I use VS Code and GitHub Co-pilot and develop in a variety of different languages and frameworks. I’ve got lots of experience with some, but I’m less knowledgeable on others.

So, having the AI assist with languages I am very familiar with is basically a way to save time and preserve my mental energy. For languages and frameworks I’m less experienced with, it speeds things up because I’m not having to constantly search how-tos and forums for guidance. And for languages/frameworks I have limited or no experience with, it can be a helpful learning tool that speeds up how long it takes to get ramped up.

With this set-up, if I start writing a line of code and then pause for a moment, co-pilot kicks in and tries to autocomplete that line, sometimes even suggests the entire block of code. It’s really good at recognizing simple patterns and common boilerplate stuff. It’s less good at figuring out more complex stuff, though.

However, I find that if I start out by writing a comment that explains what I’m trying to accomplish, and to some degree how to accomplish it before I start writing one of those more complex blocks/lines, the AI has a much higher success rate in returning helpful, functioning code. So, basically yes, I write the comment to describe code I haven’t written, and I’ll let the AI take over from there.

This works for code, raw database queries, configuration files, and even for writing tests. I’m not an expert at building out Docker configurations for local development or configuring auto-deployment on whatever random system is being used for a project, but I can often get those things up and running just by describing in comments what I need and what I’m trying to accomplish.

The VS Code co-pilot extension also has some context menu items that let you ask questions and/or ask for suggestions, which comes in handy for some things, but for me, typing out my intentions in comments and then letting the auto-complete kick in as I’m starting a line of code is faster, more efficient, and seems to work better.

Granted, co-pilot also likes to try to auto-complete comments, so that’s sometimes funny just to read what it “thinks” I’m trying to do. And most of the time, I do remove my comments that were specifically to guide co-pilot on what I wanted it to do if they’re super redundant. And, at the end of the day, not everything co-pilot suggests is production-worthy, functional, nor does what I actually described. In fact, a lot of it is not, so you should expect to go back and fine tune things at a minimum. It’s just that overall, it’s good enough that even with all the supervision and revisions I have to make, it’s still a net positive, for now.

As a kid, by the time I started hearing about the system via video game magazines, which were kind of like miniature websites but printed on paper and then distributed via mail and stores, I was convinced it would be the next big thing. By the time it was launched, I knew it was going to be the new top dog in the industry. When I finally got my hands on one, it was (pardon the pun) game changing for me.

The system definitely had its flaws, but it was an evolutionary step up and order of magnitude bigger than anything I’d ever experienced before.

And go figure, it was the last system I owned before I stepped away from the gaming hobby for nearly 2 decades. Life, uh, got in the way.

What you don’t know is that he died when he was pulled into a jet engine.

Remember That DNA You Gave 23andMe?

No. When did I do that?

I know some folks are joking about and dunking on this, but in modern times, I have justification. Call me lazy, but I have found myself writing out these comments and then letting the AI take over to at least give me a sketch of an implementation. Works reasonably well and saves me a lot of time and effort. Mostly I don’t bother to remove them, though I usually edit them a bit.

On the other hand, there are factions within my colleagues who steadfastly insist that commenting is unnecessary and to some degree even potentially harmful, and that if you feel the need to comment your code, it means your code should be improved so that it’s obvious what it is doing without the need for comments.

On the internet, everything is a repost. We simply choose to have faith that an OP once walked this Earth, drizzling his seeds of thought all across the digital landscape. Praise be OP.

There was a movie about Lucy and Desi that came out sometime in the late 1900s.

It was being advertised heavily on one of the over the air television stations that we would watch on our cathode ray tube television that picked up signals from a type of antenna called rabbit ears. Back in those days, they’d sometimes have voice over commercials where they’d talk over the end credits of a show or movie, and apparently sometimes they did that live (I guess)?

Family and I are watching a show and when it ended, they did the voice over thing talking about the Lucy movie. The announcer started out strong but totally fumbled a line, something along the lines of “join Ducy, Lesi, and little Licky”. I just know we all heard it, we all busted out laughing.

I saw something the other day where they were interviewing some people from a republican group in North Carolina. Their response was basically that it’s a non-issue for them. Even if every awful thing about him is true, they said they aren’t electing saints, they’re electing politicians.

