I remember when Adobe was a cool company that built art tools. Now it seems like the art tools are an afterthought, tacked onto a money-siphoning scheme.

What a coincidence! I’ve been testing something myself! I call it, “Not using Instagram for anything ever in any way whatsoever.”

No it doesn’t. (My PC runs Linux.)

Ethically, if not legally, this is terrible, as are all other steps Microsoft has taken to force ads onto your computer.

Seriously, think about it. You own the hardware, right? And the OS is present to run the hardware, right? To do that, it needs to be able to perform various tasks without your specific approval, and that’s fine, but using your bandwidth to download advertisements in the background, then using your computing cycles to force them in front of your eyes regardless of what you’re using the computer for, is awfully questionable. I would go so far as to say it’s a form of theft.

And no, ads on websites aren’t comparable. You, the user, are actively opting to view a web page that carries ads. You are choosing to grant them access to your eyeballs and the resources used by your browser. But nobody is actively seeking to view ads through their operating systems, and they don’t get anything in return (such as the content you went to that website for).

I’ve never even heard of it. They sure weren’t putting their VPN front and center.

I mean, yeah, a few, but there are plenty with Windows too, and the overwhelming majority of games I’ve tried it with work fine.

Well, of course. I mean it’s not like you paid for a Microsoft Windows license when you bought your computer, so obviously they have to advertise to financially support it. If you’re getting something for free, you’re the product.

…

…

…

Wait, I’m being told that when people buy computers with Windows installed, they are, in fact, paying for a Windows license, too.

So this is actually Microsoft trying to turn products they’ve already sold into continuous revenue streams at the cost of usability and customer happiness.

In other news, apropos of nothing in particular, Steam on Linux is working really well these days, with lots of AAA titles running just fine via Proton. Make of that what you will…

I simply will not buy a washing machine where some of the options for its regular use require an internet connection. I can see adding Bluetooth to it for things like remote control and phone notifications, or even WLAN support for connecting to some kind of smarthome hub that is internet-connected so you can get those notifications remotely. But the idea that smart == device-level internet connection is terrible. Appliances for basic living requirements, like laundry, should not require an internet connection of their own to function.

This particular homeowner is baffled that anyone would buy a washing machine that needs an internet connection. I’m all for smart appliances, but a smart washing machine is a solution in search of a problem.

Even if you want streaming, don’t use the TV’s apps. Use a Chromecast or attach an entertainment PC to it. Chromecasts can be replaced for cheap, PCs can be upgraded. Neither is true of a “smart” TV.

How is it with Windows applications?

My experience was 100% different. I bought a new laptop, plugged in my Linux USB drive, wiped Windows, installed Linux, and did exactly none of the things you went through.

And that’s largely down to two things:

• The fact that I bought a laptop specifically known to have excellent Linux support.
• The fact that I’m a software developer.

So everything I want to do on a computer tends to work better in Linux than in Windows, rather than the other way around. My compile times are faster, my IDEs are more stable, and my OS just… gets out of the way, which is exactly what it should do.

Mind if I ask what programs and services you were trying and failing to run on Linux? You’ve got me curious, because our experiences are so different.

If anything will finally result in the “year of the Linux desktop,” it’s shit like this. No one wants their operating system actively working to make it harder and more annoying to use their choice of applications.

The OS isn’t the reason anyone uses a computer, it’s the applications it can run.

“Him” at the end should be “her.” (“Lui” can mean either.)

Story time:

I’m a software developer for a large, multinational company. Yesterday, I needed to update the Knex migrations for the project I’m assigned to. We needed three new PostgreSQL tables, with several foreign key constraints. I added the migration to our existing migrations in a backend plugin we’re building out.

I use Copilot for developers regularly. It was helpful in this case, generating the table migrations automatically. Of course, it hallucinated a few methods Knex doesn’t have, but I’m used to things like that, and easily corrected them. Once I was done testing, I created a pull request to merge the commit in my working branch with the main branch in git.

