Works fine in any language I ever used.

I’m honestly quite surprised that this very basic language feature is even a matter of discussion here.

Nope, it is not.

x = 5
i = 2
x -= i // x => 3

while

x = 5
i = 2
x = -i // x => -2

x=-i is the unary minus operator which negates the value right of it. It doesn’t matter if that value is a literal (-3), a variable (-i) or a function (-f()).

x-=i is short for x = x-i, and here it’s a binary subtraction, so x is set to the result of i subtracted from x.

Find me a language where it doesn’t work like that, and we’ll continue the discussion.

Unary - operator is standard in every single language that I used so far, including C/C++, Java, Python, Kotlin, Lua, JS/TS, Groovy, PHP, Visual Basic, Excel, Mathematica, Haskell, Bash.

Here’s more info btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_operation

Yeah, generating test classes with AI is super fast. Just ask it, and within seconds it spits out full test classes with some test data and the tests are plenty, verbose and always green. Perfect for KPIs and for looking cool. Hey, look at me, I generated 100% coverage tests!

Do these tests reflect reality? Is the test data plausible in the context? Are the tests easy to maintain? Who cares, that’s all the next guy’s problem, because when that blows up the original programmer will likely have moved on already.

Good tests are part of the documentation. They show how a class/method/flow is used. They use realistic test data that shows what kind of data you can expect in real-world usage. They anticipate problems caused due to future refactorings and allow future programmers to reliably test their code after a refactoring.

At the same time they need to be concise and non-verbose enough that modifying the tests for future changes is simple and doesn’t take longer than the implementation of the change. Tests are code, so the metric of “lines of code are a cost factor, so fewer lines is better” counts here as well. It’s a big folly to believe that more test lines is better.

So if your goal is to fulfil KPIs and you really don’t care whether the tests make any sense at all, then AI is great. Same goes for documentation. If you just want to fulfil the “every thing needs to be documented” KPI and you really don’t care about the quality of the documentation, go ahead and use AI.

Just know that what you are creating is low-quality cost factors and technical debt. Don’t be proud of creating shitty work that someone else will have to suffer through in the future.

Why would they not let you do that? I honestly don’t know a single language that wouldn’t let you do that. Same as basic math notation allows you to do that.

x = -i

is a totally valid mathematical equation.

For the downvoters: Find me a single language that supports operators but doesn’t have an unary minus operator

Never, never ever ever trust corporations to do social change topics in a good way.

The unholy union of business and feminism still means that you now need 80h of paid work a week to keep a family afloat instead of the 40h we had before.

Disney and LGBTQ+ and other minority topics is exactly like that. They don’t care about anything like that, all they care about is making money.

Yeah, it was a political decision, not one based on how well the Linux transition worked.

They used Linux for quite some time productively. It wasn’t a failed transition at all.

From the title I expected the opposite result.

They used Cloud Computation and AI (“Actually Interns”) way before it was cool.

LOOOOLOLOL. I think there are some initial investors who, in the beginning, legitimately thought it would be a good deal. At this point, the investments are driven by hype, and investors know they are, but they’re gambling that they can ride it to the top without being caught holding the bag. That’s why it will collapse violently. Because the moment it starts going down, everyone is going to dump it.

This is it. Bubbles happen BECAUSE investors know what they are doing. They ride the bubble hard, hoping to get out just before it pops. The later you jump, the more you gain. Unless you jump too late.

All this, including the popping of the bubble, is done on purpose.

High-level capitalism is certainly the place where you should never mistake mallice with incompetence.

What’s dishonest or fraudulent about a capitalist doing capitalist things?

If you think there’s some honest, genuine and honorable capitalists out there, you must be really credulous.

Pretty much, with the difference that corruption can only happen if it takes something off it’s path, so to say.

If the path itself is bad, being bad is not corruption.

If steel rusts, it’s being corrupted. Rust itself cannot be corrupted, because it is what it is.

And yes, I very much think that capitalism sucks.

ChatGPT is a fronted for specialized modules.

