pcblues

Writing with a pen has a lot of unseen benefits.

Fine-motor skills connected to memory, etc.

Doesn't take much to find the science.

Also, avoiding interruption is good for your train of thought.

If a train of thought doesn't matter, then stay online and leave your phone able to interrupt you.

It's your "choice" (tm)

Seriously, try everything including the things you don't think will work for your sense of peace, so you know, IOWA (I over-worry always)

Peace to you all.

"But is this shift actually worth worrying about? Or are younger people just projecting their own anxieties about screen time onto their parents and grandparents?"

False dichotomies can either be the worst thing that happened to humankind or a pathway to a new way of understanding each other.

A formal way for a senior to tell AI (clueless junior) to do a senior's job? Once again, who checks and fixes the output code?

Of course an expert would throw it out and design/write it properly so they know it works.

I'm still using a 2010 Macbook Pro with a 1TB SSD for Logic Pro and Mainstage. Does it struggle? Yes. Does it work? Yes. It's still amazing technology that makes my keyboards and guitars sound bananas. To be fair, I just muck around with it, but it still has more than what I'll ever need or be able to discover.

This is tongue-in-cheek, but you spent years in management because "the thought of spending your life staring at a screen and dealing with insignificant minutia seemed horrible?" I need to read your management book!

Tried to play a free-for-all card game with blank cards with friends in a bar thirty years ago. It was too far out for the group. Writing the rules for a game during your own turn is pretty great. But if there isn't an improv idea of "and then" among the group the game won't work. It's certainly not about winning :)

Not sure if this has been posted (I see stephenwoo has mentioned him further down), but it's a break-down of how sugary foods damage the body, particularly fructose.

It's 16 years old about 30 years of previous research.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

I haven't had a _terrible_ UI experience with Win 11 that Apple hasn't put me through already. But it took away my sideways toolbar. I don't click anything that loads edge, like "Show me more from the web" type links. So I don't see ads. I use firefox and thunderbird.

The telemetry all the way through the operating system sucks ethically. But I'm invested and familiar with Windows and Office. Not being able to make Copilot disappear is annoying.

However, all my games and software that work on Windows won't necessarily work on linux. I am not interested in making a political stand and putting up without abilities and features I currently have.

So, for my own use-case, Win 11 it is.

Clearly not an endorsement, just a data-point.

Maybe I'm still in denial about the benefit of AI code design, but when I have an initial set of requirements for a program, the design begins. That is just a set of unanswered questions that I address with slowly growing code and documents. Then the final documents and code match the answers to all the questions that rose from the answers of previous questions. More importantly, I know how the code answers them and someone else can learn from the documentation. Since the invention of "velocity" I feel like much of the industry treats code and programmers like tissues. Wipe your nose and throw it away. Now we have AI-based automatic tissue dispensers and Weizenbaum's gripe about programmers creating work for themselves other than solving the requirements of the actual problems continues.

You gain experience getting interactions with other agencies optimised by dealing with them yourself. If the AI you rely on fails, you are dead in the water. And I'm speaking as a fairly resilient 50 year old with plenty of hands-on experience, but concerned for the next generation. I know generational concern has existed since the invention of writing, and the world hasn't fallen apart, so what do I know? :)

The Jupiter Ace was unreal, but only from a computer science perspective. You had to know a lot to know how to program Forth which was the fundamental language of that white but Spectrum-looking dish of a PC, in spite of a manual that read like HGTTG. Critically, it didn't reward you from the start of your programming journey like Logo or Basic did, and didn't have the games of the ZX Spectrum. I knew a person who tried to import and sell them in Australia. When I was young, he gave me one for free as the business had failed. RIP IM, and thanks for the unit!

https://80sheaven.com/jupiter-ace-computer/

Second Edition Manual: https://jupiter-ace.co.uk/downloads/JA-Manual-Second-Edition...

A CorelDraw version from the 1990s I used had an honest progress bar. Sometimes it went backwards, but by the time it got to the end, it was truly finished.

I should have made my post clearer :)

There isn't one perfect solution to SQL queries against complex systems.

A suduko has one solution.

A reasonably well-optimised SQL solution is what the good use of SQL tries to achieve. And it can be the difference between a total lock-up and a fast running of a script that keeps the rest of a complex system from falling over.

A question: Does anyone know how well AI does generating performative SQL in years-old production databases? In terms of speed of execution, locking, accuracy, etc.?

I see the promise for green-field projects.

Can someone please answer these questions because I still think AI stinks of a false promise of determinable accuracy:

Do you need an expert to verify if the answer from AI is correct? How is it time saved refining prompts instead of SQL? Is it typing time? How can you know the results are correct if you aren't able to do it yourself? Why should a junior (sorcerer's apprentice) be trusted in charge of using AI? No matter the domain, from art to code to business rules, you still need an expert to verify the results. Would they (and their company) be in a better place to design a solution to a problem themselves, knowing their own assumptions? Or just check of a list of happy-path results without a FULL knowledge of the underlying design? This is not just a change from hand-crafting to line-production, it's a change from deterministic problem-solving to near-enough is good enough, sold as the new truth in problem-solving. It smells wrong.