Now, look at what I just wrote. If you’re not a developer, you probably have no idea what “Knex” or “PostgreSQL” mean. You probably recognize the words “foreign,” “key,” and “constraints,” but you haven’t got a clue why I’m using them in that order or what I’m referring to. It likely looks like I’m using the word “migrations” completely incorrectly. You don’t know what it means for “Knex” to have “methods.” Words like “git,” “pull request,” and “commit” just read like gibberish to you.

You wouldn’t know how to ask Copilot to do anything. You wouldn’t know where to place any results you manage to get from it. If your boss came to you and said, “here’s this feature requirement, make it happen,” you would fail. You wouldn’t know why, either. Hell, you wouldn’t even know what it is your boss is trying to accomplish. You could spend the next six months trying to figure it all out, and maybe you’d succeed, but probably not. Because you aren’t a developer.

I’m a developer. All of what I wrote above makes perfect sense to me, and it’s one of the simplest tasks I could tackle. Took about fifteen minutes to accomplish, from creating the migration file to getting the PR ready to merge.

I’ve been lambasted for insisting that large language models aren’t going to replace actual professionals because they’re not capable of joined-up thinking, meta-cognition, or creativity. I get told they’ll be able to do all of that any day now, and my boss will be able to fire all of his employees and replace them with an MBA - or worse, do the work himself. Depending on the attitudes of who I’m talking to, this is either a catastrophe or the greatest thing since sliced bread.

It’s neither, because that’s not going to happen. Look at the story above, and tell me you could do the same thing with no training or understanding, because ChatGPT could do it all. You know that’s bullshit. It can’t. LLMs are useful tools for people like me, and that’s it. It’s another tool in the toolbox, like IntelliSense and linters - two more terms you don’t know if you’re not a developer.

The bloom is beginning to come off the rose. Businesses are gradually realizing the pie-in-the-sky promises of LLM boosters are bogus.

The “pitchfork” joke dates back to Fark, my friend.

Damn it, what am I supposed to do with this pitchfork now?

But seriously, shitty misleading headline.

Got myself a fully electric car, and yeah… Never looking back. I keep it charged for maybe five bucks a month most of the time, with the only exceptions being when I’m taking it on a longer trip. It gets 250 miles per charge on average, which is plenty as far as I’m concerned. Charging on the go is more expensive of course, but still a lot cheaper than filling a gas tank.

Try for a second to think beyond what they’re able to do now and think about the future.

I am. In the future, they will need to be able to perform tasks using joined-up thinking, second-order logic, and metacognition if they’re going to replace people like me with AI. And that is a very hard goal to achieve. Maybe not P = NP hard, but by no means trivial.

Also, educate yourself on Autogen and CrewAI, you actually haven’t addressed anything I said because you’re too busy pontificating.

I have. My company looked at Autogen. We concluded it wasn’t worth it. The solution to AI agents not being able to actually understand what they’re doing isn’t to amplify the problem by creating teams of them.

Every few years, something new comes along driven by incredible hype, and people declare programming to be dead. They insist a robot will be able to do my job. I have yet to see a technology that will plausibly do that in ten years, let alone now. And all the hype is built on a foundation of ignorance over how complicated a modern, enterprise-ready application is, and how necessary being able to think about its many moving parts is.

You know who doesn’t suffer from that ignorance? Microsoft, the creators of Autogen. And they’re currently hiring developers, not laying them off and replacing them with Autogen.

I don’t think most people grok just how hard implementing that kind of joined-up thinking and metacognition is.

You’re right, developers aren’t special, except in those ways all humans are, but we’re a very long way indeed from being able to simulate them in AI - especially in large language models. Humans automatically engage in joined-up thinking, second-order logic, and so on, without having to consciously try. Those are all things a large language model literally can’t do.

It doesn’t know anything. It can’t conceptualize a “summary story,” or understand parts that it might get wrong in such a story. It’s glorified autocomplete.

And that can be extraordinarily useful, but only if we’re honest with ourselves about what it is and is not capable of.

Companies that decide to replace their developers with one guy using ChatGPT or Gemini or something will fail, and that’s going to be true for the foreseeable future.