kilon

I am a lawyer and a coder and I have to disappoint you that that hype is very real indeed.

The problem is two fold a) Lawyers completely underestimated the decision making abilities of software even without AI b) People who are not lawyers that completely overestimate the complexity of legal resolution.

(a) Happens because the software we lawyers use is basically... well... crap and most lawyers are clueless when it comes to technology, even ones that specialize on it. (b) Happens because of TV and Movies have created this fantasy legal world where lawyer, especially expensive ones can prove that they are elephants because of their virtue to win arguments.

Surprisingly and this was also a surprise to me when I started to study law, law and coding is much closer than people think because there is a lot more logic than there is tv drama in a real court room.

Not only AI should not have problem resolving legal issues , judging from its current achievements, but it can help with the most valuable skill for a lawyer which is pattern recognition. Our profession bombards us daily with tons of data that is extremely hard to organize and keep track of. This applies more on civil than criminal law , but most of law is civil law anyway (economical issues), and this data is documents used as evidence, case law (court cases that have created a precedence) and of course legislation.

Also there is no much of an option really, AI is pretty much unavoidable because the ever evolving immense complexity of modern society has made legal resolution so complex that court cases take up to decades to be fully resolved which of course is not a viable solution.

An example is the IT law which has been a huge suffering for courts and legislators to keep up with its rapid evolution in a profession where court cases and legislations take decades to move forward. In IT decades are in legal terms , centuries.

AI will replace lawyers , for that I have no doubt, cause law is a dying profession anyway for the reason I explained above. Obviously lawyers will still be around for a long long time but yes AI will fundamentally change the profession. The profession is in desperate need of modernization as it has barely evolved that last few thousands of years.

The problem was never what AI can do, it can do amazing thing, the problem is supply and demand. AI is a field of huge demand and minimal supply but then this is a problem that has rampaged the coding profession which is why freelancer coders make more money than lawyers.

So first Mac is dead, because of iOS then we have iMac 5k .

Then macbook is dead, because of iOS, we have new macbooks.

Then mac pro is dead, because of iOS we have iMac Pro.

Is shouting "dead" the new password for upgrade request ?

I see an average of 1 update in less than a year with the only exception of mac mini. Why we need more often? I fail spectacularly to see the problem here.

Mac users buy computers that keep for years. My first iMac I kept for 7 year my second one is already on its 4 th year and still feel nowhere close to the need to upgrade and I do 3d graphics + coding.

I even live mostly in Windows 10 nowdays , mainly for coding reasons. Flies with no issues. I kinda like Win 10 actually.

Sad is exactly the opposite thing that I feel using my iMac. I feel sad with most pc monitors that I see around though.

Hell, the new OS brings native support for eGPUs , so I can even upgrade my iMac without forking money for an iMac Pro.

The new Metal which was already 10 times faster than the crap... sorry I meant.. OpenGL is reported to be 2 times as fast as the previous version.

Waiter... yes please may I have another plate of sadness soup... I really like it.

I agree unique naming is one of the fundamental pillars of modern coding , or else we would have chaos with stupid generic completely unrelated names like

Python, C, Java, Go, Swift, Ruby, Assembly, Basic, JavaScript ...

It would have been chaos. Obviously none would like that, would they ?

Well I will just mention that i am an iMac user since 2007 and I replying to your message with Win 10 via Bootcamp. Mac gamers choose the bootcamp route because its an easy solution and gives access to more games and software. I am willing to bet that Mac gamers are at least 8% if not more. Bootcamp became popular way before Steam did and way before we saw the big switch of big Game studio from pure Windows to Windows/MacOS. Windows also has a notorious reputaiton of being far more stable on bootcamp that a regular pc and and its a reputation that my personal experience confirms it. Because I am a developer I have decided to stick with Win 10 and bootcamp and it has been a smooth ride so far but from time to time I go back to MacOS. Windows 10 also has been the first reliable OS that came from Microsoft.

Of course bootcamp is not the only solution, there is also wine like solution and vm solution but Bootcamp is by far the most popular for gaming.