Not sure if anyone here saw the movie Clueless, but a great quote was, "That guy is such a Monet. From a distance he looks great, but up close he's a real mess."

A line that disturbed me with just how widespread the outage is. (And also people will die from it in all sorts of weird ways)

"In an update, Spanish power grid operator Red Electrica says it's beginning to recover power in the NORTH and SOUTH of the country."

Tim Minchin said it well when he said to be hard on and critical of your own opinions. Among many other things :P

https://www.timminchin.com/2013/09/25/occasional-address/

If you remove yourself from a group, how will they change their minds without a dissenting opinion? I had to do it myself eventually, for my own sanity, but I believe this is still a real problem I am no longer addressing among my loved ones.

Name-calling by commentators dehumanised the debates. I still don't understand why it is considered OK.

"They do it" should not be enough of a reason, but it affects youtube income for individuals, so let the market work, I guess? /sarcasm

I'm 52. For me, there was a time when it was considered impolite to talk about sex, religion and politics. Then it became super fun when done with open/questioning/rational/critical minds, and a lot of progress in my own thinking was achieved from the usually non-threatening but lively debates and fights among friends and family for ideas. Then it shifted in the last ten or fifteen years. When social media started having friends of friends, the tribalism kicked in. It was explained very well in a talk between Maria Ressa and Jon Stewart. She is brilliant, and well worth listening to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsHoX9ZpA_M

On reflection, my attitude to books like these indicated where I was in my understanding of programming. They used to be useful life-buoys that one clung to for dear life early in one's career in a fast-moving and often-changing industry. Then they become an interesting side-note reminding one of what they clung to as the good precepts that served them well stand out from the rest of the books. And finally they become unnecessary and seemingly dogmatic when one has become adept at swimming. In other words, essential reading depending on where you find yourself :) Disclaimer: out of these two, I only read Clean Code.

I will more likely believe a blog or website if I know it has been made by a real person, and not some hallucinating AI. The style of the prose is usually a giveaway of when AI is used to generate blog articles or websites.

I am starting a Masters in Computer Science, and going to learn Java for the first time. I wanted to know how to use default method parameter values. I searched for it and found this near the top of the results:

https://skillapp.co/blog/deep-dive-into-default-parameters-i...

Java developers will know that the language does not support default method parameter values. I only found that out when I tried to implement it in a test, was surprised it didn't work, thought maybe my version of Java was too old, etc.

But there is no syntax like "void coolFunction(int x=5){};" that other languages have.

One more reason that I will value a human-written article, blog or website. Please keep writing them!

It's kind of weird. It brings the gap from what you eat to what you do in life a lot closer. I accidentally became more fish and vegetables as an eater :) The actual gross-out part was not the fact the processing happens. It's the volume.

An example from one of "those who've shifted from established careers to something entirely different"

I used to be a software developer, now I cut up meat at an abattoir (combination choice/circumstance.) In one sense, I traded "work at a desk, go to the gym in my spare time" with "workout for work, sit at a desk in my spare time."

Upsides? Fitness, don't take your work home, redundancy less likely. Downsides? Less pay. Samesides? RSI in both jobs.

Doing the same thing every day is relative.

I heard first-hand years ago of a bug in VMWare that was _CPU-Level_ for the company that rolled it out in an effort to replace their PCs that had software locally installed. The failure would have been catastrophic for a company that had just replaced all its PCs. However, they hadn't shipped the old PCs away yet for destruction, and managed to keep the lights on by putting them all back out again until the problem was fixed.

Over twenty five odd years, I have found the path to a general debugging prowess can best be achieved by doing it. I'd recommend taking the list/buying the book, using https://up-for-grabs.net to find bugs on github/bugzilla, etc. and doing the following:

1. set up the dev environment

2. fork/clone the code

3. create a new branch to make changes and tests

4. use the list to try to find the root cause

5. create a pull request if you think you have fixed the bug

And use Rule 0 from GuB-42: Don't panic

(edited for line breaks)

I'm probably old, but still curious. You seem to have so many social contact routes on your website but I couldn't find an email address. Did I miss it?

I try to limit my contact routes to as few as possible so I don't have to process so many interruptions.

I have a twitter link on my website, so that may cater for people who don't use email any more :)

Maybe not so much a blog, but I believe a developer should maintain their own website, whether that includes a blog or not.

It lets you define yourself and organise your own projects. And (I believe) most importantly, you learn how to maintain a project over many years, which informs you of the most important decisions that need to be made at the start of a new project.

Does this help you get work? Who knows?

In my case, I have been approached by people who saw my website after reading an on-topic comment on this one :)

A couple of points.

It is not aesthetically pleasing at all, which is important to me, for whatever neurological reason. Also, I consider a laptop stand as just a device to raise the screen to a better ergonomic level on the understanding that an external keyboard and mouse will be used to operate the device.

Otherwise, in a laptop stand, ergonomic keyboard use requirements pull the incline towards level, and ergonomic monitor height requirements pull the incline upwards, so there is no healthy angle for a laptop stand.

As already mentioned by andrei_says_, typing fingers should be below the wrist (as correct piano playing has proved for centuries).