I remember the rivalry and how, in the beginning of the 90s, I made good friends with a guy from the “other side” (Him with Atari, me with Amiga) and quickly found we had more in common than we had differences.

Declaring a common enemy in the PC, we both watched our favorite platforms slowly die off with the advent of games like Doom that those old platforms were not equipped to handle.

Most of all I miss the demo scene and all the creativity it fostered. There doesn’t seem to be a modern equivalent for PC where programmers, musicians and artists come together to showcase their work like that. I hope I’m wrong and just haven’t found it yet. I would love to see that be a thing again, especially with AI slop taking over everything.

That doesn’t mean that much, thanks to the Gulf Stream bringing warm water to the Norwegian Coast.

Ohio is on the latitude of Spain, yet I’m freezing my ass off right now.

100% this. I was going to post what you said as well. But I will add that in the US, if you use 24 hour time, most people just refer to it as military time. If you tell them the difference they don’t really care.

In the US 24h is virtually never used in a civil context, but in scientific, engineering, and medical contexts it is ubiquitous.

This is what source maps are for. With the right tools you can debug the original source instead of the minified version.

I have recovered many times from a broken window session in Linux by switching to a console with ctrl-alt-fN, logging in, and either killing the offending program or just rebooting gracefully.

In Windows my last resort before the nuclear power button is Task Manager with ctrl-esc or ctrl-alt-delete.

Thank you! TIL

Minor correction: IPv6 uses 128bit addresses.

Not all! So about this bridge…

I hope people realize you are being sarcastic.

I’m no stereo expert, but from what I understand the hum comes from interference or ground problems. I’ve been told that adding ferrite chokes (like the ones on old VGA cables) to your cables can help, but you probably have to try a couple of things to fix it.

Also: typically, only analog cables have issues with electronic interference. Digital either works or it doesn’t. In other words, gold plated triple shielded digital cables are a waste of money.

Both MySQL and MariaDb are named after the developer’s daughters.

I read this as Doge Ram at first.

I vote up if I think it adds value to the discussion or should be seen more. When I down vote it’s because I feel is not adding value or off topic.

I miss the way Slashdot votes worked, where there are separate counts for each sentiment like agree/disagree, insightful, funny, etc. Maybe reaction emojis are the modern version of that?

I can only say I hope you’re right. I don’t like the way things are going, but I need to do what I can to adapt and survive so I choose to not put my hopes on AI failing anytime soon.

By the way, thank you for the thoughtful responses and discussion.

You’re not wrong, but in my personal experience AI that I’ve used is already at the level of a decent intern, maybe fresh junior level. There’s no reason it can’t improve from there. In fact I get pretty good results by working incrementally to stay within its context window.

I was around for the dotcom bubble and I expect this to go similarly: at first there is a rush to put AI into everything. Then they start realizing they have to actually make money and the frivolous stuff drops by the wayside and the useful stuff remains.

But it doesn’t go away completely. After the dotcom bust, the Internet age was firmly upon us, just with less hype. I expect AI to follow a similar trend. So, we can hope for another AI winter or we can figure out where we fit in. I know which one I’m doing.

I’m a senior working with junior developers, guiding them through difficult tasks and delegating work to them. I also use AI for some of the work. Everything you say is correct.

However, that doesn’t stop a) some seniors from spinning up several copies of AI and test them like a group of juniors and b) management from seeing this as a way to cut personnel.

I think denying these facts as a senior is just shooting yourself in the foot. We need to find the most productive ways of using AI or become obsolete.

At the same time we need to ensure that juniors can develop into future seniors. AI is throwing a major wrench in the works of that, but management won’t care.

Basically, the smart thing to do is to identify where AI, seniors, and juniors all fit in. I think the bubble needs to pop before that truly happens, though. Right now there’s too much excitement to cut cost/salaries with the people holding the purse strings. Until AI companies start trying to actually make a profit, that won’t happen.

Very true. I’ve been saying this for years. However, the flip side is you get the best results from AI by treating it as a junior developer as well. When you do, you can in fact have a fleet of virtual junior developer working for you as a senior.

However, and I tell this to the junior I work with: you are responsible for the code you put into production, regardless if you write it yourself or you used AI. You must review what it creates because you’re signing off on it.

That in turn means you may not save as much time as you think, because you have to review everything, and you have to make sure you understand everything.

But understanding will get progressively harder the more code is written by other people or AI. It’s best to try to stay current with the code base as it develops.

Unfortunately this cautious approach does not align with the profit motives of those trying to replace us with AI, so I remain cynical about the future.

Tie it to your internet bandwidth usage, so that the bulb starts dimming when utilization goes up and maybe flicker a bit, as if you’re drawing too much power off the grid when you’re downloading stuff.

No problem. According to their bubble, that only happens to the bad people that didn’t follow the rules. Every single one deserved it in their view.

I’ve spoken to Trump supporters who are themselves illegal immigrants (overstayed visa). They don’t see the problem.

Thank you for the recommendation. I would consider it again if my day job switched to Linux (unlikely).

I did try Rider on Linux a while back, but just couldn’t get my head around it. I’ve become too used to Visual Studio on Windows (with Resharper).

I don’t do a lot of C# outside of my day job, though, so VS code is fine for my uses.

Unfortunately I can’t help you there. I just use plain old kde plasma on Fedora. If your favorite code editor supports Language Server Protocol (LSP), you can probably get it to do code completion for C# one way or another. Vim, neovim, Kate, and many others do.