Another reason to stick with bootcamp is that games may offer a MacOS support but are not quick to fix bugs and resolve issues usually becayse they develop on windows and use crossplatform APIs to port to MacOS using Windows and not MacOS devs which can cause all sort of issues that can take time to resolve.

The backend plays a minor role, as I repeatedly say and I am repeatedly downvoted by ignorant people. Unreal supports on MacOS not one but 3 technologies. OpenGL, Vulkan and Metal and that is just for graphics. There is also CUDA, OpenCL, PhysicsX and much more that go far beyond the scope of 3d graphics.

A well designed graphics engine never ties itself to a platform however popular that platform may be. Whether that platform may be a OS , a graphics API or any kind of SDK.

At least Unreal is neither a game engine nor a graphics engine , its an entire ecosystem of tools , APIs. Unreal even extends C++ to facilitate for GC and some rudimentary reflective abilities.

So there are a ton of things go on, from low level to very high level.

Overall MacOS develpers have been very quick into embracing Metal for new projects and so did Unreal. Which is no big suprise because Metal gives access to both MacOS and iOS which is a variant/fork of MacOS.

Not an impressive update I am afraid , apart from the dark theme I could not care less about the rest

Nope most of them use some sort of game Engine, unreal and Unity dominate.

MacOS gaming is not only not dead it’s flourishing rapidly. Take a trip to Steam shop. You will find a massive amount of games are made for MacOS and the numbers are growing rapidly since Apple lost interest into OpenGL. But then MacOS has reached a 10% of the desktop market making it much harder to ignore than in the past when it barely reached 3%. With iOS dominating mobile revenue , Appple is the undisputed king of gaming for over a decade now.

No they are not , they are both APIs. The fact they run on top of drivers is nothing impressive if anything they make a tiny fraction of the APIs Unreal depends on because it’s so much more than a 3D Engine. Unreal runs on top of Vulkan and could also replace both Vulkan and GPU drivers. API dependence is nothing special and hardly makes something so different. There is no limitation on how low level Unreal can go.

Apple killed Flash and now they kill OpenGL. Both incredibly crappy technologies that survived for so long because of their popularity.

Nowadays Unreal Engine fill the role very well and can sit on top of any platform easily. Popularity wise , together with Unity have completely destroyed both Metal and OpenGL. Vulkan , stands no chance too. Unreal Engine is also open source and very easy to extend because of Blueprints. Unlike OpenGL , is not a C API trying to shoehorn itself into a C++ dominated world.

I have to use OpenGL 3.3 and I am amazed how badly designed it is. A brief look into Vulkan made even less sense.

I don’t agree with everything Apple does but killing Flash and OpenGL is two of my favorites. My only complain is that they have not done it as aggressively as they did with Flash. If they manage to kill JavaScript and HTML/CSS abominations I will become a hardcore Apple fan.

Currently, the only thing that designers have shown general interest for is visual coding languages. Unreal engine has Blueprints which probably the most advanced visual coding language out there and in both and 2d graphics visual coding workflows have taken, scripting may have not been so successful but visual coding is definetly something designers so a genuine interest from.Designers tool have become so immensely complex that basic GUI design which usual UX people are accustomed too is no longe enough to satisfy the complexity. Visual coding is here to stay in the designer world and most likely it will leak to the coding world too. For me its the only viable option that I am aware for bring both cultures together.

"In 2018, web browsers offer vast potential to interactive designers, as revolutionary as what PostScript and desktop publishing offered for print thirty years ago."

No they don't , almost half a century after the creation of the most influential software technology , Smalltalk. Development tools still largely ignore designers mainly because designers try to stay as far away from coders as possible and coders as far away they can from designers.

These are two cultures that are founded on polar opposite ideals and principles.

A browser, in particular, is from a designer perspective nothing more than an abomination and is laughable to compare web apps and web technologies with specialized designers tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Blender, Zbrush, Maya, 3DS Max etc. with the ugliness of Javascript , CSS, HTML and XML and is no coincidence that those technologies have so tiny presence on the web. Even WebGL which supposed to bring design and designers to web browsers is pretty much an abandonware.

For now, we can only compromise with modern IDEs that are somewhat designer-friendly like Pharo, Delphi, Squeak etc. and maybe we designers wait for another half century until the so-called "IDEs" catch one and another century for web technologies to move to HTML12 which may or may not be at last designer-friendly.

