Yeah I'm trying to figure out what exactly the author thinks is the "Golden Age of Programming" if even he recognizes it was just a bunch of high salary workers getting nothing done. Shouldn't this have been written during that time?
It sucks that a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement. But it seems to me these layoffs are bringing big tech companies down to sizes closer to what they should have been in the first place.
The real issue to me is the ever-worsening monopolization, and all the unchecked acquisitions of the past 15 years that kinda killed any hopes for competition. If that wasn't happening, there'd be a lot more jobs available. Maybe not at Google salaries, but at least there would be jobs.
> a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement
I've found people that fit this mould to be insufferable to work with
> Write an HTML and JavaScript page implementing space invaders
It may not be "copy pasting" but it's generating output as best it can be recreated from its training on looking at Space Invaders source code.
The engineers at Taito that originally developed Space Invaders were not told "make Space Invaders" and then did their best to recall all the source code they've looked at in their life to re-type the source code to an existing game. From a logistics standpoint, where the source code already exists and is accessible, you may as well have copy-pasted it and fudged a few things around.
The source code for original Space Invaders from 1978 has never been published. The closest to that is disassembled ROMs.
I used that prompt because it's the shortest possible prompt that tells the model to build a game with a specific set of features. If I wanted to build a custom game I would have had to write a prompt that was many paragraphs longer than that.
The aim of this piece isn't "OMG looks LLMs can build space invaders" - at this point that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. What's interesting is that my laptop can run a model that is capable of that now.
The discussion I replied to was just regarding whether or not what the LLM did should be considered "engineering"
It doesn't really matter whether or not the original code was published. In fact that original source code on its own probably wouldn't be that useful, since I imagine it wouldn't have tipped the weights enough to be "recallable" from the model, not to mention it was tasked with implementing it in web technologies.
The cynical part of me feels like certain employees had uncontrolled access to the user data.
There would be a morbid irony in the idea of a tool marketed as increasing safety for women actually being a honeypot operation to accumulate very sensitive personal information on those very women.
Yeah this seems like an odd thing to paywall. In the web dev world where everything is free, it's a pretty crazy ask to ask people to tie themselves to a UI framework where I guess you're forever paying a subscription just to continue using the framework?
It's like putting if postgres expected you to pay them a monthly fee.
edit: I see now their pricing is one-time perpetual access. Still, I'm genuinely curious how well this model works.
That advice is usually more for people who are already fit but don't have abs.
You can maintain a healthy level of fitness by adding some exercise into your life and being mindful of what you eat. But maintaining abs is a whole other project you practically have to center your life around. And indeed, it's mostly a matter of very strict dieting.
Okay then, how about "you can't outrun a bad diet"? Pick your favorite conventional wisdom fitness aphorism as it applies to you, but it's the same underlying principle.
Well, it's a "free if you're not generating revenue" model which is similar to JetBrains' recent "free for non-commercial use" releases of their IDEs, and I believe Docker does something like that too.
And famously WinRar which will nag you to upgrade every time you open it but doesn't actually force you to buy it, but expect enterprises will if they don't want to risk lawsuits.
They dont charge for the source. They charge for paying more attention to your issues, and for compiling the code for you. If you compile it yourself and do some of the work to resolve the issues (planning or an outright PR) then you wont pay anything
> We were partly inspired by Signal’s blocking of Recall. Given that Windows doesn’t let non-browser apps granularly disable Recall, Signal cleverly uses the DRM flag on their app to disable all screenshots. This breaks Recall, but unfortunately also breaks the ability to take any screenshots, including by legitimate accessibility software like screen-readers. Brave’s approach does not have this limitation since we’re able to granularly disable just Recall; regular screenshotting will still work. While it’s heartening that Microsoft recognizes that Web browsers are especially privacy-sensitive applications, we hope they offer the same granular ability to turn off Recall to all privacy-minded application developers.
This is only tangentially related, but I just started using Brave (on Windows) in the past couple weeks in preparation for uBlock Origin being blocked in Chrome. Once I disabled all the weird service integrations/upsells it's been a decent enough experience. But the one bizarre thing I've found is typing in the YouTube comment box is laggy as hell for some reason. No other text field that I've found has this issue, just the YouTube comment box in particular is super laggy in Brave. Has anyone else experienced this?
I've been using Brave since forever and comment on YouTube a fair bit and have never experienced this. There are a few instances where I had to go to another browser to make a website work, but even those have become vanishingly small.
Yeah, I suppose I'll have to play the disable-one-extension-at-a-time game.
It's one of those issues that's so infrequent and just tolerable enough because it's not like I'm writing essays in youtube comments, it's easier to just tolerate it for 10 seconds than to put the effort into figuring it out!
My "favorite" tactless Windows update story in recent memory was when an update pinned a Copilot link to my taskbar. I unpinned it, then a few weeks later another update added the Copilot link back to my taskbar, but not as a pinned app. Rather it replaced the god damn "show desktop" button in the bottom right of the screen! They replaced an always on-screen OS navigation button that's been there since Windows 7 with an ad!!
I hope to god that Valve takes the opportunity they have with Steam OS to give us a potential real alternative to Windows that focuses on gaming support. Cause that's literally the only reason I'm forced to continue using this Microsoft adware slop of an OS.
> They replaced an always on-screen OS navigation button that's been there since Windows 7 with an ad!!
That must be doing wonders for the click rate. I can see the pre-promotion powerpoint slide now: "User engagement with Copilot is showing exponential growth"
I get the vibe that Apple doesn't really want people to use family sharing in the way a lot of people use family plans. Like, it's there so kids with their first iDevice can get some stuff from their parents, but once that kid is older Apple wants them off your family sharing group and on their own personal everything.
I stick through the hassle cause when Google killed Google Play Music I tried out Apple Music by getting on my parents' family sharing and don't mind having one less subscription to pay for as long as they don't care. But it is annoying it puts my account in a state where I can't buy any subscriptions or in-app purchases without it getting charged to daddy's credit card. The workaround I've found is you can go on the Apple Store app/website and gift yourself an Apple gift card and claim it on your account. Then it'll charge to those funds first before the family organizer's credit card.
It sucks that a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement. But it seems to me these layoffs are bringing big tech companies down to sizes closer to what they should have been in the first place.
The real issue to me is the ever-worsening monopolization, and all the unchecked acquisitions of the past 15 years that kinda killed any hopes for competition. If that wasn't happening, there'd be a lot more jobs available. Maybe not at Google salaries, but at least there would be jobs.
reply