beryilma

I have no idea about their music and I don't know who they are as members of the group. But I dislike Nickelback (not hate, though) solely on the basis on the group's name. The name just rubs me the wrong way for some reason...

This is UI theory gone wrong. The idea that users will give feedback more freely when something looks unfinished is at best a non-validated theory.

This used to work with actual paper prototypes. But going the extra length to make UI designs look hand-drawn, when the users know full well they are computer generated is just busy work.

Showing the users what the actual design might look like works better and it actually captures important design choices such as shapes, colors, proximity, etc. that users care about.

I have been to many UX tests. Regardless of sketchy design look or not, the user will either have no problem providing feedback or they won't give useful feedback. It mostly depends on the person, not on what you show them.

I was a big Kafka fan in my younger years. Having read Metamorphosis multiple times, its depth became shallower everytime I've read it. Today, I don't know what to make of his writings.

It must be a company culture thing. I've run book clubs on AI, C++, Code Complete, Timeseries Analysis, and research articles at my company with consistency attendance of 10-15 developers. I even had rotating facilitators and light homeworks where attendees did a decent job.

However, the company's support is very important. Fortunately, my employer pays for the books and they even have a person charged with supporting book clubs, including ordering books for you and create a Confluence template for notetaking and attendance tracking.

I am confused. If the author is part of the Give Up GitHub movement, then why still keep 29 repositories on GitHub! Obviously, they didn't give it up.

"Don't be evil" was it? We came a long way from that...

> Parquet is not a database.

This is not emphasized often enough. Parquet is useless for anything that requires writing back computed results as in data used by signal processing applications.

So true. Every grant application are literally submitted on the last day. Every grant report are written on or after the last day. Every conference paper are submitted on the last day. Every peer review are submitted on or after the deadline.

Why call it "best foreign language novels" if your idea of a foreign language cannot expand outside Europe and Russia. So, nobody wrote a novel that could make the cut for this person unless it was in Spanish, French, German, or Russian?

In my case, the "production" does not really become visible to users right away. Perhaps, I should have called it "pre-production".

Versus now... I changed the text on a button with an internationalized string. It only took me about a week.

I put the English string in the catalog, updated a number of tests, run the tests on the local system, pushed the change to staging cluster, fix unanticipated test failures, push the change to production, contact the translators to have the string translated to a number of languages, and have documentation updated.

There are entire companies in Boston/Cambridge area whose business model is to get perpetual SBIR grants back-to-back and never produce anything of commercial value. And they pad themselves on the back for being innovative companies. It is almost like there is collusion between these companies and grant-giving agencies.

Doesn't matter if he is the inventor or not. Anybody sending lawyers after someone because some website used a word they claim to own is a jerk in my book.

One more internet jerk to add to my "avoid and never buy anything from" list.

> Personalisation fails for a simple reason - people don't really want to learn.

Students/people who are interested in learning a particular subject are doing just fine learning it from already available material, be it books, videos, MOOCs, etc. They may or may not use AI, but AI won't make a huge difference for these type of people.

For people who are not interested in learning, AI won't do sh*t. Because the problem is not that they don't have a tutor available to them; the problem is that they don't have motivation to learn. I am not being judgemental here: it is perfectly understandable, for example, why a poor kid may not have motivation to learn.

A few years ago, MOOCs were touted as the next best thing to democratize education and make it available to underserved populations around the world. This did not happen. Some research shows that MOOCs are mostly used by an already-educated group of people who are interested in further learning. I think learning with the help of an AI tutor would be no different: its users will not be the intended ones.

I would extend this to clever languages: "Clever languages are the worst languages you could write in". And I would put most functional programming languages in this category.

As I was clicking on this link without reading the URL, I was thinking to myself how Vanguard's website got less dense and more terrible. I was surprised when the link took me to Vanguard. Yes, for showing financial information, lack of density is a TERRIBLE idea.

> The author doesn’t deliver on the promise made early on the essay to examine the question: Why have UIs gotten so sparse?

It is dumbing down of user interfaces to the level of general public. Specialty software UIs are still pretty dense and serious users of such software would actually complain about attempts at making things sparse such as using ribbon UIs instead of menus, etc.