Especially when we take into account the blazing fast evolution of designer tools (which drive also the hardware evolution mostly through games) and the glacial pace of the evolution of software development tools stuck to the curse of backward compatibility, those two worlds continue to move apart with an accelerating rate.

In the meantime, the gap (or more likely the abyss) between those two cultures will remain. Designers avoiding coding like the plague, coder being mesmerized by their "readable code" completely oblivious to what makes a design good, kneeling before the glory of the holey grail know also as "not reinventing the wheel" or "not fixing what is not broken".

It is sad that 30 years ago designers and coders were so close together as communities, the closest they ever been was during the 80s with the introduction of Amiga 500 which gave birth to some of the most popular design tools but those days are long past.

It's funny because I joined a "coders and designers" facebook group out of curiosity and after 2 years the only design related talk have been a mockery about designers and a couple of mention of design tools from the rare breed of game developers that tend of frequent the group. Can't say I am surprised.

But hey if coders want to continue to believe that coding is an art and that design is an essential part of software development, who am I to judge. I am also delusional at times. None is perfect.

Nope, C++ is the undisputed king of coding and I have no love for C++. Not only Windows is mostly written in C++ (and I would not be surprised if they use some C and Assembly as well) but even external projects like Unity (a popular game engine) that suppose to be used only as C# libraries they are just C++ projects. As long as Windows is by far the most popular OS on desktop and Android on mobile devices C++ remains the most essential, well supported, mature although infinitely ugly Programming Language.Because the OS remains still in the center of software development.

Nope, I am afraid that won't protect you from the curse of abandonware. Only an emulator can. Your problem is not related to what type of hardware, software, OS you use but how old they are. Nothing is supported forever. With emulators we keep using technology that is more than 30 years old. This is a walk in the park.

As an ambient composer, myself I understand your pain but that is the unavoidable fate of all abandoware technologies.

Abandonware technologies however can be used through the use of emulators. If I can use my first computer that my father bought in 1988 (Amstrad CPC 6128) with its magnificent 4mhz CPU and mindblowing 128kb memory from any OS (including iOS and Android) via emulators. I am sure using 32 bit VSTs and AUs should be a walk in the park with Virtualbox.

All you will have to do is bounce those plugins to audio and move the audio to your 64bit OS or even (probably its possible) make the two OS talk to each other so you can use both 32 and 64 bit versions at the same time.

I am Greek and no it’s not , gg , is pronounce as g in gamma, and one g is pronounced as y in yellow

Earth’s Moon in Greek is actually “Feggari”, from the verb “feggo” which means to radiate light. Moon in general in Greek is “Selini”, a natural satellite orbiting a planet.

No thanks, I prefer my Libreoffice. I like markdown for simple stuff but other than that, nope.

Looks like a title of a horror movie

Damn it’s 2000 all over again. Cybermagedon is the most annoying thing. It always appears when I am in low supply of pop corn.

"The iMac Pro isn’t running iOS apps"

I always find this kind of remarks funny because iOS is essentially a specialised strip down version of MacOS. So basically any accusation of MacOS copying iOS , however exaggerated, is an accusation that MacOS is copying itself.

Open source visibility is hugely exaggerated, are you going to read one million lines of code or more ? You think others will do when every open source project struggles to even find contributors to fix small bugs ?

Sure its more visible than closed source, no question, but still it's no angel.

Apple is no angel either but at least they do not pretend to be ;)

Well software has been able to recreate analog sound sine 1997 when I started working seriously with computer mudic. The problem back then was that in order to make a faithful emulation that would need quite a lot of processing power. But back then I had a 200 mhz Pentium , nowdays I have a 3.4 Quad Core. Modern soft synths sound quality wise can dance around analogy synths , in depth , quality and versatility. Not to exclude the fact that software updates can practically fundamental change the synthesizer or offer amazing new features. The edge for vintage analogue synths was the fact that they offer more hand on control but with the wealth of midi controls that come with a wide array of presets support many software synths its still not much of a good reason to pick a hardware synth. Hence why software has practically monopolised audio synthesis lately. Thor in Reason can easily compete with my Alesis Andromeda A6 , the most powerful non modular analogue to ever exist. When it comes to modular synths, software reign supreme, while hardware users have to battle with the terror of the spaghetti monster. Nowdays going down the hardware synth lane is purely a personal taste choice.

