I feel kind of lame saying so, but I just use Kate for taking notes.

I only realised it was supposed to be for editing code when it gave me a debug error when I wrote something with parentheses (what do you mean there’s an error in line 43!? That sentence makes perfect sense!)

They’re really doing everything in their power to destroy their own business model, aren’t they?

I’d say there are probably as many genuine use-cases for AI as there are people in denial that AI has genuine use-cases.

Top of my head:

• Text editing. Write something (e.g. e-mails, websites, novels, even code) and have an LLM rewrite it to suit a specific tone and identify errors.
• Creative art. You claim generative AI art is soulless and poor quality, to me, that indicates a lack of familiarity with what generative AI is capable of. There are tools to create entire songs from scratch, replace the voice of one artist with another, remove unwanted background noise from songs, improve the quality of old songs, separate/add vocal tracks to music, turn 2d models into 3d models, create images from text, convert simple images into complex images, fill in missing details from images, upscale and colourise images, separate foregrounds from backgrounds.
• Note taking and summarisation (e.g. summarising meeting minutes or summarising a conversation or events that occur).
• Video games. Imagine the replay value of a video game if every time you play there are different quests, maps, NPCs, unexpected twists, and different puzzles? The technology isn’t developed enough for this at the moment, but I think this is something we will see in the coming years. Some games (Skyrim and Fallout 4 come to mind) have a mod that gives each NPC AI generated dialogue that takes into account the NPC’s personality and history.
• Real time assistance for a variety of tasks. Consider a call centre environment as one example, a model can be optimised to evaluate calls based on language and empathy and correctness of information. A model could be set up with a call centre’s knowledge base that listens to the call and locates information based on a caller’s enquiry and tells an agent where the information is located (or even suggests what to say, though this is currently prone to hallucination).

“Quick! Hurry! Scrum! 5 minute stand up team! We need to sort this crisis out NOW!”

“Joe! The building is on fire! Move! RUN!”

“No! We need to have a meeting first! SCRUM! STAND UP! AGILE! SILICON VALLEY!!!1!!!1!! When is the next sprint!?”

Looking for a passionate, motivated team member to be part of a newly refreshed team created to replace an unsuccessful team (RIP) promoting our incredibly competitive product!

• You must have at least 40 years experience working with Windows 11.
• GENEROUS remuneration package!*
• You need to be able to work 26 hours a day 9 days per week.
• You will need to bring PASSION! ENTHUSIASM! EXCITEMENT! [synonym not found]!, and GRIT!

*as we are a small start up, we can’t afford to pay wages, but when we are successful, we promise to write your name somewhere on an archived version of our website.

Yeah, I’ve considered a name change myself. Decided not to bother as it would mean every time I need to prove my identity to a government organisation I’d need to provide additional change of name documentation.

Government is hard enough to deal with as it is without adding an extra thing that needs to be assessed.

It boggles my mind how so many websites and platforms incorrectly say my e-mail address is ‘invalid’ because it has an apostrophe in it.

No. It is NOT invalid. I have been receiving e-mails for years. You just have a shitty developer.

Probably some bureaucrat decades ago making an incorrect assumption that passed down through generations. Happened to my family. No Irish roots whatsoever, yet somehow we ended up with the annoying form-breaking apostrophe in our ‘legal’ name just because it begins with the letter ‘o’.

“Oscar??? Surely, you’re mistaken. I hereby decree your name to be O’Scar!” ~Arsehole circa 1937

I’ve been using Linux on and off for years and I’ve never really understood what these different directories are for. If I don’t know where something is I just search for it, though more often than not whatever I’m looking for is somewhere in the home directory. I’m also not sure of the accuracy of this though. I have a VM in /run, and an SSD and thumb drive in /media. I would’ve expected these to be in /mnt.

This somehow makes me feel both old and young at the same time.

Don’t be silly; it’s obvious that there are different error messages for each gender expression. Error logs need to be detailed and specific in order to be useful.