ern

If screens per-se are the problem, we'd have seen the same issues manifesting decades ago.

I think phones are the issue, rather than screens, specifically social media and notifications in particular. Someone suggested turning notifications off for social media, and it was a big change in my life, and something I've urged my own children to do as well.

We tried a pair-programming exercise, and he got visibly angry, flustered and frustrated when he tried to verbalize what he was doing.

One of the reasons Business Analysts and the like exist is that not everyone can bridge the gap between the messy, verbal real world, and the precision demanded by programming languages.

o1 seems to have been neutered in the last week lots of disclaimers and butt-covering in its responses.

I also had an annoying discussion with o1 about the DC plane crash..it doesn’t have web access and its cutoff is 2024, so I don’t expect it know about the crash. However, after saying such an event is extremely unlikely and being almost patronisingly reassuring, it treated pasted news articles and links (which to be sure, it can’t access) as “fictionalized”, instead of acknowledging its own cut-off date, and that it could have been wrong. In contrast DeepSeek (with web search turned off) was less dismissive of the risks in DC airspace, and more aware of its own knowledge cut-off.

Coupled with the limited number of o1 responses for ChatGPT Plus, I’ve cancelled my subscription for now.

The killer app had better start giving better value, or I'd gladly pay the same amount of DeepSeek for unlimited access if they decided to charge.

I think the anti-Microsoft sentiment (outside of some internet forums, and justified IE6 hate) had been dialled back by the early 2010s.

.NET was a thing, they were post-Gates, post-antitrust, making significant efforts at developer outreach. Windows 7 was a hit.

Despite working in the Microsoft ecosystem, I didn't feel trapped, and the walled garden was coming down, with awareness of non-Microsoft technologies being widespread.

An example of this is that Australia is sorely in need of tax reform, but any party that pushes for it at state or federal level is damaged at the polls, often fatally.

My current feeling is that LLMs great with dealing with known unknowns. You know what you want, but don’t know how to do it, or it’s too tedious to do yourself.

I was stalked on it by an unhinged bank employee, and even though he's blocked I still see people from his company have viewed my profile on a regular basis.

Not related to your main point, but I've introduced Github Copilot to my teams, and, surprisingly, two of our strongest developers reached out to me independently, and told me it's been a huge boost to their productivity, one in refactoring legacy code, and another in writing some non-trivial components. I thought the primary use would be as a crutch for less capable developers, so I was surprised by this.

As a middle-manager whose day job previously robbed me of the opportunity to write code, I've used ChatGPT 4o to write complex log queries on legacy systems that would have been nearly impossible for me to do otherwise (and would have taken a lot of effort from my teams) and to turn out small (but meaningful) tasks, including learning Android dev from scratch to unblock another group and other worthwhile things that keep my team from being distracted and able to deliver.

I guess there's a "no true Scotsman" fallacy hiding there, about what constitutes "meaningful coding tasks in practice", but to me, investing in these tools has been money well spent.

I'm currently involved with two programs run by project managers who probably haven't written code for 30 years (if ever), and it's a nightmare.

I was reading The Practice of Cloud System Administration: Designing and Operating Large Distributed Systems, and I came across this quote:

Royce’s 1970 paper, which is credited with “inventing” the model, actually identifies it so Royce can criticize it and suggest improvements. He wrote it is “risky and invites failure” because “design iterations are never confined to the successive step.” What Royce suggests as an alternative is similar to what we now call Agile. Sadly, multiple generations of software developers have had to suffer through waterfall projects thanks to people who, we can only assume, didn’t read the entire paper (Pfeiffer 2012) [p. 175].

https://www.jjinux.com/2015/07/the-waterfall-model-was-straw...

I agree that even when they aren't explicitly highlighted, they do make a substantial difference, especially when comparing models over a span of a few years.

In the interests of “fairness” they are being ordered back to the office post-Covid even when their work processes mean they can be done perfectly well remotely, and even if they have widely geographically-distributed teams.

Anecdotal, but we had a team that was split with 50% working remotely before Covid, and we saw an improvement when everyone was forced to work remotely: conversations that were being held in person were shared openly.

The fact that they could be finally fixing this, and then are putting it behind a paywall is ironic, because if it finally works properly, people could actually start using it for buying stuff.

If so, this feels like a red herring.

We had used Bootstrap and similar frameworks for years prior, but all the battling with different CSS layout techniques to render the UI on this project made me realize I was wasting my time, and the fact that the designer couldn't give developers working CSS made me wonder if the entire promise of separating design from functionality was a mirage.