I keep my neovim config maintained by a LLM which is a fork of Kickstart.
My example might be an outlier on the easy side because they have a custom/plugins directory that will not have merge conflicts ever so I try to never modify the main init.lua and keep all of my changes separate in my own files. This prevents merge conflicts.
I can then ask my LLM to add a plugin or customize existing plugins by writing files in this separate directory to add/overwrite plugins and configurations. This works great for me.
If I were working in the main file creating merge conflicts, I could imagine it could get messy fast.
I own a business that does about $10-$15k mo USD in cash and card transactions and most of what you've said here doesn't ring true to me.
Unless you're handling huge amounts of cash, cards are WAY more expensive to deal with IME, especially because the fees scale as a percentage of revenue, so you can't just increase sales and lower your margins.
I bought a cheap cash and coin counter for about $400 on Amazon, which means it takes me about 2m to count whenever I need to balance the register.
For reference, with my POS I pay about $400 per MONTH in card fees (square).
It does take time to bring it to the bank, maybe 5-10m a week for me.
My bank does not charge for deposits or change; this would be insane and I've never encountered this in the US.
Counterfeits aren't generally an issue for small bills in practice; for $20+ we use a 50c testing pen that takes about 2s per transaction.
Sticky fingers are easily caught by balancing the register after each shift which is again about a 2m operation with cash and coin counters.
Overall I would be taking home about $500 more a month if all my customers paid cash, which is a big deal for a low margin business.
I know, it sucks. I didn't intend to do cash before I started my business because it seemed like a pain but now that I've figured it out I'm really glad I did.
I love being able to transact without the payment processors knowing anything about my customers, and they appreciate it, too. My cash payers are usually very grateful.
I know you probably mean very well, but IMO it's really bizarre and patronizing to be offended on someone else's behalf, especially if the offended people in question are perfectly capable of expressing the sentiment themselves.
If there's actual outrage from the group, it will surface from them without your involvement.
If it offends YOU, just say so plainly.
The hypothetically offended group doesn't need a random stranger to white knight for them in the comment section of a niche tech news website.
I think your main point is right, but there are many Costco members who are NOT shopping for "weeks of groceries" at a time, and many of them live in suburban or urban areas with high density. For example, I shop at Costco once a week for just my girlfriend and I; we don't buy outrageous quantities. We live in a populous area.
Our situation is pretty common; it's just a normal grocery store in effect for lots of people. The weird stereotype of Costco shoppers driving for miles to buy huge carts of food just doesn't line up with the typical case for my area.
Agreed. We have two Costco's within 6 minutes driving distance, my wife visits them once a week, like Walmart and Whole Foods. We also shop regularly on Amazon. We don't buy weeks of food at a time.
I don’t think the time sink is that significant with many tools, especially since you can take existing projects and change them. And it’s fun to hack!
It is significant if you don't want to sit at a computer all day just to MAYBE get basic functionality, then find you've backed yourself into a corner because you didn't know some esoteric detail and have to spend another day doing a refactor, etc etc
I don't want to sift through docs and man pages and debug cryptic compiler and runtime errors in my spare time.
There are far richer things for me to do with my life.
I want to use my computer to get my tasks done and be done with it. Slogging through technical details an LLM could crush in minutes is a much better use of my resources.
IMO, it's a bit disingenuous in 2026 to argue that technical college degrees exist for the sake of pure education and that we're best suited to continue pretending as such.
The vast majority of students and employers treat them as vocational certificates in practice, and the profession would almost certainly benefit from adapting curricula to more closely match that reality.
Foundational concepts are still necessary, but I don't buy the argument that we should continue teaching like it's 1946.
I've been thinking along similar lines as you and really appreciate you posting this comment.
I, too, think it's important to put dreams out there even if they have holes in their implementation or are easily torn apart by naysayers. We can and should collectively dream of a better future if we want something worthwhile to aim at.
Thanks for taking the time to write such a high quality reply; this is something I've wondered about for a long time and I appreciate the thought and detail you've shared here. :)
No worries - I'm glad it's helpful. Like anything, it's incredibly context specific, and you're always weighing up trade offs that may or may not turn out to be valid over the long term based on the best information you have right now.
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