> It’s like entire web design world decided more whitespace is better, and won’t hear anything about it. And now some desktop apps are being designed like web apps...

At the company I work for, "Microsoft does it this way" is a valid design argument (unfortunately). So, it is not like the entire web "decides" to do things in a certain way, but the entire web "follows" a few leaders (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) with their design trends. And, of course, these companies change their designs every other year and the whole web follows.

Information density in many areas are out of whack these days.

Reminds me of people taking pictures of my presentation slides at conferences where four bullet points with short phrases (say, 50 words in total) turn into a full 12 megapixel photograph.

Similarly, my entire PhD thesis written in LaTeX is a 4MB PDF file, whereas my wife's is a 700MB MS Word monstrosity. Both are mostly text, math, line plots, and tables...

The report describes well everything wrong with academia, most of it stemming from power imbalances.

But the report itself is also a prime example of academic wrong-doing. Thirty five people report various malpractice, bullying, fraud, even potential crimes, and the report by the committee can only conclude "plausible" misdeeds. Until there are consequences for powerful people (that is, people bringing grant money), these things will keep happening.

Owning a house does not mean not owing anyone a cent. You still owe multiple types of taxes to the government. You still need to get insurance. You still need to make repairs.

I actually find piece of mind in renting. I can always say screw it and move to the cheapest part of the country as I am getting closer to retirement age.

For less than 10 concurrent users, I would rather say:

- "Using Kubernetes to host an application when NodeJS would do..."

I am not very knowledgeable about Kubernetes or Docker, but often times NodeJS+PM2 worked just fine for me for a small user base.

The point of the article is not clear to me. What is the relation between "start with why" and "databases are becoming a commodity"?

It is true that having a unique idea for a startup is no longer (if it ever was) sufficient since it will be copied almost instantaneously by another company, that may actually do it better than the original startup. In the hardware area, this is absolutely true. Any decent-selling product on Amazon is guaranteed to have Chinese copies within a matter of days/weeks.

Also, I think databases were always a commodity. About 40 years ago in a developing country, I was using dBase & FoxPro (obtained free) as a database for my father's business. Today's databases are a lot more sophisticated, but commoditization is not new.

> Otherwise they wouldn't go to court to force people who don't even want to be in the union...

Even worse, they might request your dismissal if you don't join. Here is a direct quote from the Union agreement of a major university, where I teach part-time: "The Union may request that a Part-time Faculty Member who fails to join the Union, maintain Union membership, pay an agency fee, or make a charitable contribution in lieu of an agency fee shall be dismissed. If the Union makes such a request, the Employer shall comply... If the Part-time Faculty Member fails to pay within that time period, and the Union so verifies, the Part-time Faculty Member’s employment will be terminated at the Union’s request".

If anything, unions are only acting in their own interest.

Yup. I gave a lab homework to an SE class of 42. After reading through at least 12 LLM generated, similar looking, and wrong code submissions, I've cancelled the whole lab assignment. And students complained in class evaluations about it.

Same thing that happened to universities.

Management people do not want to deal with awkward, weird, introvert developers/academics. Instead, they get lower-level people as recruiters and administrators that are like themselves, but willing to deal with developers and such.

Meaning, we did it to ourselves by not knowing how to deal with people.

> ... students will spend time figuring out how to fix that and learn the language grammar this way.

That is a cute thought. Instead, they do submit the LLM generated code as is, messed up or not, and still expect to get full grade.

It is a mistaken idea that work programming is or must be boring. I think you might mean "boring" as opposed to unnecessarily "creative" or complicated. But not all work code is boring, boiler-plate code.

In my experience, it is not the divas who are the problem, but inexperienced developers (especially ones from non-CS background) who have a weird/no sense of formatting. I have seen my share of strange, inconsistent formatting in code reviews with junior developers.

No. They are not. In fact, paid or unpaid, take-home assignments are unethical. They are built on the power imbalance between the employer and the job candidate.

The test is easy: the person who is giving the assignment would themselves be annoyed, inconvenienced, and feel pressurized if they got given a similar assignment when looking for a job themselves. You know "do onto others..."