So they are keeping the Mail app, but changing it so you can’t send or receive email. That seems pretty pointless. Just remove it from Windows altogether and be done with it.

Then they escaped to the Delta Quadrant.

All this was foretold in that documentary sent back from the future: Star Trek Voyager.

Not sure why you are being downvoted just for not realizing about Brave using Chromium. That seems a bit harsh.

Here’s a list of non-Chromium web browsers from August for you or anyone else who might find it helpful.

Whatever she does do is just going to be reversed. Good or bad, it will be fine purely out of spite. It’s a futile exercise.

I just got back from taking one of my kids trick or treating with his friends. It was great. My wife and I got to walk and chat with the other parents while all of our kids knocked on doors and shouted “trick or treat!”. Lots of friendly, generous, nice people. And lots of shouted reminders from us for the kids to not walk on people’s front lawns, to say thank you, to be careful crossing the quiet roads. There were so many other kids out too. It was pretty crazy, but in a good way. About half of the houses were giving out candy in some way or other, with only about a quarter having an un-monitored bowl.

Then on the way home we drove past a church that was having a ‘trunk or treat’ in their parking lot. That just looked sad. There was no excitement for going up to the really cool houses that were decked out in amazing props and decorations. There was no need to hone analytical skills to determine which houses were giving out candy and which ones probably weren’t. Just going very short distances from one car to the next getting candy. My kid asked why they do that. I said it’s probably because they are a closed community who don’t really want to associate with ‘outsiders’. Give me the conventional experience over that all day every day!

And vodka. Soooooo much vodka!

Interesting article. But as a veteran developer the whole AI trend reminds me of the outsourcing trend back in the mid 2000s.

Back then Western developers (especially junior and mid levels) were seen by many companies as a waste of money. “We can pay for three developing world developers for the price we pay for one American/European one! Why are we wasting our money?!”

And so the huge wave of layoffs (fuelled also by the dot com bubble bursting and some other things) kicked off. And many companies contracted out work to India, etc. It was not looking good for us Western developers.

But then the other shoe dropped. The code being sent back was largely absolute shite. Spaghetti code, disparate platforms bound together with proverbial duct tape, no architectural best practices, design anti-patterns, etc etc. And a lot of these systems started falling apart and required Western developers and support engineers to fix them up or outright replace them.

Now, this isn’t a sleight on Indian of other developing world developers. I’ve met lots of phenomenal programmers from that part of the world. And developers there have improved a lot and now there are lots of solid options for outsourcing to there. But there’s are still language and culture barriers that are a hurdle, even today.

But I digress. My underlying point is that there are similarities with today’s situation with what has happened before. Now, it’s very possible LLMs will go to the next level in several years (or more) time. But I still think we are a ways away from having an AI engine that can build a complex, sophisticated system in a holistic way and have it capable of implement the kinda of crazy, wacky, bizarre business rules that are often needed.

Additionally, we’ve heard this whole “developers are going to be obsolete soon” thing before. For 20 years I’ve been hearing that self-writing code was just around the corner. But it wasn’t even close in reality. And even now it’s not just around the corner.

No doubt, AI will hit a whole nother level at some point. The stuff you can do with Chat GPT and the like it’s insane, even right now (though as another article here on Lenny earlier today said, quite a lot of LLM code output is of suspect quality to say the least). And I know the market is rough right now for greener developers. But I think we’re about to see history repeat itself.

Some companies will lean heavily into AI to write code, with only a few seniors basically just curating it and slapping it together. And other companies will find a middle ground of having juniors and seniors using AI to a more limited and careful level. Those latter companies will fare a lot better with the end product, and they will also be better prepared with regard to tribal knowledge transfer (which is another topic in this altogether). And when that epiphany is realized it will become the default approach. At least for another 10-20 years until AI can change things up again.

Anyone remember the short-lived Great War of the Messenger Apps? For a few months back around… '98? '99? MSN tried really hard to shoehorn its way into working with AIM. About every day there would be an update from MSM Messenger to allow it to work with AIM. Then AOL would fuck with their own protocol to ice out MSN users again.

I think these shenanigans also impacted the Trillium Messenger app too, which up until then had been flying under the radar of messenger interoperability.

I might be getting some of these details wrong.

Damn, what a surreal and unpleasant experience this must be. Sorry man. Hope your and your family stay safe and secure.

I can’t imagine what it’s like. You’ve done a great job explaining it. But still, I haven’t walked in your shoes. But I guess it’s all about walking that fine line, right? Doing enough to get your job done for your employer, while also chipping away some time to give back a little to this in need in a fucking crazy, bad situation. Sounds like you’re doing a good job with that balancing act.

Thanks for the charity recommendation. I’ll see what I can do there.

In some ways. Him publicly staying that he was done with the book series would be like ripping off the providential band-aid off.

There would be an initial backlash of upset people, and there would be a lingering nagging about giving the series over to someone else for them to finish writing it, but at least people would stop asking him “when’s the next book coming out?”, and variations on that. And if he said “no I’m not allowing anyone else to finish it!” (as he has hunted at before but then flip-flopped away from) then people would hang moved in. They’ve moved on anyway to some degree. But there’s a lingering resentment that is arguably bigger than that resentment would be with the above mentioned declarations.

But does he need to admit it? Do people deserve to know the truth from him? No. It’s his creation, and his choice. If he doesn’t want to admit it he doesn’t have to.

Oh he already gave up about 12 years ago. He just refuses to admit it.

Burned like that bush Moses saw in the old testament. Although Trump probably thinks that the term ‘burning bush’ would be in reference to an STD he got after sexually assaulting sometime.

Fuck Adobe. They are the epitome of the greedy, toxic software company.

I switched from Photoshop over to Krita last year. I’ve tried Gimp in the past, but just can’t adjust to the UI. Krita is different too, but not to the same degree. I’ve been enjoying it. It’s well-made and very powerful, with very good online support.

I tried Prime for the first time the other day. I think I’d rather drink hurricane flood water.

To expand on what others here have said: no they can’t, and there was a recent article here on Lenny taking about how AI (which I know is different from average bots) has figured out most of the visual captcha types.

I hope so too. Although the IT job market isn’t great right now, so I doubt the departures will reach a critical mass.

Interesting. Teams has been doing this for a few years now, so I assume it’s the same functionality just transferred over to Outlook (which has been going through a massive overhaul recently). For anyone in an MS-based company with Teams being actively used, this is not a new thing.

Yeah, he’s always been an opportunist, but at this point he’s pissing away any positive legacy he had as a firebrand liberal just for a cynical run for office that will inevitably fail.

This would be like Ted Cruz suddenly turning into a moderate liberal to try to ingratiate himself to voters. It won’t work. The electorate’s memory generally sucks, but there’s no way they would forget a political switch this jarring.

Back in the early 2000s, Arsenal and England goalkeeper David Seaman pulled his back by reaching for his TV remote control. He was out for a few weeks as a result.