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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 13th, 2024

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  • hperrin@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlWell, that's offending
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    7 days ago

    I run an email service called Port87. I was reading some copy to a friend who resells MS Exchange services and I said “legacy email services, such as Microsoft Exchange”, and he got a bit offended. That was much more accurate than this, and he still felt offended.







  • There are two types of color E-ink displays:

    One that uses a color filter on top of a regular black and white particle display, like in their Kaleido screens. This has a faster refresh rate like black and white displays, but the colors are muted and the screen’s “pure white” is much more gray than other displays.

    One that uses four colored particles, cyan, magenta, yellow, and reflective white, like in their Gallery screens. This has a much slower refresh rate, but the colors are vivid and the screen’s “pure white” is just as good as a non-color screen.

    There are also color transflective LCD screens from other companies that are sometimes marketed as “e-paper” or “paper like” that are fairly uninteresting.

    And there are just straight up backlit LCD screens marketed as “e-paper” or “paper like” that are just not. XPPen just made one. I personally think this should be considered false advertising.


  • Any place that is replacing junior devs with AI is probably going to really regret it when they have no senior devs in a few years. Being a junior dev in a team is kind of like an apprenticeship. You learn the trade, but you also learn the shop. Then when the senior dev moves on, you have all that knowledge and can step into the role of senior dev. If a team decides to not have junior devs anymore, then they’ll have no one to take over when a senior dev leaves.

    So the answer is yes, it is already replacing junior devs, but that’s only because management hasn’t learned how bad of an idea that is yet. Ultimately, it will cost them more through losing foundational team knowledge.

    You also have to hold an AI’s hand the entire way through coding something, whereas you can kind of just let a junior dev go do their own thing, and eventually they’ll probably get it right. An AI “agent” tries to hold its own hand, but that doesn’t seem to work out usually when I’ve tried it. It starts making changes that are really bad, then just seems to always double down and eventually make a huge mess.


  • Yeah, that’s probably true. Remember how all the execs decided to replace cashiers with robots, then the stores started losing money because a. it made stealing a lot easier and b. people would avoid stores that only had self-checkout robots and never had anyone to help you because a robot doesn’t know where the flour is. Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers. It turns out cashiers do more than just scan barcodes. But, upper management didn’t get to where they are by being smart.


  • I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.

    My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.

    When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.

    Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.









  • Yes, the freedom to murder people would not be good for most people, but you are taking away others’ freedoms when you do that. But, this thread is about private property, speech, starting a family, and thought. Maybe I should have been more specific in my original comment. A better world wouldn’t require sacrificing these freedoms. It would require giving up the freedom to take others’ freedoms away.

    Any freedom that means you have control over your own body and thoughts, I would consider an “essential” freedom, and those are the ones that I mean when I say a better world wouldn’t require giving up those freedoms. If you’re giving up your right to control your own body, you’re inviting a worse world.