cs02rm0

I've tried so many times to get ChatGPT to generate code and every time it produces something that looks like code, looks like it would work but doesn't work - for fundamental reasons, like it's made up APIs that don't exist.

It might make getting some small functions or one liners in place quicker, especially for someone in a language they're unfamiliar with. But IME it falls apart pretty quickly and can cost you a lot more time figuring out why its fantasy code doesn't actually have a hope.

That does suck, from multiple people too. Code review processes that put off developers from contributing and don't value their time, rather than helping them to contribute are a pet hate of mine.

Seeking an equivalence here also strikes me as a false equivalence - the power balance between an LAPD office and a citizen is not equal.

I think there's still a flip side to these decisions. Google has an established reputation as a product killer, I'm sure the effect of that won't bring them down but it's there and I doubt handing a product off to someone else would either.

Interesting.

Flower seems to fit well for people who are sensitive about their data and don't want to hand it over to a third party, but this seems to move towards a model where they have to hand that sensitive data over to a third party.

Perhaps that still works for the bulk of users, especially commercial rather than government. It's difficult to pursue both a managed solution and simultaneously maintain an open source offering without one departing from the other.

While I can see the offensive side and this sort of thing is likely going to be assigned to history eventually I suspect there's some value in many. Sometimes if someone's CTD (circling the drain) it may be valuable for the next clinician to understand that, in a way that makes light of what I'd imagine must be fairly depressing to deal with on a routine basis.

I suspect the physio doesn't write that phrase for every patient, there was probably a reason, one not to get too out of shape over.

Not quite sure that's how the Luddites viewed it. I suspect they thought that if something is harmful, distressing, dangerous etc, People have the right to question if we’re going in the right direction or not. We've seen the same views with the introduction of every new technology but so far none of them have destroyed the human race.

This is seen as something earth shattering now, and in many ways it is but I suspect in time it will become a loom, another tool like all the others. One to be superseded in time by something another step beyond.

Off the top of my head - a python app for drawing over a macos screen, but it used an API which didn't support transparent windows, I could draw over a black screen which was so close in code (even set the background alpha) but miles from the desired application. And a Java android app for viewing an external camera, which it seems used an API that doesn't support external cameras.

Of course, because it's not sentient when a couple of days later I figure out from searching elsewhere why it's effort would never work and tell it why, it just apologises and tells me it already knew that. As I'm going along though telling it what errors I'm getting it keeps bringing up alternative solutions which again look like exactly what I want but are completely broken.

I haven't had it produce a single thing that was any use to me yet, but so often it looks like it's done something almost magical. One day I'm sure it'll get there, in the meantime I'm learning to loathe it.

Separately, I've asked it to create a job advert for a role in my wife's business and it did a decent job of that, but it's far easier to walk a path there from what it provides to an acceptable solution. Programming is hard.

Do it. Travel, take up hobbies, explore side projects, potential alternative careers or just make your bed, tidy the house and get some exercise in. Try and make it a little constructive.

You've put away a decent amount of money, now's the time to take the mental pay off which that security buys. When you're ready work opportunities will still be there.

I tend not to tell too many friends or even relatives what I'm up to - many can't understand the luxury of being able to afford to it, or the feeling of needing to do it. Those I do tell I often call it a sabbatical - seems to fit within their mental model more easily then.

Life's too short.

For the first few moves I doubled my salary. That helps a lot.

You grow a network too, you see things from different perspectives, get variety, learn new tools. A change is as good as a rest. And when all is said and done, if it doesn't make you happy, just take the extra experience and increased salary and go back.

But look around you, how many people who left the company ever came back?

IME the advice was good because companies tend to value you as little more than who they hired, the jobs market values you for who you are now, which changes quickly early in your career.

Good luck either way.

I think the flaw is that someone believes they turn up to a project and in reviewing code to fit it to a mental model they understand they believe they're improving the readability for others who think like them.

In reality it becomes design by committee, worst of all worlds.

Slightly tangential, but I'm about to leave a project where it gets the review process badly wrong - anyone can and will comment on a review, but only a select few can merge. They have a massive bottleneck of reviews with many held up by conflicting style preferences, or comments on neighbouring code not modified, none of which is able to be resolved by agreement as no one willing to take authority over any one view. Even the simplest one line change can't get merged within a month which essentially means development has stalled other than for the few who have merge rights.

Give me a lone developer's codebase to wrestle with any day.

First thing I did was try and find a Pi Zero 2 W. Discovered most models of Raspberry Pi are completely unavailable. And so, another side project was canned.

I mean, it's someone else's code, your engineers are going to say it's rubbish, it needs a full rewrite and throwing away, warn us up front before you even think about acquiring such terrible code, etc. But if it's a built a company to the point of raising sufficient revenue/profit it's surely good enough.

I can't say I'm a Maven cheerleader but I find nodejs, sorry npm, with webpack, or yarn, babel, gulp, or... to be a confusing soup of incompatibility. Most of which moves on so quickly that whatever works this week is dead next week.

Then over the next two hours I get 30 notifications about people liking my comment and nothing for anything actually useful, like calls. It doesn't even pretend to let me turn off notifications for reactions without losing the whole channel's notifications.

As far as the keyboard's concerned I think it's three buttons - something like cmd-shift-m where on Slack it's just m. Drives me mad.

The whole point of calling is to reduce the pain of having to type out a load of stuff that's easier to say and comes with the extra nuances of verbal communication. I can't imagine they'd prefer the repeated flashings of your manager is typing... over minutes.

Just sending "hello" is annoying though, I'll give them that.

The keyboard swiping is off the charts awful compared to Android. It has no idea what word I want unless I'm incredibly specific, it recommends words I'm highly unlikely to use, adds punctuation almost randomly in its word suggestions, gives me multiple choices from the same stem.

You can't just press the cursor into the middle of a word, you have to do the hold and swipe thing.

You can't record your own calls. WTF, it's my phone?! I guess I'm supposed to just buy another iphone to record the audio onto from via its microphone.

As far as I can work out, Facebook messenger links don't open, full stop. Unless your default browser is Safari.

Want to choose how many icons you have on your screen? Nope. Smaller font size? Nope. Long press on an image to do a Google image search? Nope, not even to open in a new tab.

In Liz Truss' first PMQs yesterday one of the questions was on pushing for a return of the online safety bill for further "regulation" of the internet, which Truss said is going to come back, for the under 18s of course.

https://youtu.be/1ZCTQwljRqs?t=3428