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I don't have an X account, and I only use xcancel when someone sends me a link. The reason it's impossible to completely avoid both of them, at least in my corner of the world is that a lot of public organisms seem to think publishing information online exclusively on Twitter is okay, and if you complain they tend to ignore you (I admit I haven't tried complaining about it on Twitter, which seems to be the only thing that works these days).

I've stopped using xcancel even for that. If anything is important enough, it will reach me via other channels. Particularly from any contact who give af ... if they don't it's not important.

Not every org is going to run their own site. I have a similar frustration with companies that post on Facebook or Instagram. I deleted my Facebook account years ago.

If they post on Reddit, it gets lost in the sea.


You could make it 99% of the time a normal phone booth and 1% you get the Matrix easter egg, that would be even more fun.


I've implemented this. There's no random function with voip.ms, but there are time-based rules. So it'll play the Matrix easter egg about 1/90th of the day after no answer.


And the other 1%, a call from the Machine (Person of Interest) with a Dewey Decimal System number callout. It would be even better if the booth itself rang and when somebody nearby answered, you get the numbers.


But how is it different? Because I live in one of those 27 member states, and I'm pretty sure that we had our own regulations before, that they were different from the other 26 states, and that any companies doing business here had to comply with them. Or is it that they were not complying with regulations before and now they will have to?


Before: you make a thing, you stick it in box and mail it to someone in another EU country. Fees paid: postage.

After: for every one of the 27 EU countries you plan to ship to, you must pay hundreds or thousands of euros in registration fees as a packaging producer.

Somehow, regulation believers who think they are sticking it to the big man think this is a reasonable system, and not a complete killer of small time entrepreneurship for those not fortunate enough to have millions in capital.


Do you, is that what the law is? I've seen enough propaganda flying around to not just take this on faith. What happens whenever two countries differ on any other regulation and one company sells outside its home country?


What is the question? Instead of going straight for the insinuations of Russian propaganda and whatever you could just have looked it up for yourself.

How about Spanish-Portuguese specialty horse riding gear? https://picadera.de/en/ppwr-warum-wir-nicht-mehr-in-die-eu-v...

How about organic children's clothes from Sweden? https://shopdunssweden.se/

A solid bike lock made straight out of German engineering? https://www.pitlock.de/en/blog/post/eu-packaging-regulation-...

I could find these all day but let me just remind you that for literally _DECADES_ before this regulation there were no such restrictions to cross EU online shopping. Now the small players have closed entirely, and the more fortunate can only afford to serve the largest countries such as Germany, Belgium, Netherlands. It's insane.

And to add insult to the injury, substandard alternatives to all of these products are still readily available on Temu. They are fucking laughing at us in China!


I have yet to see any evidence beyond angry internet comments that registering in every country is actually required.


There are several sites out there trying to help explain PPWR and they all say the same thing: the one that brings the package to an EU state market must do EPR registration in that EU state.

If you sell directly to consumers from a web shop, that is you.

A selection of such guides:

https://www.ppwrconsulting.com/blog/ppwr-small-business-sme/

https://packdeclare.com/blog/ppwr-sme-guide

https://getreadycompliance.eu/ppwr-extended-producer-respons...


These companies that make money helping you register want you to register more? Color me shocked


You are free to pretend you know better than SME's all over the union, their chambers of commerce, actual CUSTOMERS dealing with this, but evidently business has already ground to a halt anyway.

This is exactly what I mean by regulation believers. Here you have all the evidence you need that the harm is done, yet you believe it's still about some philosophical debate whether the regulation even works that way.


No, the evidence is that some people are overly paranoid and the rest would like to clear up the wording to bypass the paranoia. The same thing happened with GDPR.


Like I said, you are focusing on irrelevant semantics. The single market is already dead, you just didn't realize it yet.


What forfeit will you give me if I come back to this comment in two years and there are still European small businesses?


Well, yes and no. They tried making exemptions for micro-businesses, but they are not exempt from the law completely. The administration costs can be bigger than your estimated profit for a certain country.


I think this is the most accurate take on this thread. I've written super optimised code in assembly and SIMD. But only for contests never at work, because I've never had an employer that cared to optimise things that far, they just wanted cheap software that worked just good enough to get the job done. Even in places where they actually cared about quality would usually prefer adding a couple features over optimising things that much.


It'll be a little startup from San Francisco called "El Goog".


I remember people moving the goalposts like that since, let me check... when did AI Dungeon go viral? Wow, 2019.


Yep. I've been hearing «Look, we only got tools that are really capable in the past 6->8 months... everything prior to that was unusable garbage, so anything anyone said about the field prior to that is totally invalid.» for years now.


What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Fable can do. I push its code straight to prod.

But I am just as amazed with how little real life consequence it seems to have! Even software houses were hit more by interest rates than by this magical revolution.

If I couldn't directly observe Fable in action, I wouldn't believe in AI.


