mattferderer

I have the same reaction with the "YouTube face" thumbnails.

I debate this in my head way to much & from each & every perspective.

Counter argument - if what you say is true, we will have a lot more custom & personalized software and the tech stacks behind those may be even more complicated than they currently are because we're now wanting to add LLMs that can talk to our APIs. We might also be adding multiple LLMs to our back ends to do things as well. Maybe we're replacing 10 but now someone has to manage that LLM infrastructure as well.

My opinion will change by tomorrow but I could see more people building software that are currently experts in other domains. I can also see software engineers focusing more on keeping the new more complicated architecture being built from falling apart & trying to enforce tech standards. Our roles may become more infra & security. Less features, more stability & security.

Can't speak for this product but disabling a lot of the animations, gradients, shadows & visual effects has made Windows 11 run significantly better on the computers I have it on. They didn't seem to add much value anyways.

I'm a fan of a lot of the user experience improvements being made in Windows over the last decade, such as Terminal, running Linux, Power Toys features, screenshots & recording, Paint finally getting layers, window management & more.

At the same time, I'm still not sure why we needed Windows 11 as the only good updates seem like they could have been done without it. All the visual changes have seemed to cause bugs & performance issues on relatively high powered PCs (64GB+ memory, m2 ssd drives, latest gen mid level GPU & CPU)

It seems the Windows ME, Vista, etc experiment continues to live on.

Google has been getting this push back for the last 15 years. (That makes me feel old to remember it)

Google Knowledge Graph (that sidebar they show) was hated by publishers, especially Wiki for stealing their content.

Google adding direct answers to questions.

Lots of fights over social media & recipe results.

I'm not arguing who is right or wrong,* just saying this has been a thing for a long time.

* Exception most recipe websites & those infinite looping Pinterest blog links. Those websites are all awful & wrong.

I preferred lists as the only usable way to use Twitter, even before the takeover. I like how Bluesky has improved the functionality of your own feeds & being able to share them. If I recall, Elon was promising something similar when he bought Twitter but I don't believe that ever happened.

It will be interesting to see how Bluesky is able to continue operating when it needs to generate a profit though. I'm curious what their plans are. The need for profit on social media platforms often results in loss of quality & user experience.

Thank you for making us all feel very old.

Slight aside on the original post:

* Microsoft did just fight off a huge government battle on Activision. I believe they lost a battle on Teams bundling. Last week the FTC announced they were looking into Azure.

* Apple, their store & mobile browser has been a topic of monopoly discussions for years.

* Amazon wasn't allowed to buy Roomba just this past year. They've had tons of inquires over the past decade.

To be fair they're not a great comparison.

VS Code starts out as a lightweight code editor & via extensions you can turn it into more of an IDE but it'll take a lot of customization & messing around.

Rider is an IDE with all the bells & whistles already included. It also has extensions but they've built it with the most popular things already.

Refactoring, debugging, code navigation, formatting & hinting/suggestions are far superior in Rider. They have a lot more advanced features. Check out some YouTube videos by JetBrains to see examples.

Don't get me wrong - VS Code is still a great tool & I use it daily. I do wish they would have named it something other than "Code" or "Visual Studio Code" but hey, it's Microsoft. They're famous for terrible bad name choices. Maybe they'll make a copilot to fix that.

VS Code is really good at certain things but it struggles on larger projects & doesn't have near the advanced features.

It's a very good choice though for a lot of projects. It's also a great way to try out C#. It has some amazing extensions for certain tasks too.

As a paying subscriber I love this move for the .NET community.

As a .NET dev for many years, I've noticed there have been periods of time where either Visual Studio or Rider was far better than the other. Currently, Rider is much better.

Hopefully this encourages more people to try out C# & F#. Both fantastic languages.

- Edit - Looks like Webstorm (JS/TS editor) is also free now.

Congratulations to Cloudflare! Stepping up as the Newegg of the 2020s! Proud to be a customer.