Sure, any significant business depends on a lot of software. As a software company you don't want to build that which is not in your core business, so you would buy a lot of other software. But the reality is a little more insidious. Investors are mostly selling to themselves. Every time an investor invests in a company there is a push to partner up or avail services from other companies their portfolio. Even if it's not the best choice for the company at that time, investors are more interested in strengthening their overall portfolio.
The long term consequence of this is that as capital gets concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, so does the means of production. If you are outside the network you will find it very hard to sell your services even if you have a better product. This already happens in many places with wealth disparity. Deals simply do not happen without the "blessing" of a wealthy backer. Software is unfortunately moving that way. The once upstart nerd who was able to launch their business from the basement has turned into the technocrat baron who will keep such a thing from happening again.
There are a lot of people declaring this, proclaiming that about working with AI, but nobody presents the details. Talk is cheap, show me the prompts. What will be useful is to check in all the prompts along with code. Every commit generated by AI should include a prompt log recording all the prompts that led to the change. One should be able to walkthrough the prompt log just as they may go through the commit log and observe firsthand how the code was developed.
I agree, the rare times when someone has shared prompts and AI generated code I have not been impressed at all. It very quickly accrues technical debt and lacks organization. I suspect the people who say it’s amazing are like data engineers who are used to putting everything in one script file, React devs where the patterns and organization are well defined and constrained, or people who don’t code and don’t even understand the issues in their generated code yet.
> npx would resolve dependencies when the command is executed
I hate that this is becoming a thing. I was pretty miffed some time back when I realized go build just went ahead and installed a whole new version of golang on my machine. These are devtools ffs, why so much mollycoddling! And what happened to half a century of good conventions where the default is always to prompt?
Brands have started getting into ecommerce/d2c directly where earlier they left it up to distributors and third parties. Amazon needs to attract them because co-mingling is a strict no-no for them.
Did you ever wonder if it's cheaper because it's counterfeit? The counterfeit industry is huge in contract manufacturing. Designs are easily leaked and near lookalikes manufactured at whatever price point you seek. Sometimes they even claim they're manufacturing it in the same facility as the original brand. These goods have flooded the market for damn near every product out there and unless you can trace the entire supply chain you don't know what you're getting.
That's a fair point. I try to stick to name brands on Amazon to try to minimize the chance of fakes (Generals, Casio, Zebra for my examples previously) - and the packaging does look like the one I get directly from the manufacturer. I bought two of the same Casios at different times - once from Casio and once from Amazon - and I'm sure the packaging was the same.
But it's one of the things I guess you can't be too sure about. Maybe if we see name-brand prices increase after commingling ends, that can be proof that prices were low due to counterfeits
Journalists fucked up massively when they allowed sponsored content to masquerade as editorial content. Now people don't trust media as much as they used to and are moving to other sources to get their information. What journalists around the world need to do is come together and build consensus in the industry on separating sponsored content from their own. A tiny, fine print at the bottom of a full page sponsor is grossly insufficient. It has to be more explicit. Perhaps reserve colors and styles exclusively for indigenous content or frame all sponsored content in a clearly identifiable manner. One way or another, they need to figure out how to reclaim their reputation.
I canceled my subscription to the local daily over this. Not only were they presenting advertisement as if they were editorial content, they weren’t even reading it themselves. If they were, they would have noticed that they’d printed, on actual paper, an unreadable article full of broken html fragments. That was the last straw for me. Stunning disrespect for the people who pay for the paper.
It may be effective by sheer force of adoption, but it's not well designed at all. It has never been through all its iterations, with each one imposing a new programming model on its users and I predict what we have today will not be the last!
It started simple and sound idea but had its quirkiness with shouldUpdate, didReceive, willUnmount. But that wasn't enough, to write decent applications, you need to do unidirectional flow. You can do that, all you need is actions, action creators and dispatchers! Now you have all this bloat that eventually leads to reflux. While you're tearing your head screaming "What the flux", redux comes along and says hey you know what, if you just write a giant switch statement, you don't need dispatchers. And everybody liked not having to read about dispatchers, so redux was here to say. If it gave more problems you can just create a toolkit around it. Besides, it claimed to be functional. Surely that means it works, right? Now you could rub shoulders with those cool clojure kids who seem to be getting all those high paying jobs. But the cool clojure kids are not impressed. They say, class is something you are, not something you write. So you hang your head in shame and promise to never write classes again. While you're untangling yourself from this mixin mess you got mixed up with, an epiphany hits you. If you can emulate a class using functions, then you don't have to write classes again! And so you finally get around to ridding yourself of classes. Sure it means you have to write more functions, and nested functions and wrap all your functions and shove the state away somewhere you can't see, but it makes everything functional, which means it works. Except for handling exceptions globally, you'll need to use classes for that. And by the way, don't worry about unidirectionality. Everything is asynchronous now.
We use a mixture of LLMs (e.g. to identify the important variables to trace), language servers (to understand where a variable is originally defined and where it's used).
The long term consequence of this is that as capital gets concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, so does the means of production. If you are outside the network you will find it very hard to sell your services even if you have a better product. This already happens in many places with wealth disparity. Deals simply do not happen without the "blessing" of a wealthy backer. Software is unfortunately moving that way. The once upstart nerd who was able to launch their business from the basement has turned into the technocrat baron who will keep such a thing from happening again.