jeffbr13

I tend to go by Binary Large OBject (BLOB) storage to discern between this kind of object storage and “object” as in OOP. BLOB is also what databases call files stored in columns.

Forgot about that GPU cluster you spun up last month and built up an astronomical AWS bill? Don’t worry, you won’t have to sell a kidney, stay at Amazon Workhouse Services until you've cleared your debt!

I’m not sure I have much sympathy for the problem. Copilot is going to force everyone to move up the abstraction stack.

I absolutely disagree with how Copilot has been trained on the intellectual property of others, and I think Microsoft/GitHub should be taken to court over it (and I say that as an IP cynic, but if you play that game, you should stick by the rules), but this technological cat is out of the bag.

Students (and everyone else) should be thinking much harder about how they test and verify the behaviour of any given piece of code and how they design systems to stick together. This class of technology is going to automate away many of the jobs where you just pump out code. This is fine. It’s no different to someone inventing a burger-flipping machine, and I’m sure many here would agree it’s better if humans didn’t have to flip burgers for a living (modulo solving employment being necessary for a decent/tolerable existence). It may turn out that the next step in software productivity is not a new generation of cool and highly-abstract declarative programming languages (4GL) but simply automating away the drudgery of writing code in the extant kinda advanced languages (3GL) which are ‘good enough’.

Arguably Copilot doesn’t change much about the software development process. You can already get software developed pretty cheap if you farm it out to low-quality contractors or a lot of juniors straight out of school. There’s a whole branch of the industry that will hire anyone straight out of university to manage and front development teams in South Asia. But as we say, quantity has a quality all of its own. And the only way to manage software (not code) quality with this method is to verify and test that the deliverables actually meet your criteria and expectations.

It’s currently a great time to focus on TDD/BDD and code specification because our time spent on the D is about to get a lot shorter. There is still a place for artisanal hand-crafted code. But the mechanical loom has arrived.

I found it helps to set boundaries and in one instance make it clear that I do not appreciate being called out of the blue. I feel almost everyone understands that a texting before a call is polite these days. Clarification was only required once for a colleague who tried dialling me into a meeting I wasn’t party to, just to ask me some questions that could have been an IM. They were actually a little younger, and so I think it was more a case of realising your impact on other people (who may be in or trying to achieve flow) if you interrupt them because it seems urgent to you. Like the article notes, the open plan office engendered interruptions too easily because it was convenient rather than urgent.

As a millennial I suppose I fall in between the two camps. When I was younger, social anxiety about taking up people’s valuable time with my silly questions made a phone call seem like a terrible burden to subject someone to, but with age and (remote work) experience, I’ve realised that conversations are indeed much higher bandwidth and often appreciated more than a letter or thread of back-and-forth clarifications. If I _had_ to stereotype by generation (sorry GP) I could say voice and video seem easier than reading and writing for boomers and Gen-Zs, but even that doesn’t sound right. It’s probably just a communication style thing. There’s a reason many of us struggle to read a book when we can watch some TV instead. As humans we communicate with our voice, face, and body. The main benefit of text is asynchronicity. The challenge is how to thread the needle of asynchronicity in an increasingly post-literate world.

This maybe takes “identifying as an Apple user” a bridge too far!

And really, who’s going to know (how) to do that, especially in an emergency? It also relies on either your phone or watch surviving an accident intact. It’s your life, but it’s just going to frustrate identification attempts when it’s important.

A wallet doesn’t have to be bulky a to hold a couple of cards or a few slips of paper. I have a cardholder which is much more minimal and compact than a standard wallet, and even Apple makes cardholders that attach to the back of MagSafe phones now.

I agree! In a way...

I’ll see a “Hi!“ in a notification or followed by _x is typing_ then safely know that I can start slow context-switching out of whatever mode I’m in, start reviewing that block of work for check-in or noting the key takeaways to come back to, and start pre-loading whatever I was talking about with that person last, without the fear of “here’s a big block of text, please respond to it in kind (all right away)”. And more than that, I can also interrupt any incorrect lines of thought or rambling if it’s more rubber-ducking than a request, or turn it into more of a conversation than a message which can read “please do this” and a reply which says “um... let me get back to you”.

I don’t know about you, but a large technical question or “hey can you... X Y Z” generates much more uncertainty than a chat between colleagues, even if the format is only different. Hell, modes of communication are a thing, we’d be as well use each one for its strengths.