That's what sidestepping means, no?

That the answer doesn't matter, and capabilities and behaviour are there either way.

That wasn't my reading of the comment, but I guess it's possible that that is what was intended.

To my mind, "sidestepping the question of consciousness" and "sidestepping any notion of consciousness" mean very different things.

From context it doesn't look like this was the interpretation of "sidestepping" OP was using.

I've played this game before and it's been called queens, not kings. But this is a fairly nice implementation.

You're mixing up Go and Othello :)

Try it on a flaky connection. Every menu (maybe any action of any kind?) makes a roundtrip to the server before displaying, with a very slow timeout. It's crazy how bad it is.

Not just that, some actions spawn an entire Chromium instance. For example, any time you click on a music video (not a new thread, an actual full Chromium instance).

I’m sure more agentic coding loops will improve these inefficiencies

Are you joking? Inefficiencies like that are a typical tell for LLM-generated slop.

And I'm sure their prompt whisperers are proud of their work.

Yes I was joking

I think they've gotten worse about this as an organization over the last few years(?). Earlier this year an update to their mobile app introduced loading time, and resulting slowness, for opening menus that used to be ~instant. To me that smacks of once having known not to do that, but that knowledge having been lost (or priorities having shifted).

More specifically, I'm talking about tapping the '...' on a track for the options menu. That should be latency-free, and used to be.

That specific thing hasn't been latency free for me for years.

Though I agree it should be.

I have a software degree and some work experience but have been doing other things for a decade or so. I'm curious to try out some "vibe engineering" but it seems a bit daunting to get started, there are so many new tools available on top of the AI itself. Are there good resources for somebody like me to get started, that'll guide me though how to think about prompting, and using CI and how go have the agent successfully write specs and tests and what-not. I don't mind paying some for a good course, but I find it hard to figure out which one would be worthwhile, or whether there are some youtubers that would be better to follow.

Any tips?

The best option at this point is to just sign up for a paid plan with either ChatGPT or Claude and then ask the model the same thing. My preference would be for ChatGPT and if you've been out of the game for a long time then using the desktop app might be the best choice https://chatgpt.com/codex/

Then try starting with voice mode (if you're comfortable chatting out loud) and just talk your way through it.

Just jump in.

Build a sandbox, download Codex CLI or Claude Code or whatever and spend some time doing some creative stuff with it just for the sake of learning how it all fits together.

Pay attention to the inputs you provide and the outputs that they result in. Keep your bullshit detector engaged: Bots often lie.

If you get stuck, or it gets stuck, or you want prompting advice or whatever: Ask any frontier-level bot for help. Sometimes, it's very instructive to get help from Claude for an issue with Codex, or vice-versa.

Want better tools? Ask the bot to suggest some that exist. (None of the existing tools fit? Have the bot write new ones.)

All of this stuff is always in a state of flux, so even with the lies they'll do better at teaching than any fixed reference will. They're LLMs and processing language is what they tend to be best at... so go ahead and use that.

And remember: They're designed to behave kinda-sorta like humans, but they are not humans. They're just computer programs. If you don't like their output style, or they don't like your input style: Ask them how to implement rules that make them knock that shit off. :)

Demo does not work in Fx on android

I've used both, and for me mullvad has worked a lot better. They seem more focused on VPN as core to what they do and don't leak data when reconnecting to a different server, and with proton I often experience that my connection stops working if my laptop gas been closed for some time, and the only way to make it work again is to reconnect to a new server. And then it leaks connections for a few seconds.

My gf experiences some thing like this sometimes. Seems to correlate without exercise or excitement or eating histamine rich food. She takes pentatop to regulate it with some success. I'm also interested to head about your experience.

I've been close to subscribing to The Economist a couple of times, but when I do a web search I find a lot of people complaining about their similar practice of making it difficult to unsubscribe, so I've refrained.

I guess there are more people who give up on unsubscribing than who refrain from subscribing?

Unsubscribing from The Economist was one of the most frustrating corporate interactions I've ever had.

Honestly if it was easier to unsubscribe I'd probably have an on and off again subscription, but I'll never subscribe again because I don't want to jump through those hoops to unsubscribe.

It's hard to calculate the number of people who don't subscribe at all, but you can calculate the number of recovered subscriptions from a retention process.

FWIW, as a subscriber to both, I have more often found myself manually renewing lapsed subscriptions than going through painful cancellation processes to get out of them. I get the Economist through DiscountMags.com where it is often available with a discount.