My degree is in Computer Engineering, dipshit.

You made up this fantasy that somehow I don’t know what I’m talking about based on nothing other than you wanting me to be wrong so your world view isn’t challenged.

I stared out with the assumption that you were having a good faith discussion. It’s now clear that you’re a troll, tech bro, AI lover, or all of the above. At this point, I’m done with you and encourage others to be as well.

Friday.

I have over 25 years of development experience. My current role is vice president of development and architecture where I lead a team of 80+ devs, QAs, and architects. By any measure, I am one of those “engineer level” developers you speak of.

Yes, LLMs are a tool, but it’s a tool one should use sparingly. LLMs are pattern recognition machines and are great for routine, been-there-done-that type development. For anything that deviates from the norm, LLMs will try to force everything back into common patterns… even when those patterns are not correct. A well designed system can be mangled into junk because the LLM doesn’t have enough context or because something is new.

Be skeptical of the rave reviews around coding agents and the use of LLMs for development. Much of the hype seems tied to developer skill. Less capable developers can use LLMs to appear more capable than they are. For good developers, LLMs seem to erode their skills as they rely on the tool instead of their own knowledge. I have seen this first hand.

Overall, it seems LLMs raise skills of bad developers and hamper the skills of good developers. It’s creating a bunch of middling developers who are incapable of handling anything novel or complex.

Could be either, depending how you write it.

Lean into the creepy factor and ramp up the anxiety by adding recent events found in the tape and a feeling of en-ease as they’re discovered. Deja vu can solidify it further, causing chills down the spine. Add an event that is then found on the tape before it happens, proving it’s a prediction. As the tape is repaired, more is discovered. Your indication of progress is how much tape is left to repair, providing a mystery, and anxiety, of what will be found next.

Lean into the sad factor by showing the world now and reminiscing on the lost. Ramp it up with something the character loved, maybe shown in the tape, and then showing the last of it going away. Add in the nice old man, the character’s savior, dying; not from age, but because of the destruction. Could show malnourished children, though that can be triggering. Showing malnourished animals would give a strong visceral reaction without having the same trigger. Be careful going too far in this direction as it can quickly become depression porn. You’d need to have a ray of hope or something the character is fighting for. The tape could help if it’s shown to have accurate predictions. It could show a happy, green field, blue sky, kids playing type thing at the end. This could give the character hope.

Another layer of sadness would then be an oscillation between believing in the happy prediction or not. To ramp that up, show one tape prediction as false, or presumed to be false to the character though actually true. (Think Shrek 2 when he thinks the potion is a dud until the next morning, though the audience sees it worked after he turned away). It’d be up to you to determine if the final hope is true or not, letting you end on a high note, or a low one. Either way could be impactful.

Overall, it’s a fun premise which you can take in many directions.

I might be an outlier, but I enjoy working. I like what I do. I also like having money.

Most days, when I get home, I do whatever housework is needed and still have time to spend with my family, work on home projects, or relax and play a game or whatnot.

Take care of yourself by exercising and eating right, find a job you enjoy, and you won’t be dead tired after work. Granted, there are occasional days when I’m exhausted, but they’re the exception, not the norm.

I’m middle age, and as much as you are not looking forward to working, that’s how I feel about retirement. I don’t know if I will ever retire, not because of money, but because I think I’d get bored.

Taylor Swift, “You Belong With Me”?

Source?

I’m with you. Professional sports have gone downhill. I used to be a diehard Denver Broncos fan. I had DirectTV specifically so I could get every NFL game. During football season, I’d watch every game I could. If I were to do that now, I’d need a number of different streaming services. Apart from that, I began watching less and less a few years ago when every other commercial, and every commentation, became about betting. Draft Kings, Fan Dual, MGM, and whatever else there was. It stopped being about watching the game and became more about gambling.

With baseball, they’re digitally putting ads on the pitcher’s mound. A couple years ago, they added advertising patches to the damn uniforms. It’s disgusting. People don’t play for a team anymore, they play for a brand.

Yet, even with all the additional ad revenue, ticket and concession prices have skyrocketed. It used to be that you could take a family of four to a game and not break the bank. Now, a single game is the cost of a full vacation. With four tickets, concession, and parking, you’re paying at least $500. And that’s without any sort of souvenirs. To make it worse, every team is wanting a new stadium and they are forcing the cities and states to pay for it through taxes. It’s greed on top of greed on top of greed.

I can’t stand watching professional sports anymore. On the plus side, I now have a lot more time to do other things that are a more fun and give a better sense of accomplishment than, “Hey, my team won.”

What are you talking about? C# is massively popular, especially with corporations and government. If someone wants to get a job writing software, they won’t go wrong learning C#.

Python is great for data evaluations and scripting. There’s nothing wrong with learning it, or any other language for that matter… including Java, C, or C++

They are a middleman and do take a slight overhead, 1.1% last I saw, though it might have changed since then. The benefit is one of simplicity. Many people want to give to charity and aren’t sure which one. UW let’s them donate one place and it get distributed to many. They also have criteria that charities must meet to qualify. Also, like you mentioned, they do the paycheck deduction. All of what they do is about making it easier and hassle free as possible to donate, making it more likely that people will.

No.

Me too, but it has nothing to do with Facebook. Don’t kink shame me.

Fear and caution are not the same thing.

Do you really think the US has any real concern about being attacked? There is plenty to say about US policies, both good and bad. Part of that is the nearly $1T per year spent on the military. I don’t think you’ll find many credible people who think attacking the US will be good for whoever does it.

Attacking the US has been, historically, one thing that tends to unite the country. We - Americans - like building shit and we like fighting people. We never stop building new weapons. But when there is no-one to fight, we fight each other. There is a huge social divide in the US right now. You want to fix that, attack us.

*Edit: spelling

I like some of the concepts of agile and scrum. Two week sprints rather than multi-year projects. Faster turn around on bugs. Having a prioritized backlog so we know what we are doing next. Small standups to get ahead of blockers. Spending less time documenting everything and more time developing. You don’t need a PM or scrum master in those things. A good team lead can do it. If the PM needs an update, they can look at the board.

A lot of the crap that gets add in to it is so freaking useless. There is an AVP at my company that keeps pushing everyone to sign and share team agreements so “there can accountability.” It’s so cringy. If someone is getting stuff done, do you really think having them sign something saying they will do it is going to help? If someone is getting stuff done, then it isn’t going to change anything. It’s infantalizing. So much of it is micromanagement and lack of team trust.

As manager, I have to say that is uncalled for. As a developer, I will say you are 100% accurate.

I agree that it isn’t as good as it was. The last two updates have definitely decreased its effectiveness for multiple things, not just dev. It is still my starting point when looking for something. It is just not as good as it used to be.

Obviously, you can’t take what it gives at face value, but you shouldn’t do that from SO either. In general, I see faster results using GPT than I do with Google and SO. You can also extend the responses with any customization or changes specific to what you are trying to do, where you can’t with SO.

I’m not saying SO is bad. Not by any stretch. I still use it a lot. It just isn’t my starting point anymore.