I read the lack of real-life consequences as a sign that gains through digital technology as a whole become ever more marginal.

What would produce huge "gains" (depends on who you ask) again is the automation of the myriad non-digital roles/companies, but good luck with that...


> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Fable can do. I push its code straight to prod.

>> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Opus 4.8 can do. I push its code straight to prod.

>>> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Opus 4.6 can do. I push its code straight to prod.

>>>> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what GPT5 can do. I push its code straight to prod.

>>>>>> What's moving the goalposts? I am very much amazed at what Opus 3.5 can do. I push its code straight to prod.


I am definitely not impressed by Opus. Quite the opposite usually.


The same thing they always do?


I don't see why these colors would be any more truer than the ones before. I bet they would change again just as quick if winds went back to blowing the other way. The only color they care about is the green of money. And if you asked them why they supported it they'd get all forgetful and not remember ever supporting any of that.


It will be very difficult for them to backtrack on their crap now without losing face, since many of them have gone off the far end. Elon was once a darling of the left, with sizeable donations to Obama and Clinton, and even Biden.

It seems for Elon, the point he went right happened as follows:

> On August 5, 2021, Biden signed an Executive Order targeting that half of cars sold in 2030 should be electric.[254] General Motors CEO Mary Barra was in attendance.[254] Musk commented, "seems odd that Tesla wasn't invited."[255] Barra said in 2024 Musk never forgave not being invited.[256][257] In 2025, former vice president Kamala Harris said that she believed that not inviting Musk was a "big mistake."[258][259] In September 2021, Musk criticized Biden as "not the friendliest administration."[258] In December 2021, Musk publicly expressed opposition to the Build Back Better Act.

He literally switched sides for something so trivial, but went deeper and deeper till he went full retard.


There are only like three or four that aren't just flat buttons with a different border radius and colour. If this had been done in the mid 2000s it would have hundreds of entirely different looking buttons. Glassy buttons, metal buttons, glowing buttons, pixel art buttons, cartoon buttons, etc.


A better time. Before flat material lameness and Corporate Memphis.


One sentence into that readme I can tell you that yes, it most definitely counts as slop.


That's fair critique, the README itself is indeed slop explicitly written by bots for bots. What it actually does and how it works is actually pretty neat if you care to look.


Then.. why would you link to the readme if you know it's slop? What's the point of a slop README?


'Cause I don't have any quality user-facing documentation yet; that README is for bots. None of the interfaces have had a chance to settle, so any time spent accurately and humanely documenting what the project is capable of right now is an investment I cannot afford. I figured most people would just give it over to their favorite LLM with whatever instructions they prefer for translation because that's what I would've done...


I don’t mean to pick on you in particular here, but this approach has been bothering me a lot lately, and it seems like it’s super common.

I get that it’s an early prototype and not all the design choices are made yet, but I struggle with “I can’t afford human-readable documentation yet”. Isn’t human readable documentation important for efficiently planning and deciding what you want to build? I feel like I can’t afford not to have human readable docs and plans while the project is taking shape

Related, if a user can prompt an agent to translate to a human-readable summary, wouldn’t it be better to just do this in place? Sure, models can deal with noisy LLM outputs but shouldn’t a document that’s easier for humans also be easier for bots?


No worries, I don't feel picked on at all.

Yes, it would probably be better to have something like that if you're struggling to plan and decide. In my particular case this has been a project that I have dreamt about and tinkered with for at least 15 years now. Most of the work I'm doing is just refinement of existing ideas what were already codified in other projects I've built.

Why don't I do this in place? The amount of churn is utterly incredible as ideas are refined and taken to the limit. These agents are getting quite good, but they regularly make the silliest of mistakes. You actually have to be extremely cautious about what you document because it often has a way of becoming "doctrine" to the agents. In fact, one of the most difficult parts of working on this project has been that the foundational properties cause the agents to lock down behavior WAY too early.


What does "that README is for bots" mean? Are you implying it is some kind of special language written by and correctly understood by bots/LLMs, but otherwise semantically coherent?


Sort of? The bots almost insist on making sure one exists because that's one of the many patterns they trained on and they do their best to be human-like, but we all know that just doesn't pan out. They're also a side-effect of your long-term interactions with the agents, very much like being in a tight clique where most of your conversations sound like gibberish to outsiders because of all the jargon.


Wait so someone asked for something you made with AI that wasn't slop, and then you linked to something you knew was slop, and you said "I think this counts as something that isn't mere slop" and then when called out on it you admit you knew it was slop the whole time?

This is a frequent pattern among AI users. What causes it?


I noticed this as well. A few days ago I was linked a game engine here when I similarly asked for proof and when I went to the repo and started reading it, the best way to describe it was keyword jargon soup and it seems to be the same for a lot of projects in this thread.

I think it's because it makes them seem...smarter? More technical? But they can't describe who it's for or what the actual design is without consulting an AI.


