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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Rofl. As a developer of nearly 20 years, lol.

    I used copilot until finally getting fed up last week and turning it off. It was a net negative to my productivity.

    Sure, when you’re doing repetitive operations that are mostly copy paste and changing names, it’s pretty decent. It can save dozens of seconds, maybe even a minute or two. That’s great and a welcome assist, even if I have to correct minor things around 50% of the time.

    But when an error slips through and I end up spending 20 minutes tracking down the problem later, all that saved time vanishes.

    And then the other times where my IDE is frozen because the plugin is stuck in some loop and eating every last resource and I spend the next 20 minutes cursing and killing processes, manually looking for recent updates that hadn’t yet triggered update notifications, etc… well, now we’re in the red, AND I’m pissed off.

    So no, AI is not some huge boon to developer productivity. Maybe it’s more useful to junior developers in the short term, but I have definitely dealt with more than a few problems that seem to derive from juniors taking AI answers and not understanding the details enough to catch the problems it introduced. And if juniors frequently rely on AI without gaining deep understanding, we’re going to have worse and worse engineers as a result.


  • Eh. Honestly, the line of “questions” was rather stupid.

    “Why aren’t you lobbying to make your business irrelevant” is essentially what the interviewer pushed aggressively.

    Sure, I get calling out a CEO for deflecting tough questions with corporate BS. But it was a pretty dumb line of questioning in the first place.

    Why isn’t Google lobbying for privacy protections?

    Why isn’t Comcast lobbying for net neutrality?

    Just make your statement and ask for comment. “Our listeners consider Intuits lobbying against tax reform that would benefit tax payers to be adversarial to their customers. What would you say to them?”





  • Mostly fair, but I’ll push back on the security issue.

    Side loading an apk is extremely dangerous, and an easy attack vector.

    While there are plenty of malicious apps that make it on the Google store, they do attempt to do some automated and even manual curation. This is fact.

    I think it’s wholly appropriate to warn the user that they’re bypassing that standard, if imperfect, Google security coverage. And granting extensive app permissions is done at your own risk.

    3rd party app stores may do their own security curation as well, and it’s up to them to communicate that and educate their users on why they still get the Google warning.






  • What a dishonest argument.

    There’s a world of difference from someone barely getting by, living paycheck to paycheck, versus a middle class worker well into their career, able to afford minor luxuries and still squirrel away money for savings and retirement.

    I am middle class. I am 20 years into my career. I make comparatively good money.

    But due to not prioritizing buying property, I’ve pretty much missed my window. I can qualify for a mortgage, have the 20% down-payment, but the monthly payment would pretty much wipe me out, costing around $3k more per month than renting.

    If I were at this point in my career 20 years ago, I could have easily afforded a house comfortably.

    That is what we’re talking about when we talk about the housing crisis for specifically the middle class.





  • Shift-left eliminated the QA role.

    Now we have AI generated shit code, with devs that don’t understand the low level details of both the language, and the specifics of the generated code.

    So we basically have content entry (ai inputs) and extremely shitty QA bundled into the “developer” role.

    As a 20 year veteran of the industry, people keep asking me if I think AI will make developers obsolete. I keep telling them “maybe some day, but today’s LLMs are not it. The AI bubble is going to burst, and a few legit use cases will make it through”