HarkMahlberg

the potential of accumulating society’s knowledge and being able to present that to people in an understandable way.

We call this Wikipedia, please consider donating to keep it running!

energy/efficiency advances

About that.

I’m so glad I have hobby projects where I can do just that, but software engineering has stopped being a profession I look at with pride. Everything is broken by design and costs a fortune at the same time.

Good blog you might like: https://ratfactor.com/tech-nope

(and sometimes newer)

My God man, say it louder for the folks in the back. A 21 year old answer, heck even an 8 year old answer like OP said, might not STILL be the best answer in the current age. Technology evolves, new languages get invented, old languages gain some new features, and all of that happens at a rapid pace.

I get super dismayed using SO and seeing the top answer predates Rust. (Note I don’t mean to say Rust is always the answer, but that Rust is already 13 years old. Things change.)

which kinda sucks

No worries mate. :)

I didn’t say anything about the quality of Romanian engineers, nor Indian nor Nigerian for that matter. The worker, regardless of nationality, is not who I’m railing against.

Counterpoint: Nigeria is in the same time zone as Germany.

And even that isn’t important. Its part of the veneer. The outsourcing spree of the late 00’s/early 10’s created an intense distrust of outsourcing that persists today in the IT industry. That’s why he avoids saying India, he wants to have his cake (cheap labor) and eat it too (not resalt old wounds). But when the chips are down, all those benefits of same time zone collaboration and EU partnership will go out the window if they think it’s the only way to increase revenue.

Edit: I was slightly mistaken on the dynamic here, but I still think the guy is a ghoul exploiting people for their labor.

It’s so shameless innit? He puts on the veneer of caring about quality, but then gives up the game by admitting the real goal is the cheapest labor possible coughslaverycough. Why stop at Romania if you want cheap labor? Just outsource it all to India or Nigeria, we all know you would do it in a heartbeat if your precious quarterly profits were on the line.

Edit: didn’t realize the guy was Romanian so at least the shilling makes more sense, but I still get the feeling he’s not doing his employees any favors.

Can’t wait to meet the successor to M1 Abrams: the M2 Sad Tin Can.

I’ve seen lazy developers take solutions from Stack Overflow, and paste them directly into code with no scrutiny, no testing, no validation. I’ve also seen talented developers take solutions from Stack Overflow, verify them, scrutinize them, simplify or expand on them. The difference wasn’t the source of information, but what the developer did with it.

AI is a crutch for the shameless, careless developers who create more problems than they solve. It’s just made them more efficient at it. Which only creates problems faster than than the talented developers can solve; it’s easy to destroy, but difficult to build. I know talented developers who use AI, but it hasn’t made them faster or more efficient, because their strength is also their weakness: they take their time, they evaluate their options, they scrutinize AI output because they know its prone to mistakes.

My greatest worry is the folks in the middle - they’re neither experts nor novices, just average. I want to see more engineers develop the skills needed to make them experts, but I worry that AI will just make them lazy.

That sounds like treating the symptom rather than the disease. Why automate the toil, when we could remove it instead? The other commenters brought up examples:

generating (the boring) parts of work documents

when I notice auto-generated parts, which triggers that I use AI in turn, and I ask it to summarise all that verbose AI generated content.

The AI wrote a document a human didn’t want to read, so AI then read the document AI wrote. The incentive thereafter is to save, and use, the shorter AI doc over the longer one.

Was any value created by this cycle? We just watered down the information with more automation. In the process, we probably lost nuance, detail. Alternatively, if we all agreed the document wasn’t worth a human’s eyes or keystrokes in the first place… why have the AI do anything? Sounds like we would all be happier to not have the document in the first place.

Much like programming itself, where if you have to write tons of comments to explain what you’re doing and why, your code is the problem and should be rewritten to be more legible. If you need a training seminar on how to use the program, the program maybe isn’t very usable lol.

Well that does work, so thank you for that. But I still maintain that’s crazy unintuitive. If I saw that option in a context menu at least it would be self-explanatory. But the feature as-is would only ever be known if you hovered over a single character and read the tooltip.

Nah mate, SN has no correct way to use it. The interface is fucking horrible. It’s a black hole of information. The search is a stack - if you want to remove a query at the bottom of the stack, you have to remove all the queries, then add them back one at a time. I’ve lost edits to tickets because I dared to have two tabs open at the same time. I’ve seen edits to ONE ticket end up on ANOTHER, again, because of having two tabs open.

No killer feature can redeem it when the basic workflow is hot dogshit.

Despite having a laptop in college for comp sci, I almost always took notes with pen and paper. Arrows, boxes, diagrams, small blurbs of concepts, didn’t really matter what I wrote. It was the act of writing that helped me remember it.

Found em

Which will get it wrong and leave expired/unsigned certs everywhere XD

That was a joke? Nice try Nostradamus, I know you can see the future.