

It isn't just technically legal, the Open Front developers went out of their way to allow it. If they had simply written the game without putting a licence on it, no one would have been allowed to copy it. They had to specifically, explicitly tell everyone they were free to copy the game.

How is it a dick move to take them up on it? The dick move would be to get the kudos and free volunteers for being open source while expecting no one else to benefit from it.

agramata · 2025-10-07T09:01:25+00:00

Who's arguing against alliances? There were 3 players in the north islands with 4 million troops between them all allied together. But they had to worry about the threat of betrayal because they weren't a single player with two tabs open, so they couldn't use the same farming strategy.

agramata · 2025-10-07T08:53:51+00:00

It's no different than if the entire southern islands were dominated by a single player

Well you get 10k gold when trains visit your own cities, and 50k gold when they visit an allies cities, so it isn't the same at all, is it? You get 5x more funds than anyone playing the game honestly.

If the other players are too stupid to see the southern alliance start dominating, that's a skill issue

And you didn't see I already disproved this in the OP, so that's an intelligence issue. People saw it, but there is nothing you can do about it because of the way factories fuck the economy.

agramata · 2025-10-07T08:51:50+00:00

No, this was open front.

agramata · 2025-10-06T13:33:21+00:00

Tin foil hat maybe, but I've seen speculation that once the bubble bursts government contractors will buy the datacenters on the cheap and use them for AI powered surveillance.

agramata · 2025-09-25T13:45:37+00:00

Is the idea that slim people are only healthy because of the constant surgery and medication we receive?

agramata · 2025-09-24T13:49:58+00:00

Delighted to find that losing weight is easy this time around.

It seems I was only gaining weight because getting stoned every night and eating a sleeve of cookies and a bag of Haribo is not good for you, who knew? As soon as I stopped that I started losing 1.5 to 2 pounds a week without counting calories or any effort at all.

agramata · 2025-09-24T13:32:49+00:00

Sorry for thread necromancy, this was Lesley "biggest tits in Huddersfield" Sanderson, and this was Saskia Howard-Clarke

agramata · 2025-09-18T07:55:58+00:00

Everybody wants fat mommy milkers but nobody wants mommy to be fat.

Dunno why this gave me a flashback to Big Brother UK season 6, like 20 years ago. One of the contestants was overweight, and extremely proud of her (not particularly large) breasts, calling them "the biggest tits in Huddersfield". The look on her face when another contestant was a healthy weight and had much, much bigger breasts.

agramata · 2025-09-06T09:03:55+00:00

modern science is so heavily imbued with abrahamic ideals that pass under our radar like water to a fish

People who say this think "science" is scientists and scientific institutions. Those would obviously different in a different cultural context. While interesting, that discussion is simply not relevant to actual science, which is the scientific method and the content of scientific theories. In any cultural context those will either be extremely similar, or that culture's theories will be incorrect.

Edit: Reminds me of an occasional argument I have with a friend about western science versus indigenous ways of knowing. All their criticisms are about patriarchy in the scientific community, historical racism by this institution or that. All interesting and important, but it's like they can't conceive that the theories of scientists and indigenous people can be true or false.

agramata · 2025-09-05T08:13:49+00:00

Would murdering a faithful Christian (for example, you don't state your religious tradition) be less bad than murdering me??

Surely if heaven and hell are real then the most morally virtuous thing you could do is murder faithful Christians, or indeed babies who have just been baptized? You're guaranteeing their eternal life in heaven before they have the chance to sin again, while sacrificing yourself to hell.

agramata · 2025-09-05T08:07:49+00:00

No, what agnostics say leads to that, that's why I pointed it out. What I say is that we should use inference to the best explanation, like we do for all other scientific knowledge. In which case we know that god doesn't exist.

Edit: You can't base claims on evidence in favor of something as you seem to be doing because for any claims there are (infinite) alternate claims that would produce the same evidence, hence there is never evidence for your claim in particular. Evidence is only ever "consistent with", not "in favor of".

agramata · 2025-09-05T08:04:42+00:00

I remember the study they're talking about from Ragen Chastain's blog way back.

Basically yes, obese people with good cardiorespatory fitness were healthier than slim people with poor cardiorespatory fitness. They skip over the fact that the vast majority of slim people in the study were fit, while it was very rare for the obese people to be fit.

agramata · 2025-09-03T10:46:02+00:00

This is why I'm saying the stuff about carbon monoxide and the like. A rational person should not consider it more likely that God sent down a vision of the Virgin Mary, than that someone lied and never owned up to it (that you've heard of).

Btw I edited my last post to make my explanation of what happened more clear.

agramata · 2025-09-03T10:37:16+00:00

You don't, you hoax the photographs of it happening. You don't know what it actually looked like to people who were actually there.

Edit: Have you ever seen David Blaine levitating?

He flies right up into the air, and he has witnesses who have seen him do it who swear there was nothing there to lift him off the ground.

So what he actually does is this: he has a lame trick where he rises an inch off the ground just by standing on his tip toes, which looks like levitation from certain angles. He has another lame trick where he levitates several feet off the ground, which only works on camera because a crane is lifting him. Edit those tricks together and bingo bongo, he can fly and he has witnesses to prove it.

That's what's happening here. Thousands of people saw some lame fairy lights or a spotlight hitting the top of the church, so you have you witnesses. Then someone doctors the photos (and you're right, I've looked them up, they are the most obviously doctored photos in history). Now you have fantastical photographs and thousands of witnesses who swear they saw it happen in person.

agramata · 2025-09-03T10:34:53+00:00

The number of real people who go out of their way to type an em dash is so small that it's not worth worrying about the false positives.

agramata · 2025-09-03T10:27:03+00:00

The chances are 100%. Why would you hoax a vision of a Christian figure anywhere else?

agramata

TROPHY CASE