Readit NewsIt baffles me how usable Office 97 still. I was playing with it recently in a VM to see if it worked as well as I remembered, and it was amazing how packed with features it is considering it's nearing on thirty. There's no accounting for taste but I prefer the old Office UI to the ribbon, there's a boatload of formatting options for Word, there's 3D Word Art that hits me right in the nostalgia, Excel 97 is still very powerful and supports pretty much every feature I use regularly. It's obviously snappy on modern hardware, but I think it was snappy even in 1998.
I'm sure people can enumerate here on the newer features that have come in later editions, and I certainly do not want to diminish your experience if you find all the new stuff useful, but I was just remarkably impressed how much cool stuff was in packed into the software.
I'm also sure they can go as far as 5nm like SMIC if they really wanted to, since it's strategic for China, but the cost would only be justified if the current cycle lasts long enough.
And yes, I do legalese details of that are much more complex. But it just makes no common sense.
1) Post-soviet countries are doing amazingly well (Poland, Baltics, etc) and very fast growing + healthy (low criminality, etc)
2) The "Russia is weak" thing; it is vastly exaggerated because it is 4 years that we hear that "Russia is on the verge of collapse" but they still manage to handle a very high intensity war against the whole West almost alone.
3) China is not a country lagging behind others at all. It is said in some schoolbooks but it is a big lie that is 0% true now.
It's nearly impossible to bankrupt huge country like Russia. Unless there's civil unrest (or west grows balls to throw enough of resources to move the needle), they can continue the war for decades.
What Russia is doing is each week borrowing more and more from the future and screwing up next generations on a huge scale by destroying it's non-military industrial base, isolating economy from the world and killing hundreds of thousands of young man who could've spent decades contributing to the economy/demographics.
Also the system prompts for some of them are kinda funny in a hopelessly naive aspirational way. We should all aspire to live and breathe the code review system prompt on a daily basis.
Where they suck is high level problems like - is the code actually solving the business problem? Is it using right dependencies? Does it fit into broader design?
Which is expected for me and great help. I'm more happy as a human to spend less time checking if you're managing lifecycle of the pointer correctly and focus on ensuring that code is there to do what it needs to do.
I'm afraid to ask about the bad ones.
That’s the thing about any automations that are just aides. Humans are extremely bad at monitoring machines, and if aide system is good enough that trick you into thinking it’s actually stand alone and in control, you get complacent very fast, stop pay attention as you convince yourself that automation got it.
So bad level 2 driver assists are so bad, that no one will get complacent, as they give you only very minor help. Really good ones (like comma) can trick you into thinking that they can do much more than they’re designed to do.
I must admit the idea has a lot of appeal, because there are people seeing good ROIs, so it does not seem to be the tool as much as the tool user
And it's problem specific to software engineering. Any engineering deals with it - when you manufacture physical things, for example, tolerances, safety factors, etc, are all tools to deal with reality being messy.