Not really, .NET is heavily tied to its IDE and winforms are very similar to VCL. Not to exclude the fact that Microsoft was already heavily copying Delphi way before .NET. Java is simply another programming language.

It’s funny when Java devs mention that C# and .NET is a copy cat. The irony is the other way around , even though Java predates .NET , the same creator was then one that created Delphi which Java pretty much copy pasted not as elegantly. It’s great to see Delphi being around and it’s legacy continue through C# and .NET. The fact that Microsoft open sourced it brought a smile in my face. My Delphi days are over, nowadays I Code in Python, but .NET still feels like home.

For me the hard part is finding what to automate. Automation is not only about saving time but taking away the annoying stuff as well making your efforts more efficient. There is no silly graph to predict how valuable an automation will be. Python started as a simple bash like scripting language and nowadays it grown to epic proportions. Automation needs time to mature. People tend to overestimate the value of their time vs the value of automation. Even the language we speak took thousands of years to develop, talking about huge waste of time. But hey someone has to push human progress forward.

I actually I mentioned this 10 hours ago. So no need to be suprised ;)

I don’t keep a log but I use pen a paper to create diagrams which visualize my problem and potential solutions. It has been very helpful and good excuse to rest my eyes from the monitor. I don’t care about dates cause I like to work in a chaotic kind of way and I don’t like planning ahead I prefer exploration and critical thinking during execution.

CLI is nothing more than a form of GUI. Hence GUI is fundamentally superior and the only ones willing to live in the Stone Age of CLI are some coders. What is more ironic is people who think that any CLI can come remotely close to the power , flexibility and extensibility of GUI. There is literally nothing that the GUI is not great at,it’s just that most coders have no idea how to design a GUI and that is reflected in the terrible state of GUI APIs and coding in general. I have been coding 30 years now , started from CLI and as soon I could converted to GUIs and never looked back.

Truthfully as a lawyer , well I am pretty close to be an ex-lawyer cause I now code for living we really dont need software so much. In my office we had an old database running on DOS when I became a lawyer in 2008. I got rid of it and replaced it with Dropbox. Used extremely simple folder structure and that was pretty much it.

I was even considering making specialised software for my father's law firm but I never saw the use for it.

99% of lawyer's work is not arragning meetings or organising documents. Even I who I was very new at the time I did a ton more photocopying documents and answering calls from clients than any form of organisation.

This is why law orientated software fails to become popular for lawyers. What we need as lawyers , what would be really appealing is an AI that can look through case law and help us formulate lega arguments. Unfortunately the technology simply is not at that level.

What makes it worse is that even though coding can be an extremely repetetive process law practices is not, you literraly dealing with diffirent problem each hour and you have to filter and combine various amount of information. You may think that organisation is the key here but because the main focus are legal arguments not so much evidence there is very little to do in that area other than having AI and feeding you ideas.

Problem is that lawyers are using a lot of thinking power and because their is not technical in some cases it can be called even philosophical , it would be very difficult for an AI to be actually useful in this area, unless there is a large leap in technology I am not aware of.

I am not a US lawyer , I am a Greek lawyer and yes we have plenty of legal software in my country as well, that almost none is using. DOS and a dual core at 2.0 GHZ is more than enough.

I use blender, Blender has multiple VPLs that each specialize in one area. Texture, Material and Compositor. Blender VPLs are fully upgradable with Python code that allows the creation of new nodes . This allowed developers to create new VPLs using animation and modeling nodes. So even though Blender VPLs are not meant to be used as generic languages however there is already the API in place to allow this essentially exposing the entire Python scripting interface as nodes.

Reaktor I do not know if it supports 3d physics particles , but you could do what you ask for from blender. Blender supports midi for controlling animation.

Blueprints on the other hand are a generic VPL and can do anything you describe. It's also the best choice because Unreal excels at real time graphics.