askonomm

So ... are we about circled back to realizing why COBOL didn't work yet? This AI magic whispering is getting real close to it just making more sense to "old-school" write programs again.

From what I understand of modern hiring practices, the automated systems match for exact keywords, and if WebScript is not in the system, you don't get matched, and no actual human will even see your resume.

In a world where quality content or products disappear at an ever quicker pace, replaced with generic slop with no emotional attachment, functioning as just a way to extract something from you, the consumer, nostalgia becomes ever more valuable. Maybe not let everything go? Maybe letting things go is why we're at the current state of toxic consumerism that nobody likes.

Quite often it turns out that the connecting glue that held the friendship together was the shared experience of the same job. Remove that and the friendship fades away.

I've had amazing bosses, and yet I've still quit. Once you get bored and have no room to grow in the company there's little your boss can do about it.

Yes, you also know this in modern PHP. https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.declarations.ph.... You add type declarations just like any other statically typed language, and you can get your static analysis by your editor out of the box. But in addition to that, you ALSO get runtime type validation, something that most languages won't give you, and something that to me at least is amazing since code correctness is one thing, but data correctness is even more important in my opinion, and runtime type validation gives you data correctness, built in, no need to mess around with external libraries.

Modern PHP shops don't really do dynamic PHP anymore. Ever since it got types and runtime type validation. Refactoring is also proven to be very easy as a result, and especially with something like Rector (https://github.com/rectorphp/rector).

Indeed. With AI juniors can create horrible software faster, and in bigger quantities. Based on my experience AI really only enhances your existing talent, and if you have none, it enhances the lack of it, since you still need to be able to know how your AI slop fits in the larger system, but if you're a junior you most likely don't know that. Couple that with skipping the step where you must actually understand what you copy and paste from the internet for it to work, you also lengthen the time it takes for a developer to actually level up, since they do much less actual learning.

That's at least my experience working with multiple digital agencies and seeing it all unfold. Most juniors don't last long these days precisely because they skip the part that actually makes them valuable - storing information in their head. And that's concerning, because if to make actually good use of AI you have to be an experienced engineer, but to become an experienced engineer you had to get there without AI doing all your work for you, then how are we going to get new experienced engineers?

Modern PHP is not a templating language. It can be, much like many other languages can be, but it's not how it is used. Most other languages also implement their own templating languages. Have you seen modern PHP ... I don't know, sometime in the last 10 or so years, or is this just another circle jerk of hating on something you have little clue about?

Now if you see that as a bad thing, separating business logic and presentation, and sandboxing presentation so it has no larger access to the system, then I'm afraid you're just not a good programmer.

So this is supposed to be following the practices that were common in PHP ten years ago? Modern PHP is not written in such a way where business logic is mixed with templating. For good reason.

Up to 100k per bank account is secured by the European central bank though, so for most Europeans, the money cannot just simply disappear and you never get it back. And if you have over 100k per bank account, you probably should look for banks with better insurances anyway.

Clojure is very fragile though. Most Clojure companies are driven by vc funding and so whenever there's even a slight economic downturn, the few jobs that there are all disappear, sometimes mid-interview process, I've found out the hard way. But if you have tons of savings to justify a potentially half-year-or-more job search then no, not dying. But I wouldn't exactly say alive either, and the job market also hasn't grown in any noticeable way in the last half a decade.

Holy crap is this unreadable or what (notably the lsp-base fn). There's a reason why in most Clojure companies I've worked at we try to make as small functions as possible, because otherwise it very very quickly becomes an unreadable mess, and you write code after all for humans to read, because if you didn't, you might as well just write binary. But, I'm not surprised many people don't want to get into Clojure or Lisps in general, because it takes a boatload of conventions and active discipline to make it a good experience.

I did not say people used 4k displays in early 2010s en masse, I said that's when I last saw people use 1440p displays. I live in present time, and in present time 4k displays are very cheap. It gets a little more pricey if you want high refresh rate as well, though my 4k 144hz display was just around 400 EUR, which I would consider a lower-mid-tier price range.

4k displays are available at just a few hundred bucks these days, I'd hardly call that being rich.

I mean the last time I saw anyone have a 1440p display was back in the early 2010's, so ... nowadays most people that I know buy 4k 27"/32" displays at minimum, with 5k displays gaining popularity as the price for them goes down. Macbooks for example come with a very high resolution display, and so do most high-end PC laptops, too.

1440p monitor would probably be why the text is blurry - there simply isn't enough pixels to make things smooth without resorting to special hacks to improve LowDPI text rendering, which with more and more displays being HiDPI many don't bother doing.

This is wild to me. In Estonia school lunches are free for everyone, paid by the taxpayer. Doesn't matter if you are poor or wealthy, everybody gets the same food.

Not all schools are government institutions or funded by the government. But it wouldn't matter to your point, because by that logic anyone who owns the building should then be able to make rules about what goes on inside that building, or any organization, etc. Much like how you have basic wardrobe etiquette, you could also have a rule that says no phones in a classroom.

Now me being Estonian, just across the sea from Finland, I was surprised to learn this needed to be a law in the first place since when I went to elementary/primary school smartphones and laptops were not permitted in the classroom. Didn't need a special law for that, it was just the school's rules. You either play ball or you get called into the principals office. This happens enough times and you simply get kicked out of the school.

