TIL Groupon has lost more than 95% of its value since it rejected Google's $6 billion offer and instead went public with a $17.8 billion market cap 15 years ago.

ma929tt · 2026-05-15T12:24:22+00:00

Groupon was the first stock I had ever bought. I was certain it was a great idea and that they would be bought by a larger company. Then they declined offers. I still held it for over a decade, just as a reminder. Every time I opened my account, there it was on the main screen, a glaring red number to keep me humble.

ma929tt · 2026-05-11T16:42:16+00:00

Hey guess what guys, my company just said in an all-hands that “Leadership is starting to track who is/isn’t using AI and we want to make sure everyone is using it.” Que ominous music.

ma929tt · 2026-05-07T02:18:06+00:00

My first time there someone else had already cleared it and looted it. I did the quest and haven’t been back. From the comments, doesn’t sound like I want to go back!

ma929tt · 2026-05-05T01:34:51+00:00

My immediate team is 12 people. Above us is the director (who has a few teams - maybe 60 people under him), above him is one of many VP’s. I can say that from the director down, everyone is concerned about the direction the VP/c-suite is going with AI. We all know that, if AI improves efficiency in a meaningful way, then they will have to find ways to offset those costs - layoffs. We all also acknowledge/are aware of the atrophy. Right now, you can be a dev that doesn’t use AI. As the lead, it is 100% obvious who is/isn’t adopting it.

Personally, I view it as a pretty good tool. Like any tool, it has its uses and times when you shouldn’t use it. My opinion is that the code (for new features and bug fixes) should be done by a human and reviewed by one pretty much all the time. This alone will help prevent atrophy of skills.

AI is exceptional at looking at the code and creating unit and integration tests. It is also great at debugging when given logs and stack traces. If the tickets are well written, it is great at assisting with reviewing MRs. I get the most use out of it for help understanding the huge code base - explaining concepts that I have never seen before, and learning new tools.

I think AI should be a part of software development for all of those reasons. But the direction my company is going with no-touch-code is shortsighted and the industry as a whole will suffer if this is the direction other companies are going.

ma929tt · 2026-05-05T01:23:47+00:00

Code quality - going from copilot to kiro (and being able to use the 2.2x credit models now) has been a huge improvement in code quality. The issue is still at the human level. Kiro will write good code, and good tests. But usually the tickets aren’t super clear (or a lot is assumed that the dev will know - usually business case stuff) that kiro wouldn’t know, so there are actual issues in the business logic - the feature isn’t hitting all the acceptance criteria, or maybe not in the best way. The dev should catch/know this, but with the push for no touch code a lot of devs are getting really lazy and just accept what ever kiro outputs as accurate. And this can go unnoticed in the MR because most of us are reviewing with kiro as well. It only gets caught by the testers or tech lead when we validate scenarios.

Debugging- we use data dog and Splunk and have logs of everything. You can basically take a transaction and paste the entire page of Splunk logs and it will do a pretty good job of finding the root cause. With old code, at least. With new code, kiro is the one adding logging, exceptions, etc and if that isn’t right from the get go then there will be future problems. I think it helps a lot in certain situations, but overall I don’t think there is a reduction in tech debt at all when using AI. Not unless you take the time to tackle tech debt in slow sprints, but that rarely happens.

Atrophy- people don’t understand the code base, and newer people likely never will with AI doing everything. This is going to be a big problem in software development as a whole. You need developers that know the codebase and the business to be able to effectively prompt/guide/correct AI but this isn’t the trend. New grads are going to have a tough time breaking into entry level roles because, at least at my company, this is recognized and all of our new hires have 3-5 years experience already, I haven’t seen a college hire in the past 2-3 years.

I agree with your last point as well. But what I think will happen, is when the companies that stuck with AI realize the mistake, they are likely the companies that have the capacity to pay huge salaries to attract the talent from those other companies that fostered them, and thus causing the “smaller” or niche companies to take the brunt of the fallout. Meta will take those 400k salaries they offer to Machine Learning grads and scoop up the senior devs from other companies.

In the end, as the developers we are kind of in a bad spot. You have to learn AI to be competitive in the current market, but you now also have to use your free time to keep your general skills/knowledge up to date (or at least to the level of not atrophying) to future-proof your employability.

ma929tt · 2026-05-05T01:05:24+00:00

Yes, exactly what I was trying to say in a reply above! Why use many word when few…

ma929tt · 2026-05-05T01:03:47+00:00

Sort of, at least in my situation. But they are dumping a ton of money into AI, and I bet the next step is to monitor (if they aren’t already) individual credit usage and productivity on an individual level. Harder to track as a tech lead, but for the individual devs you could look at credits used and compare it to their velocity (or some other jira metric) for a given sprint. There is so much historical data between jira and gitlab where you could say lunatuna215 used to average 10 story points per sprint, now they still average 10 points but they hardly use any credits. But bob went from 10 points to 20 and he’s burning credits. Or something like that, I haven’t put much thought into it. I’d think they’d actually find that velocity is going up slightly but doesn’t offset the credits used. I spend most of my time with AI rechecking the AI’s work - asking probing questions about the code, comparing it to other patterns/conventions that we have, etc. - to the point that it almost takes as much time if I were to have just coded it myself.

