edgyswingset

Microsoft bashing? Where did I do that?

I run a few things on .NET Core today and it’s great. I’ll probably runs some things in Azure soon enough. I just think UWP has no future because its primary device type (Windows phone) is dead, and it hasn’t seen any uptake in the enterprise to replace Winforms and WPF. F# seems just fine to me, and it’s supported for my app type. Perhaps you need to rethink your choices in development technologies.

My F# code runs on Linux. My client code is migrating to the web and mobile, as is just about every enterprise in the US. Why would I watch Windows developer day?

> there is no sign of UWP going away anytime soon

Except for Windows Phone getting killed, which was the _main_ device type for UWP. The Windows app store is the same graveyard that it was in late 2015 when the announcements around new Windows Phones piqued my curiosity. It looks like that's simply not a thing anymore. I'm betting my money on Xamarin and the browser for a client application, not UWP. There's just no point to it.

As a sometimes-user of F#, I’m quite happy not caring about a dead-end technology like UWP and .NET Native, thank you very much. I’m glad everyone else seems to agree about that, too.

Not that I'm inclined to believe stuff either way, but this is an op-ed and not really financial stuff being reported on.

> No offense (and sorry for being off-topic) but I never get how people obsess over the under 1 or 2% cost savings while completely ignoring the overvalued principal.

Here's my counterpoints:

1. ~5k is enough to pay for two amazing vacations for me and my fiancee. I'd be enthralled to save that amount of money.

2. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're making the implication that people should instead be searching for cheaper housing. Easier said than done.

Somewhat related, but there was a very good talk at MLConf 2017 about using sound to catch illegal logging in the Amazon. Similar premise: collect the sound, analyze the patterns, and classify.

In consumer products, perhaps not. Business systems? Oh, you betcha.

Note: I'm interpreting AI as "also the very useful subset of AI called Machine Learning" here. ML is already in so many things, but I think it truly has yet to take off. But I very much believe that it will be ubiquitous. It's probably worth it for programmers to learn some of the basic algorithms, general approaches, and what they're good for.

The answer is simple. Actually work on it. Not an easy answer, as this is surely incredibly difficult work.

The article says:

> Imagine if every bus, boat, and train in London was kitted out with sensors and counters, with the data made available to third-party service providers — this could help cities manage transport infrastructure far more effectively.

And my reaction is, "Imagine if we had more buses and investment in public infrastructure to begin with."

In fairness, public infrastructure is already miles better in London than most U.S. cities. So the idea of tricked out buses with good smartphone integration seems a lot more realistic to me than if this were done in the U.S.

Probably easier from a technological standpoint, but I can imagine an autonomous freight network being just as challenging as an autonomous tax service if you account for all sorts of things: sales, mountains of other regulations, compliance, etc. I can hardly imagine it's as simple as, "let's just put some sensors on trucks and the problems will solve themselves!"

> This bill is going to end up killing people

I'm pessimistic that this will ever be known by those in swing states, let alone cared about. I've traveled to those places and met people there. They have normalized death due to medical complications and drug addiction. Why should more people dying make a difference there?