Am Estonian, and from your list only the first one is with physical mail, though more and more people use virtual cards / Apple Pay instead of even owning a physical card. We can also withdraw cash from an ATM using Apple Pay, no need for a card.

As for price changes regarding utilities (or really, anything) we get an e-mail from the service provider or from the landlord (who then gets an e-mail from the service provider). We also pay for utilities via an online bank transfer or automated subscription to the service provider or to the landlord via a bank transfer (who then pays via an online bank transfer or has an automated subscription).

Elderly people set up automatic subscription services in their local bank branch or by calling the bank, I have not heard of a single elderly person using mail to pay for anything.

I know plenty women who also forget to take it every day.

And, as seems to be the case with U.S., even the justice department themselves have little interest in enforcing the law, making insider trading the sort of thing that on paper is illegal, but since everybody does it, it's okay.

And in Europe collection means all of your bank accounts get frozen and in some countries they even have the power to direct your salary from your employer straight to them until the debt is paid. You definitely don't want to end up in this situation.

I mean the rot goes much deeper than Donald Trump. Most of the US cabinet and top leaders are actively hostile towards what used to be ally states. Spreading lies, propaganda, insults and threatening to invade and take away our land. Meanwhile treating its own people like slaves. USA has become almost indistinguishable from Russia in that regard.

How often do you start a new project? In most companies you work on the same project for years, and even in consultancies it is multiple months at least, so it's not like in a professional setting this issue would come up a lot. I also find LLM bootstrapped projects tend to use massively out of date dependencies and practices for things, riddled with linter errors, which often results in me having to still fix everything, and in the end would've been faster if I just did all myself anyway.

On a side note, get diagnosed for ADHD. I did, and ever since I got on meds my life has drastically improved. Though I never had a big issue with motivation, it has greatly helped with memory and mood stability.

The interesting part here is how it differs for you and me. I work on quite complex systems most of the time, and I write things much faster myself. AI needs so much hand holding that it's equivalent to trying to sprint while carrying a backpack filled with bricks. And also, it changes the way I think, which is really scary to me. I very quickly stop thinking about what a good solution to a problem is, and instead start thinking about how to convince AI to come up with a good solution to a problem. I basically become a manipulator, not a creator. A Steve to a Wozniak. If I wanted that I'd have gone into sales or management instead.

I also wonder what is the end of this relying-on-AI cycle? You need good problem solving skills to be able to use AI to make somewhat working solutions. The more you depend on AI, the worse become your problem solving skills. And then what. Since you're no longer capturing knowledge into your own brain, your moat as a problem solver is also slowly disappearing, no? And once the job market figures out you actually can't do anything outside of an AI, or the tech has moved on, and what you knew before you started using AI has become irrelevant, who will even hire you anymore?

I see this a lot with juniors entering the job market nowadays, unable to problem solve (many don't even know how to copy and paste text), and sure enough, they get fired a lot.

I have found that unless your job is making simple CRUD apps and you really don't care about quality at all, yes, you will be less productive. The amount of tiny problems slipping through is immense, and it is known that code reviews are ineffective at noticing all the bugs, as well as it not having any idea of the general code style or conventions, inability to learn if I tell it, and so forth. In the end I spend at least as much time as I would spend coding the thing myself just massaging the AI to make a somewhat working thing, and that at the expense of much, much worse quality. And, I myself am also miserable, since I'm basically spending my entire day communicating to a kindergarten child and teaching it, over and over again, except that a child eventually learns, AI doesn't. That's horrible. I don't want to spend my days doing that.

Companies I work at tend to value quality and correctness over productivity, as ultimately low quality and incorrect software makes for unhappy clients who we have to service out of our own pockets later on anyway as part of the warranty we provide for our software, ending up costing us a lot more in money and reputation. But, like I said, I'm also not seeing any productivity gain, not unless you throw every good practice out of the window and pretend to be the only dev in the team as the AI will willfully rewrite large chunks of the app and destroy your colleagues work in the process.

And for what? So that you can be a manager? What is your moat in the end of this? Will you advertise on your resume the ability to manipulate AI via text prompts as your skill? I suppose if you want to be a manager, maybe that's appealing. I don't. I want to actually make things, and be an active and intellectual part at making those things, not just a manager monitoring butts in (virtual) seats.

I stopped using any sort of AI once I started feeling my overall problem solving ability disappear (as in, from memory, intuitively, the one thing that makes me valuable in the job market), and I don't want to end up as some glorified copy-paste vessel. Not to mention, being a copy-paste vessel is only fun for manager-type people I figure. Reviewing code is the least fun part of my job, using AI to write code is essentially just spending all your days reviewing code. No thanks. I like to hammer my own nails, not watch some idiot who can't learn and has to be babysit at every turn try to hammer the nails.

His last name means "star" in Estonian. I was curious if his roots were from Estonia, but could not find any info. In any case, rest in peace Dave.

In my mind not niche means having jobs, and Rust has no jobs, not in any meaningful amount at least, and none at all in most countries. That puts it deep in the niche category for me.