AI is The GOAT 🐐🎉

Code completion suggestions have got a little better these days, and sometimes they even contain the correct variable names and values. But do we really need the LLM's waste of energy and memory consumption to save us from typing to the end of the line? Algorithms would have been enough.

Code comments rarely make sense, but my typical example is something like

// TODO remove workaround when #123 is fixed

which adds external context (some say that's bad) and can't be understood without external context. Likewise, commit messages referencing GitHub/GitLab issues, for example

git commit -am "mobile header layout #456"

I wonder how an AI should help anyone get those correct?

Even worse, there are at least two different versions of Teams, and two different types of Microsoft logins, which can be hard to discern, even more so, when some of the apps and websites are automatically translated to German and others aren't.

Microsoft fans (yes, they do exist) claim that Microsoft pioneered digital accessibility and is still the best choice for international collaboration. What a pity if that's the best we got in 2024.

Regular customers seem to like Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft Office, because it's part of their infrastructure, they have the right logins and permissions and got used to the pitfalls. If you have never used Google Meet, Mail, and Calendar before, it might feel the same, though, or if your microphone suddenly refuses to work in Zoom.

The dilemma will repeat on higher levels.

Nostalgic stuff might feel better because we were young and naive and had more fun, but @retoor has a good point about abstraction and minimalism triggering our fantasy, much like reading a book compared to watching a movie.

I remember old video games, not PS1, but long ago on Commodore 64 in the 1980s, restricted to a video resolution of 320 x 200 pixels and 16 colors, but the gameplay was quick and immediate, and the surreal futuristic electro sound was the best!

- Street Surfer

- Paradroid

- Gyruss

There are also inconsistencies like ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED. A normal event that does not cause notifications on mobile phones and in mobile browsers, but makes Chromium browsers throw an error. Why won't Chromium browsers just continue to load data when a network change was detected? Instead they interrupt browsing and throw an ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED error telling me that my connection was interrupted. I don't understand the purpose of this error message or why this behavior is the default an not a special option.

@Hazarth in most cases there is no need to guess. When IBAN account numbers were introduced in Europe, official definitions and correct checking algorithms have been issued. Many numbers or codes have 1...n correct representations which are often (but not always) clearly defined.

Some use a car for shipping, some use a ship for cargo.

I always suspected they made bash unintuitive and inconsistent on purpose, and they made sure to use as many non-alphanumeric characters as possible so that developers can't just google the arcane language that only admins are supposed to use.

I recently saw an unopened </p> tag in a website's source view. I wondered, when browsers have implicit auto-closing rules, maybe we should define unofficial de-facto standard for inserting implicit missing opening tags as well. I mean, it does work in human communication as </sarcasm> proves

From a business perspective, they should make Figma worse until it's only slightly more professional than Miro. Then they can add all the missing features back but for an extra fee. They can try and act like Adobe, until another startup disrupts the market with a new professional tool with a nice UI, which will of course deteriorate and become more expensive as soon as the disruptors have enough customers to become the next de-facto-standard who will eventually be obsoleted by another disruptor and so on.

(Update: turned out that there was no "new UI" in my case, but I got promoted to have editing permissions, which puts the seemingly missing export settings to the bottom of the design tab. I wonder how many devs might have suspected that their Figma UI got broken or restricted when it's the other way round)

Paywalls don't stop spam and clickbait content. It's like meetup trying to make the most money out of what's left of their former de-facto monopoly, before fading into insignificance.

most bots are still incredibly dumb, but human clickworkers are a real challenge

In that sense, life's like the film Truman Show: something or someone will always seem to try to stop or distract us from our goals, and the harder we try, the more absurd the excuses will become. The biggest challenge is not to trick ourselves, also known as procrastination.

But most of these are first-world problems. We don't need to go to an office if we don't have a job. We don't need to worry about buying or decorating a home if we can't afford one etc. Still these problems are real problems.

Buddhism has a lot of wisdom and strategies. It doesn't matter that much if or how long we actually meditate, but it makes a difference to experience it all to start getting a different view on our minds and our delusions.

It's not that hard to detect bot behavior and content - unless you care about not losing that 0.01% chance of discarding a meaningful message or pissing actual users off by making them solve a math problem or click on the one object that does not match the others.

Pasting in some code from ChatGPT without reading it is no worse than pasting some code from StackOverflow without reading.

Nesting a column layout inside a column layout can be done in minutes using HTML and CSS, but page builders need extra layouts that you must learn to use, what's this BS?

Ironically, page builders were made so that website owners can edit their content without hiring a web developer. But what's actually happening...

WPBakery is even worse than Divi, and they dare charge their clients a monthly fee?!?!?!?!

@electrineer both orange and brown are darker and redder variations of yellow, right?

But languages like Italian have more or different "basic" color names, like different tones of what English people (who rarely see blue sky?) subsume to be "blue".

you mean like this 256 web safe color palette: black, black, black, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, brown, brown, brown, ...

I don&#39;t know what you mean

@tosensei actually there is a movement called "boring web development", boring in a positive sense like in the principle of least astonishment

I like customers who have an open mind.

You don't need to know precisely what you want. Leave it to the experts, embrace their ideas and accept their decisions. And, yes, project managers should be experts in communication. But some aren't.

@Demolishun

> I don't know what this post is about. But okay.

Nerd

@Jabb03

> If it's implicit it's not a requirement.

Nerd

@jestdotty how would ad providers use additional data, like from cameras or body sensors, when they fail to use what they already have?

Despite all the "intelligence", personalized ads seem worse than a random or context-based choice. Why do they keep showing me

- ads for the exact product that I already bought?

- text ads remotely related to a word in my search query that has multiple meanings, like "eleventy" is a JAMstack software, but also an Italian fashion brand, and WC-AJAX can be a physical product to clean my toilet or a web service used by WooCommerce.

I used to suspect "artificial intelligence" to act dumb on purpose to make it look less threatening, but why should they keep showing unsuccessful advertising if they have to pay for it? Why would they intentionally make Alexa fail to understand my friend's dialect? I guess they would get too many false positives when trying to read people's facial expressions, even if people allowed it.

There are nice and beautifully designed ads that don't move, don't make a sound, don't insult my intelligence, or show anything ugly or disgusting.

Those nice ads are either the minority or I don't notice them because they don't annoy me.

Surfing the web in private mode, logged out of all accounts, without an ad blocker, takes the mask off and shows the internet in all its true ugliness of scams and cheap Chinese crap products.

Python and cups updates managed to break my printer drivers years ago both on Linux and MacOS! The printer is still working fine, but if I actually want to print something, I need to use a Windows operating system.

Humanity of generators is not the point, but bullshit and misinformation are. There's already too much bullshit, marketing and troll content created by humans, and AI learns from human output, so we won't even notice the difference.

@Hazarth that's the root cause: from a developer's perspective, something is wrong. From a user's perspective, I don't want to be lectured in which format I should type an IBAN, and if I copy it from an invoice, I expect it to be valid. Same goes for phone numbers.

In a 1:1 human dialog, if someone asks for my number they won't demand that I repeat it without a leading zero, with or without a plus sign or whatever. But digital interfaces do.

That's like telling your kids they must not eat spinach and peas to trick them into wanting to have it? So let's all fight against testing, quality and other missing priorities so we might be getting them at last.

Showing some progress to management is a social skill mostly unrelated to coding and actually solving problems. I used to speak up on behalf of junior coworkers and try to make it clear what kind of challenges made our work take longer than expected but what a great business value will result when we finished.