If you e.g. ask it to do maths, it will not do it via LLM but run it through a maths module.

I don’t know for a fact whether it has a photo analysis module, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t.

To be corrupt, you need to have another purpose than personal enrichment that you are corrupting in favour of personal enrichment.

The whole goal of capitalism is personal enrichment. There is no other purpose that could be corrupted.

It’s like saying that you make water wet or that you burn a fire.

Read it again, slowly, without anger, and I’m sure you will be able to understand it.

The concept of a “corrupt industry” doesn’t really make sense.

Corruption only works in non-profit/political/governmental contexts. It’s when you have a job that requires you to value some specific higher goal more than your own personal benefit.

The whole purpose and the higher goal of an industry, same as capitalism in general is personal benefit. A capitalist cannot be corrupt. Or to put it differently: The thing that would make e.g. a public servant corrupt is the modus operandi of capitalism.

Edit, since a lot of people don’t seem to get it:

Corruption means that you have some higher purpose that is corrupted in favour of personal gain.

Capitalism has no higher purpose than personal gain. A capitalist prioritizing personal gain is not corrupt, he is a capitalist.

Saying a capitalist is corrupt is like trying to make water wetter or trying to burn a fire.

What we call corruption for a public servant is ideal behavior for a capitalist.

That’s why I purposely left out paradoxes created by omnipotence/omnicience, because you are right, they are incompatible with logic.

The main thing I wanted to argue is that as soon as something supernatural becomes explainable, it’s not supernatural anymore.

The same argument could be made with anything else supernatural, doesn’t really have to be an omnipotent God. As soon as something supernatural exists, it is part of the laws of nature. It might not fit our model of the laws of nature, but that’s a problem with our models/our understanding, and not a problem of breaking the actual laws of nature.

And at that point it’s something that we can either explain (and thus it’s not supernatural) or something we will be able to explain with enough understanding (and thus also not supernatural).

Unless, that is you follow the definition of magic we talked about above: Magic is what we cannot (yet) explain, and we call it magic because we don’t want to admit that we can’t explain it.

(And with magic I mean any handwavy non-explanation like magic, supernatural, God, aliens, …)

Tbh, there’s hardly another way of defining the supernatural.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that God really exist. He’s a personified being that’s omnicient and omnipotent (let’s ignore paradoxi created by these facts, as they aren’t really relevant to the argument).

Since he’s omnicient he knows how his omnipotence works. Since he’s omnipotent he can replicate what he’s doing and he can show a scientist how he does it. Since he’s omnipotent, he can even make it possible that said scientist can replicate it the same way.

Is this still supernatural, or is it just advanced science?

And to go further, is he breaking the laws of nature, or did we just misunderstand the laws of nature? Like you said, gravity existed before Newton, and that theoretical God’s omnipotent abilities break our understanding of the laws of nature would to me just mean that our understanding was wrong.

To put it differently, someone using the relativity theory is breaking Newton’s laws. That doesn’t mean they are breaking the laws of nature, but only Newton’s understanding of them.

I know a (then) girl who was told by her doctors that she would never walk again due to the nerves in her spine being damaged from an illness (can’t remember what exactly that was, it’s a while ago).

Her church congregation did some fasting, prayer and blessings, and soon after that she was able to walk again and she didn’t have any problems with walking since.

Her doctors called it a miracle, because they didn’t have a medical explanation of how this happened.

Stuff like that isn’t even all that rare, especially because our understanding of medicine is still rudimentary at best.

It’d need to work by supernatural means to be a miracle.

What is supernatural?

To say it in the words of Arthur C. Clarke

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

To paraphrase it: Anything we don’t have a scientific explanation for is indistinguishable from the supernatural.

If magic would exist in our world, we would study it and it would just become a branch of physics. The supernatural is just the collection of things we don’t have an explanation for right now.

Walking on water doesn’t happen that often anymore, but miracle healings are just as alive and well as they were 2000 years ago. Probably because humans have immune systems that allow people to often recover even without medical intervention.