The README is, the project absolutely isn't and you don't have to take my word for it. I figure I'm speaking to a technically advanced audience who is perfectly capable of pulling down the repository if they're at all curious. I also provided a non-slop link elsewhere in the thread if that's more your bag. If not, oh well...


The project appears to also be slop.


Why would anyone pull it? When I want slop I just ask the AI to generate some exactly the way I like it.


I get the skepticism, I really do, but my hope is that your own AI(s) confirm exactly what I'm claiming within these comments. Like I've told others, there's no need to take my word for it... the entire point of the project is that anyone can execute/prove the same things I claim using their own hardware via a Doom-replay type format. If I was one of those influencer types, then I would've simply led with "it's an agentic first engine!!! how amazeballz is this?!" or some other nonsense. On the extremely off chance that I'm actually working on some sort of ridiculous ARG, consider this post a canonical part of it.


> I get the skepticism, I really do, but my hope is that your own AI(s) confirm exactly what I'm claiming within these comments

Given that you stated your readme is for bots, given that you expect our own AI to interpret it based on your evidence, how do I, as a human, go about evaluating this project without just writing it off as slop from the linked evidence?

What is the starting off point for a human, not an AI agent, to evaluate this?

And to be clear if the answer is to just download arbitrary code onto my machine and run it, that’s not good enough given the increase in attacks from AI projects and fake recruiters telling you to just run it bro. I’ve already had to pass on multiple interviews despite being unemployed because the human/ai on the other side demanded root access or for me to run arbitrary code onto my machine as part of their process.


Frankly, there's no "good" starting off point for a human right now, and that's why I'm not at all comfortable claiming this has actually shipped. It's very much a WIP where only a select few namespaces have actually had a chance to settle.

That said, the maths library might just be the best thing to start with because it's mostly stable, relatively simple, and virtually every other part of the project depends on it in some way. If graphics are more your jam then maybe check out the SDF VM project and associated documents. All rendering goes through a single instruction set that is implemented via a shader pipeline that allows arbitrary scenes to be defined without shader recompilation. The project is essentially multiple compilers wearing a trench coat so there's a little bit of something for everyone... like two fully implemented emulators of the brick variety, including peripherals.

If you're adventurous and want to have your favorite LLM give the project a review in a sandbox then I think that'd be neat! Especially considering that they would have absolutely no problem driving everything themselves through STDIN. Though I totally understand if that's not something you're keen on doing considering the state of things today. Either way, cheers!


Jesus Wept. Software engineering is dying at the moment and everyone has AI Glitz in their eyes.


Dying? Really?

https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.Maths...

Some of us aren't just slopping it up like @theo and all the other AI influencers are, as I developed nearly every single line of this by hand over the span of the past decade. Agents recently became capable of factchecking it and helped find bugs that my other unit testing never caught. Software engineering has never been more alive!

https://gist.github.com/Kittoes0124/6827d08e457c1c8b790422af...

This is a snippet I wrote years ago to help me study different formulations of the equation ((1 + √5) / 2). There was this thing I could "see" in there that would allow me index into these sequences, and whole families of others, in O(1) time. The problem is that I still don't know enough maths to derive the exact object that I want from the nonsense that I have.

https://github.com/ByteTerrace/Puck/blob/main/src/Puck.Maths...

This is the reformulation of that snippet into a proper object, distilled using Fable and Sol. Unlike BinaryIntegerFunctions, I didn't write a line of this and I'm quite happy with that. It's been a slog for so long... being able to let these agents toil away at all the off-by-one type noise is just nice. I get to focus on an actual product for once instead of manufacturing every single nut and bolt myself.


I am just confused on how you know that all of what has been generated is valid. When you write the code generator yourself, you have that level of confidence.


It's mathematically provable in most cases because the engine is deterministic from the ground up and I refused to ever compromise on that one detail. For example, nearly all of the VM and maths code functions have been validated for ALL possible 32-bit inputs and extensively fuzz tested in the 64-bit range. Even the more complicated sections of the code like the emulators have batteries of third party tests that ensure a certain level of compliance. The fact that you can play commerical ROMs to completion, including esoteric titles that require third party peripheral/MBC code, is quite solid proof too!

A form of recursion is also doing a lot of heavy lifting because the emulators are their own separate deterministic engines that are dynamically plumbed into the primary loop. This not only allows us to embed diegetic devices (as in, you can literally pick up a glowing brick in the world, hold it to your face, and play it), but also validates that the primary loop is coded accurately because the outer loop runs at X Hz while humble bricks must run at ~59.7275 Hz. Pacing inaccuracies in the main loop cause us to fail the brick suites that we test against. This concept of having features reinforce one another is applied as often as possible.

The obsession with determinism goes so far that both the DirectX and Vulkan backends are validated against each other for pixel level differences. If they differ more than the expected maximum then code is refactored until the drift is back within acceptable range.


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