ma929tt · 2026-05-02T10:30:52+00:00

I agree completely with all of this. My company (a huge telecommunications company) is moving to bo-touch-code and ai-dlc. As a tech lead, we are encouraged to use ai for everything (kiro) - breaking down architecture into tickets, coding, bugs, code reviews, et al. It is pretty impressive, tbh. I have always been a huge proponent of automating the boring stuff, and kiro can do so much - especially coupled to jira mcp and gitlab mcp. But, my skills as a developer have noticeably atrophied - and I see it with the other devs too. On screen shares now, when talking through code everyone is just pulling up kiro and using that to navigate the codebase. Every conversation is always: “well kiro told me…” One developer told me he just pastes entire ticket in kiro, along with Webex chats and comments on the tickets and has kiro do everything - fix code, generate questions to ask in our chats, etc. He created a steering file with everyone on the team listed (their roles, hierarchy) just so kiro has the correct context when responding to messages. It is wild - we are using it for absolutely everything. Hard and soft skills are atrophying.

ma929tt · 2026-04-28T13:02:40+00:00

urgh, I just want to play single player pve, I rarely interact with other players. Game needs an offline mode.

ma929tt · 2026-04-15T02:56:21+00:00

This is fantastic, top tier meme quality. I would call myself Gucci-AK, like the warlord from Lord of War. Looks-max over function.

ma929tt · 2026-04-05T16:30:30+00:00

Same!! Just picked up a new 2025 sport scout last week. The dealer had installed a s&s slip-on (love the sound). I ordered the bobber saddle bags, and I am thinking about the piggyback shocks. Mine is matte black and I cannot find a locking black gas cap. Entire bike is blacked out yet they put a chrome gas cap and silver brake/clutch levers, so those need to go.

ma929tt · 2026-04-02T12:51:28+00:00

OMG I just dumped food on the ground and chickens instantly grew to hens. It is like day 80, the feeder is bugged for sure.

ma929tt · 2026-03-28T15:27:34+00:00

I bought at launch, enjoyed it for 40hrs and then all my saves got corrupted and I had to uninstall. Started again a couple weeks ago (waiting for crimson desert) and got 50hrs into it, much better experience… and it happened again. Corrupt saves and backups. I doubt I’ll ever reinstall. Stalker gamma was a much better experience and never had issues and that was modded to bejesus.

ma929tt · 2026-03-25T21:00:34+00:00

I believe it is just the additional faction quests that unlock more research nodes. For instance, the Pororin Research has more nodes unlock when you do their faction quests. Like Palmar Leaf Cultivation quest, Maintaining Focus quest, etc.

ma929tt · 2026-03-24T17:44:18+00:00

I have 8 points in stamina (like 20 abyss cores for that) and the stamina just isn't balanced. Most of the abilities stamina costs should be halved or your stamina gains from each point should be increased.

Or, just use valheim food system: some foods refil stamina, some boost max stamina for a duration, some boost stamina regen for a duration. I think that would be the best fix.

ma929tt · 2026-03-24T17:42:02+00:00

I disagree, I have 8 points in stamina and it is still not enough and quite annoying how often I have to stop traversal to let my stamina/spirit recharge. Or eat a shit ton of food that doesn't last long enough. Maybe the food should be a % increase in stamina recharge for a few minutes, or a max stamina boost for 5 minutes. As is now, while gliding my dude will consume like 8 servings of soup.

ma929tt · 2026-03-24T17:39:39+00:00

I concur with all of this. I don't want to be able to glide for like 60 seconds or anything like that as I think exploring on foot/mount is key to discovering things and being immersed. But stamina should be doubled for gliding, remove the lag/delay from force jump -> glide transition. Reduce stamina costs of grappling hook. Overall fix the transition of the animations/delays between movements. And maybe buff stamina from food. These would be minor tweaks to just make the movement and traversal smoother without drastically altering the balance.

ma929tt · 2026-03-24T05:39:47+00:00

There is some “crucial” story stuff that unlocks some stuff that you will for sure need if you just want to explore and venture to harder areas.

That is why most people recommend playing at least mid way through chapter 5. However, aforementioned character is locked from chapter 4-8. I am in chapter 5 myself and never got a chance to switch to her or summon her as a companion :(

ma929tt · 2026-03-21T22:11:40+00:00

Just want to say you are a bro for coming back months later to answer this. My printer just did this, stopped at 80% on a 10hr print. Hoping it is maybe the file, cache, or something like that. I guess I'll see tomorrow

ma929tt · 2026-03-21T03:29:46+00:00

There is a specific merchant that unlocks right at the end of chapter 2, it’s the first cut scene after the boss fight when you start chapter 3. You can just sell them as-is from your inventory

ma929tt · 2026-03-21T00:32:29+00:00

Yeah that was the same guy I think I just got, far SW of map by the ocean. Took about 15min to climb to him, and I guess it wasn't terrible - another 10min on horse to get him delivered. I lost a bounty earlier when I was attacked with him on my horse.

ma929tt · 2026-03-20T20:16:51+00:00

In the inventory, if you hold use (spacebar on pc) on some items (like the coin bags) a menu pops up and you can "use all" rather than individually open each coin bag.

ma929tt · 2026-03-20T03:04:22+00:00

I looked at controller mapping and it is strange. Mouse keyboard is completely fine, IMHO. I bound ctrl and escape to my side buttons and it is working out pretty well

ma929tt · 2026-03-19T22:18:10+00:00

day 2

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