Gotta say the article hits the right notes. I'm one of the peeps thinking about whether I actually still need Windows. I'm not a power user of office and photoshop. I could in fact live with various online office-alike suites or Linux Libre office. I also no longer need a particular piece of software that only runs on Windows. The HW I have is well supported on Linux nowadays. The only real reason for still running it is games and most of those I still play run crossplatform in large-part due to Steam. The new features being announced sound like a MS board-cooked joke. Agentic OS? For who? Secretaries? Small businesses that need local AI crawlers to find - what - 3y old invoice? I don't get it. And lets not forget their plans to turn the octopus into a subscription-based model which to me sounds horrific and likely the final step to purging it off my machines. Still a good choice for non-tech-savvy users and for users forced into it due to OS-exclusive software. Hopefully not for long though. More competition in the space should hopefully spur some innovation.
I stopped using Twitter somewhere around the time of Musk takeover. Only used it for event coverage live during events for which I found it genuinely useful at some point and of course doomscrolling. Can't say I miss it. Its like nothing changed in my life. I also managed to miss the LGBT exodus after Musk policy changes and learned about it later at a random FOSDEM talk. Global "social" feeds do everything in their power to steal attention and having it all back is great for sanity.
Gotta say I'm super annoyed by getting spoon-fed AI popups in every piece of software I'm using. How about fixing bugs and optimizing mem and perf? Whatever happened to caring for end users. Empathy is aparently dead in the era of VC capital.
Even if its just a demo its really slick. Tech has come a long way. Can't say I want to talk to a droid to check-in at a hotel or bump into one at home all the time but I'm sure there are some obvious civilian use cases around.
Gotta say I'm pessimistic about the future of AI. At least until its adopted by public sector, schools and societies. Right now its just enhancing what we already have. More "efficient" meetings with auto-note-taking so we can have more meetings. More productivity so we can make less people do more, increase the workload and make them burn out faster. Better and more sophisticated scammers. More sophisticated propaganda by various legal and illegal actors. Cheaper and more grotesque looking vidz and music. More software slop. Not to mention all the "cool" improvements coming our way in the form of smart rockets, bombs and drones and of course I drool for all the smart improvements in surveillance capitalism 2.0. They call it a revolution but for now its just a catalyst for more of all the things we "love".
I survived one day. Feels accurate. I don't get why there are so many serious comments around this game. Its not rocket science. We often make fun of autism in the team, its just a nice way to chew the fat in the modern workplace.
True that. Its unsustainable. They'll keep it clean to attract a mass of consumers and then enshittify the experience by serving nicely disguised ads afterwards. Feels like this scenario has been on repeat since forever not just in Google but every product that supposedly shows "relevant" products.
Looks like another BS article that tries to compare a junior dev. to an AI. And its not even close. Anyone that actually tried to use AI tooling should know better. Feels like the CEOs that got sold this ideas are force-feeding this idea to senior devs and sadly senior devs are trying to gulp it down instead of rejecting the entire idea.
LLMs are more like a lightning fast pseudo-random text generator at this point. To see that though you'd need to run it a few times, test it and understand the output. Something that's a bit beyond the casual amateur ability. Maybe what we need is the AI bubble to burst first.
Its sad that we've gotten here though. Every tried having a coffee with your preferred AI as opposed to doing it with a highly motivate junior? Maybe you're not even going to get a chance to experience this.
I like to go on a nostalgia trip every now and then as well. Loved the old forums that got taken out by social networks. Also loved the various private communities in IRC and Usenet and the blog-o-spheres I was part of and read about. But the sad reality is that its more about the community than the technology. And the communities of old mostly disbanded and moved on and restoring old tech won't bring them back.
Nowadays the main issue for me is that there are too many people in the room. Pick any social network and forum and you're an immediate misfit there. Make one edgy statements and trolls, flamers, live streamers will tear you apart. Not to mention AI tech advancements are making a not-great situation slightly worse. The internet is no longer a happy place. Its a good question if it ever were.
Forums had been better but I wonder how much is about peeple just beeing different. Nowadays people have less time and struggle more, so they favor s.th. more effortless in their free time and also are more egoistic (on average of course only).
I rarely use LLMs nowadays. Most of the time I'm fixing difficult to debug issues spanning multiple projects and a variety of backend systems and there's just no easy way to plug them to all this spaghetti. Autocomplete also spews out complete BS and was the first thing I disabled.
I did find they very useful when writing completely new stuff (things like "write a <insert your favorite API" client or making test boilerplate ie. as a copy&paste replacement tool.
It'd be nice to hear in detail how its been useful for other devs. There's too much propaganda around on how amazing it is and not nearly enough use cases.
