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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Rofl. As a developer of nearly 20 years, lol.

    I used copilot until finally getting fed up last week and turning it off. It was a net negative to my productivity.

    Sure, when you’re doing repetitive operations that are mostly copy paste and changing names, it’s pretty decent. It can save dozens of seconds, maybe even a minute or two. That’s great and a welcome assist, even if I have to correct minor things around 50% of the time.

    But when an error slips through and I end up spending 20 minutes tracking down the problem later, all that saved time vanishes.

    And then the other times where my IDE is frozen because the plugin is stuck in some loop and eating every last resource and I spend the next 20 minutes cursing and killing processes, manually looking for recent updates that hadn’t yet triggered update notifications, etc… well, now we’re in the red, AND I’m pissed off.

    So no, AI is not some huge boon to developer productivity. Maybe it’s more useful to junior developers in the short term, but I have definitely dealt with more than a few problems that seem to derive from juniors taking AI answers and not understanding the details enough to catch the problems it introduced. And if juniors frequently rely on AI without gaining deep understanding, we’re going to have worse and worse engineers as a result.


  • Eh. Honestly, the line of “questions” was rather stupid.

    “Why aren’t you lobbying to make your business irrelevant” is essentially what the interviewer pushed aggressively.

    Sure, I get calling out a CEO for deflecting tough questions with corporate BS. But it was a pretty dumb line of questioning in the first place.

    Why isn’t Google lobbying for privacy protections?

    Why isn’t Comcast lobbying for net neutrality?

    Just make your statement and ask for comment. “Our listeners consider Intuits lobbying against tax reform that would benefit tax payers to be adversarial to their customers. What would you say to them?”





  • Mostly fair, but I’ll push back on the security issue.

    Side loading an apk is extremely dangerous, and an easy attack vector.

    While there are plenty of malicious apps that make it on the Google store, they do attempt to do some automated and even manual curation. This is fact.

    I think it’s wholly appropriate to warn the user that they’re bypassing that standard, if imperfect, Google security coverage. And granting extensive app permissions is done at your own risk.

    3rd party app stores may do their own security curation as well, and it’s up to them to communicate that and educate their users on why they still get the Google warning.









  • Shift-left eliminated the QA role.

    Now we have AI generated shit code, with devs that don’t understand the low level details of both the language, and the specifics of the generated code.

    So we basically have content entry (ai inputs) and extremely shitty QA bundled into the “developer” role.

    As a 20 year veteran of the industry, people keep asking me if I think AI will make developers obsolete. I keep telling them “maybe some day, but today’s LLMs are not it. The AI bubble is going to burst, and a few legit use cases will make it through”




  • In general, digital privacy invasions have been very successful because of attrition.

    Most people don’t care, those that do hold out, but then every competitor does the same and you no longer have any real alternatives. Eventually, the hold outs need to replace [car in this case] and the sting of the objectiknable change has faded, and they just move on.

    Rinse and repeat.

    We lost the fight for meaningful net neutrality, basic digital privacy rights, broadband limits, etc.

    They’ll win this one too. Eventually. Your phones and IoT with microphones are already doing it.


  • Also a very litigious society. Even if they mean well, going off the page and trying to figure out a “Haus” solution is just putting themselves at risk.

    They have to check all the boxes for your insurance. They have to check all the boxes for their own malpractice insurance. Even if they followed procedure, they might get dragged through the legal system to defend themselves if a client feels wronged.

    That turns you, the client, into a number in a dispassionated machine.

    And I don’t have a solution to it.

    Edit - that was a bit too bleak. There are a lot of doctors trying their best to retain humanity in a system aimed at destroying it. The whole med school journey is aimed at weeding the people out who are just in it for the money. It’s designed to gatekeep the industry to require a massive amount of passion to get your foot in the door. But the realities of the industry do their best to squash that.