Yeah. In this wild scenario, only the people who can crack the robots security protocols, and reprogram them, will have any influence over society.
I promise to be a benevolent ruler.
Except Michael Bay will have to return to making Transformers movies full time. Sorry about that, in advance.
Yeah. The whole job is figuring out just the right away to say “pretty please” to the computer. The ways it’s done changes every decade or so. The fact that it’s a huge pain in the ass has yet to change, in spite of decades of marketing promises.
AI isn’t ready to replace coders, but it’s quickly going to make a dent on the numbers needed.
Let me push back on this a bit - this belief comes from the assumption that I, as a hiring manager, need more team members because they can only type so fast.
My actual need for separate development team members is to achieve a bench depth of two people in each of the seven specializations necessary to keep my employer un-bankrupt. (My annual bonus is better if I somehow miraculously cover the 14 specializations necessary to make us never look like idiots. But these are wishes, not miracles.)
I don’t currently see any sign that AI will ever materially affect the number of people I need to hire.
In contrast, the specific individuals I hire have massive impact on how many others I need to hire. One person with three specializations brings me massive savings.
But I pay my people to understand our organizational domains of expertise. LLMs don’t bring any new understanding whatsoever into the organization.
Now lets say A.I makes developers 50% more productive
That’s wildly optimistic. If I recall correctly, early studies are showing the 51% of participants who saw any improvement, reported an average of a 20% improvement.
Even granting that optimism, since 5% of all software projects are on time and within budget, we may look forward to a whopping leap to 7.5 out of every hundred software projects arriving on time and under budget, in a best case scenario.
The hard truth no one wants to talk about is that the average software development team is awful.
This glorified parrot tool of LLMs is one of the coolest we have seen in awhile, but it’s not going to materially fix the awful state of the field of software development.
The average software development team doesn’t understand how to deliver high quality maintainable solitions on a reasonable timeline.
AI may mildly improve the delivery timelines of the still very incorrect and over-budget solutions delivered by the average development team.
Yeah. It honestly blew me away. I switched my personal laptop to Linux, as one often does, primarily to revive some old hardware.
I thought I was giving up streaming from it, but it’s been great.
I tend to run my TVs on non-stadard media devices due to privacy bullshit by vendors, and previously that has meant a lot of Android variant devices.
Looking forward, I’m really looking forward to running my living room TV off of a modified SteamDeck or a Linux media server build that is as close as I can get to one, thanks to the surprisingly good media experience of Firefox on Linux, lately.
Yeah. I like that their campaign slogan font is noticeably different than the previous deranged, delusional, maniac overlords. It’s a refreshing change.
“Optimized Multi-Screen Management: Fully leverage multi-screen setups, perfect for Pincabs or dual-screen arcade cabinets, for an immersive and customized gaming experience.”
Exciting!
More or less. The man who appears in front of them is the narrator of “The Twilight Zone”, who frequently appears to explain that the events of moments earlier are happening in an alternate, impossible, universe.
The ability to stream media from legit paid sources. (Netflix, Comcast, max, disneyplus, prime, I don’t know where the list is currently, but anything that bitches about user agent.)
Agreed, that’s critical. That said, I periodically subscribe to all of those, and all of the ones I’ve tried in the last year on Firefox on Debian, have worked perfectly. If there’s any left that still don’t, I haven’t tried/encountered them.
Yeah. Windows install and Linux install quietly switched which was the difficult shitty experience sometime when I wasn’t watching.
I don’t think there’s anything in the Fediverse meant to support the family updates use case.
We use giant SMS text message threads for that.
For more privacy, we get everyone to use Signal or XMPP with OMEMO.
Simon Tatham’s Puzzles has classic puzzle games like MasterMind and Sudoku plus a bunch that became classics to me after I discovered them there.
About every year or so one of the ones I have previously ignored “clicks” for me and becomes a new favorite of mine.
Yeah. This is the important nuance. I would vote for necktie duck, but I’ll carry bowtie duck with me to a party.
Both are perfect. But if I had to pick one, the Bowtie duck is the one I would carry to hell and back.
If you’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment from Slay the Spire, be sure to try out Monster Train.
Lots of my colleagues in SWE use full blown AI development tools.
We all use full blown AI development tools. Before that we had other tricks that did the same thing.
We must beware mistaking the instrument for the musician, or we get sold a broken old instrument that doesn’t perform miracles outside it’s master’s hand.
I even used Claude AI to write an entire C# application, I did ZERO coding, yes, literally nothing! I have NEVER coded in C# before, I gave it all requirements, worked with it like a project manager… it created a full blown working application that was beyond my expectations.
I achieved the same in 2000 with a home grown framework, and again in 2006 with Ruby on Rails.
Astonishingly fast prototyping is a quarter of a centrury old.
Computers are replacing us. They’ve been at it since their inception.
Keep learning the trade and you’ll find there’s a metric ton more that computers cannot help with, than that they can help with. That will get better. I’m working at making it get better.
I figure that my learning how to train the computers is job security. I didn’t count on it being a harsh lesson in how long it’s going to be before computers get not stupid.
I do have a plan for when I automate myself out of a job. It’s just not a plan I’m really counting on, because I’ve been trying for decades and I only have so many decades left of doing this.
I’ve been constantly advised to have an exit plan, for when the computers replaced me, for the entirety of those same decades.
Most often by the same people who want me to charge less.
Funny thing, that. Take care who you listen to on this topic, and what their motives are.
My motive is to (continue to) charge the rest of you a shit ton of money before the AI finally replace us.
It does help me if you all don’t buy into the bullshit that CEOs have been spouting about replacing us all.
We’ve all been undercharging for about 3 years due to it.
AI hasn’t accomplished jack shit, but a lot of you have accepted lower pay than you probably should.
I make very good money, but I can’t help but notice that it would be a bit more, if the rest of you would wise to the scam and raise your own prices.
Some days, all I do is code.
So your instincts are correct. You need to learn the rest of the job, before the part you are doing is replaced by robots.
Homemade pornography, obviously.
But actually, I’ll limit myself to fixing deployment pipelines, correcting business specification mistakes, helping business leaders understand how computers work at all, mitigating moderate security issues, and finding a new job when the unmitigated severe security issues drive my employer bankrupt.
So essentially, exactly how I spend my day today, but with less typing.
And more nude photography, of course.
I’m actually anxious this is where it’s going.
If we end up there, I’m going to charge so much money, and I’m going to have all kinds of pain-in-the-ass clauses in my contract.
If I have to clean up the stupid again, everyone else is going to be doing doing some stupid shit that I find funny, in exchange for my help cleaning up their mess.