Readit NewsIf you're someone with a background in Computer Science, you should know that we have formal languages for a reason, and that natural language is not as precise as a programming language.
But anyway we're peek AI hype, hitting the top on HN is worth more than a reasonable take, reasonableness doesn't sell after all.
So here we're seeing yet another text about how the world of software was solved by AI and being a developer is an artifact of the past.
English or any other natural language can of course be concise enough, but when being brief they leave much to imagination. Adding verbosity allows for greater precision, but I think as well that that is what formal languages are for, just as you said.
Although, I think it's worth contemplating whether the modern programming languages/environments have been insufficient in other ways. Whether by being too verbose at times, whether the IDEs should be more like databases first and language parsers second, whether we could add recommendations using far simpler, but more strict patterns given a strongly typed language.
My current gripes are having auto imports STILL not working properly in most popular IDEs or an IDE not finding referenced entity from a file, if it's not currently open... LLMs sometimes help with that, but they are extremely slow in comparison to local cache resolution.
Long term I think more value will be in directly improving the above, but we shall see. AI will stay around too of course, but how much relevance it'll have in 10 years time is anybody's guess. I think it'll become a commodity, the bubble will burst and we'll only use it when sensible after a while. At least until the next generation of AI architecture will arrive.
I've owned a macbook since 2010, with a short break during the touchbar era when I got myself an XPS with windows which I dual-booted with ubuntu and later a system76 that comes with their own flavour of Ubuntu, called Pop! Os.
The situation in windows (windows 10 at the time) was abysmal. Completely incoherent UI, settings spread across different menus, ads in start menu, slow and broken search, constant nagging to update windows, to update the drivers, to tell me that the drivers have been updated, to install or update my antivirus, etc. These were not things that I installed myself, these were included with Dell's setup of the machine.
On the system76 laptop things were different. Things were calm, I could configure everything as I wanted and things worked. Until at some point I installed a new version of something, which had nothing to do with sound, but it broke sound, just as I was preparing to join a meeting, and just as we were going into the second phase of lockdowns in late 2020 so online meetings were here to stay.
My macbooks are reliable. I've got the M1 as soon as it came out and I never got a single issue with it. I've upgraded twice (I think) across major versions and everything worked. I don't have to worry about it leaving me hanging when I need it.
(And that's not taking into account things like build quality, touchpad quality, battery life, silence, etc)
In the end of the day, I do a lot of debugging as part of my work. When I don't work, I want to choose what I will be debugging, not have it forced on me.
And don't get me wrong: I see where Apple is going, I know that they're a greedy company that want to maintain their iron grip and have the final say on what we can and cannot do on our machines.
However, for me for the time being it's the least bad option.
XCode installations failing, Docker installation failing after an OS update never to work again without completely reinstalling OS, plugging in headphones would crash the Macbook (until OS update 6 months after I got it), video calls slowing to a halt, if sharing screen etc.
Also there were some things I just never got used to in Mac like window tabbing & minimize working in a Mac way. Maybe if I hadn't had a personal laptop that used Linux at the same time, I would have gotten used to it a little better, but I just plain hated the way it worked.
To be fair, I think it was still more reliable than varieties of Windows, especially the later ones! If tabbing worked more like under Windows and it allowed a bit more configuration, I might be using Mac these days.
That leaves Linux. Although it's not flawless neither after configuring Debian + i3, it works exactly like I want and the same installation has been reliably working for 5+ years. However, getting to the setup that just works certainly took several tries and depends on laptop compatibility, so... No ideal choices exist right now I think. Just luck and what someone is most used to in the end.
Eg authenticatedMenu() appears 4 times in authenticatedMenu.js, only one of them is imported by 2 different files and 3 are just there alone. There's a single export in the file and a number of other files import it through an index.js that re-exports several files other files too.
In my case I think it'd help, if I could disable the duplicates as they don't really provide any useful information when exploring the codebase.
Also, if there was optionally a way to ignore the files that re-export functions/classes and collapse those paths, it'd make the graph a lot smaller and more easy to understand. Maybe it's already something that depgraph does, but the duplicates confuse things, so I'm not sure.
In a nutshell, which type of documentation we need depends on the goal we have. Any API missing one of the kinds of documentation will feel like it is missing something. Once I read about it, I've been noticing how the documentation I like tends to have all these aspects covered.
https://www.writethedocs.org/videos/eu/2017/the-four-kinds-o...
I didn't know how arrays or linking/including worked (or that they existed), so it was one long file with each creature having its own function to determine their behaviour and their own health_creature_1, health_creature_2 and so on. I really started wondering if there was a better way after a while.
As an entrepreneur, this is amazing news! This means users can now more easily switch to my superior service.
At least this is how I choose to see it. It seems to encourage healthy competition and I'd rather compete on the service quality and value than the cleverness of my contracts and discounts. I'm sure it will hurt the bottom line of some companies, but I'm not sure it's a bad thing.
The OSINT folks aren't technically spying but they're a lot closer to it than this.