The conservative folks I talk to always, always, always bring up the price of eggs and the price of gas when they are talking about how bad the economy is these days.

I’ve heard “Groceries have doubled in price.” many times. Obviously I can’t prove that’s not true for them, but then I ask what items that they buy regularly have doubled in price? The answer: “Eggs”.

Okay, so what else, I know that eggs alone do not make up your entire grocery bill? “Everything”. That’s pretty much all I get.

Even if they can tell me a few more things that have doubled in price, it’s basically going to be outliers or things I know for a fact they rarely/never buy. Like when it comes to the eggs, they’ll make claims like “eggs are $10 a dozen”, but when pressed about it, you find out they’re talking about the gourmet premium brand that’s always been way more expensive than the cheap ones and which they’ve never purchased in their entire lives.

That’s great news! I’m a HUGE fan of chest hair.

Somewhat tangential question: Why do so many sites have links to an external status monitoring site, but when the site is down and you go to check the status on that external status monitoring site, it says everything’s fine? What’s the point of the status site if it doesn’t actually acknowledge that there’s any sort of outage nor provide any info on it?

How many j’s has this photo been pegged? My dear sweet pixelated Jesus.

Not going to lie, I kind of wonder if Anna Kilgore named her cat Miss Sassy in honor of Lindsey Graham.

When you think of it, so many of them are immigrants. They don’t belong in our suburbs. They don’t belong in our homes. They should go back to the desert where they belong. But no, instead they’re pricking us with their thorns and I shudder to think what they’re doing to our pets and the wildlife.

Where I live, the indoor smoking bans started in the early 2000s. Before then, people that went to bars and clubs ended the night smelling like cigarette smoke whether they themselves were smokers or not. Sometimes even eating out at a restaurant would leave you smelling like a smoker. Back in those days, though, I was still so used to it that dealing with it was second nature.

For most of my life the smell didn’t really bother me, but I’ve found that within the past 5 years or so it does.

As a child, I guess I just grew up with it, so it didn’t bug me much. I hated being teased about it at school, which was a regular thing. I also used to hate how the tar would build up on the walls of our house to the point where it would form tear-like patterns. My parents kept an otherwise reasonably clean and tidy house, but for some reason THAT didn’t bother them, so periodically I’d spend a few hours scrubbing our walls to get rid of the stains and cut down on the smell a bit.

My parents ,much of my family, as well as most of their friends smoked indoors, in their cars, and even in restaurants. Despite living in near poverty for parts of my childhood, they chain smoked cartons of cigarettes a week. Must have been expensive.

I wish I could say that they stopped smoking, but no. The worst part for them isn’t even the fact that they know that it has taken at least a decade or more off their lives. It’s the realization at how much they are missing out on near the end of their lives and how difficult it is living with debilitating health issues from smoking. They simply cannot do what other people their age take for granted.

And to the title of the post: Yes, I was the kid in the car while my parents chain smoked cigarettes. Sometimes they rolled the windows down, though I’m not sure if that was better since it meant the ashes and red hot “cherry” would inevitably come flying back in and smack me in the face.

Why you peeing in that thing, bro? The two big arches ought to be enough for any halfway intelligent person to realize that you’re supposed to stick your buttocks there not your beanie-weenie. Dries out your logs so that they don’t make as big a mess when you pick them up to toss them into the sink.

My credit card offers virtual credit card numbers AND the ability to auto-lock the virtual numbers so you can set a date and after that the number will not accept new charges.

I make sure to use a virtual card number for everything subscription based, then I immediately set the auto-lock feature to expire in a few days (give the initial charge time to clear but still plenty of time before the subscription would otherwise renew).

Some subscription services make it super tough to cancel. This method fixes that issue for the most part. Some subscription services terminate immediately once you cancel the subscription, even if you still have “time left” otherwise. This way you don’t really have to formally unsubscribe. It’s easy peasy pumpkin breezy as the common folk like to say.

When someone asks a thing like this on Lemmy, look up the same thread on Reddit (guaranteed to find it was recently also posted there) and copy-pasta some of the top posts. Guaranteed worthless internet up arrows.

I hope your system is doing butter thesis dames.