mattferderer

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.

If memory serves me right, the 2024 Energy Geek Out episode touched on this topic. https://www.dotnetrocks.com/details/1931

If I recall they touched on how US oil drilling companies with lots of experience in horizontal drilling were being used by these companies & the financing that goes into them.

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.

Cloudflare has been talking about this for a while albeit slightly different than your take - https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/

Risks, risks & risks.. That's my #1 priority on communicating estimates.

Overall this is a nice short summary on the topic. The one thing I would add that I found very helpful on larger projects is communicating the risks & unknowns. I suggest listing them out at the start of the project & update their status as you work on it.

I've worked on teams where it's done with a simple color (red, yellow or green) on how confident we are on the task estimate based on risks/unknowns. This is the simplest way in my opinion.

I also like Basecamp's Hill Charts - https://3.basecamp-help.com/article/412-hill-charts

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.

Made me think of this old joke that's been on HackerNews, Reddit, etc for years:

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

---

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/leq19j/english_to_be...

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

but Nvidia themselves are trying to spin up their own cloud provider offering, and unsurprisingly don't want to help a competitor

I thought Jensen recently said he does not want to offer their own cloud offering. He instead wants to focus on creating ready made solutions for cloud vendors to purchase & re-sell services with.

Underrated comment & stated beautifully.

If you want a "diverse" team, having both kinds of above stated people on the team is crucial. The above mentioned A players can't do the steady boring work the so called C players can do & likewise that the C players can't do what the A players can. Also C players can be great at questioning all the bleeding edge new tech A players want to implement. For reasons like this, I think it's important that more senior positions are made up of both kinds of people.

Good managers will help everyone identify which kind of person they are & help them have work that fits them best. They'll keep the C players motivated & the A players feeling challenged.

A very common modern setup is PostgreSQL, C#/.NET, Linux & using JetBrains Rider for the IDE. You don't have to go all in Microsoft to use C#, F# or .NET.

Also .NET has been about "run everywhere on any platform" as their tagline for quite a few years now.

They have had plenty of community fumbles without question. I can't speak to those though. I've seen lots of vocal high up Microsoft employees try to win those fights on the side of the community but no idea what happens internally.

I love how much better listening to books with AI has become.

Have you done any attempts at multiple narrators telling a story?

Microsoft's Azure has a great tool for doing this but it's time consuming as you have to take all the text & match it to the narrator by hand. Open AI's last big demo kind of showed using voice chat to change narrator voices on the fly.

I think it would be awesome if you could submit a book, have a simple tool parse through & find all the speakers. Then let you sample how each one sounds with a brief description of what the person is like. Basically you get to have each voice do an audition & you pick your favorites. Then it goes through page by page generating audio based on the voices selected.

I'm not suggesting this feature for the app. I'm just throwing out this idea as one I've been thinking about. There have been a lot of books I've wanted to listen to but don't have time to sit down & read.

You are an expert Tailwind CSS developer that I will ask for help.

Is that part of the prompt necessary anymore? I feel that was a version 3 thing.

My prompts have been getting less verbose & I've been finding little value in introductory phrases, correct grammar or spelling.

You might be interested in this cool app that Microsoft made that I don't think I've seen anyone talk about anywhere called Speech Studio. https://speech.microsoft.com/

I don't recall their voices being the most descriptive but they had a lot. They also let layout a bunch of text & have different voices speak each line just like a movie script.

It's a race & unlike other bubble tech this one has proven itself to even the most conservative of people.

Yes there will be tons of terrible use cases & companies built on bad AI ideas. Those will crash like many .com companies did & most blockchain startups.

But a lot of people use it daily & continue to push it.

So your suggestion is to issue a chargeback.. to get money back that should under the terms of whatever service you signed up for be owed?.

Funny story... One of the big cloud providers actually has you do that on purpose as a remedy for an account you've lost access to.

This reminds me of a recent talk by Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang. He discusses video compression history a bit. He proposes in the future one would just send a very small amount of data & then the computer displaying the video would recreate everything based on prior knowledge of the person talking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytZcvwZxkrg

Aside from personal use, it's well known that the amount of data being created every day is growing exponentially. Based on the article these discs are not meant for personal use but for data centers.

Sendgrid was my go to email provider for clients pre-acquisition.

Once they got bought out & forced their poorly implemented 2fa with mobile phone requirements, I had no choice but to find different providers.

Curious to hear your opinion on ODATA after using it on your projects. Pros, cons, anything.

I wonder if torrent sites are a better 1 stop shop place where you can find everything?

I also personally believe as tech makes it easier for indy type groups & average individuals to make longer form content, Netflix may just become irrelevant to companies like YouTube who have better distribution channels.

Underrated new book not mentioned here - Think Like a CTO by Alan Williamson

The link to the Basecamp article from several years ago should not be overlooked - https://basecamp.com/hill-charts

Hill charts are a great way to keep people informed about a project status. I think they make much more sense than estimates.

I believe if you build with SIP (structured insulated panels) you get these built in often - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfvjvDlVzLs

Saw an ICF house a decade ago where they did some thin channel mounted on the wall & they ran everything through there instead of cutting into the ICF. Can't remember how it worked with the dry wall.

Would be nice to see interior walls built with such a thing.

South Dakota, USA has entered the chat.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-amer...

A South Dakotan trust changes all that: it protects assets from claims from ex-spouses, disgruntled business partners, creditors, litigious clients and pretty much anyone else. It won’t protect you from criminal prosecution, but it does prevent information on your assets from leaking out in a way that might spark interest from the police. And it shields your wealth from the government, since South Dakota has no income tax, no inheritance tax and no capital gains tax.

No one has been stung by a bee due to clover in our yard & shoes are rarely worn which I why I mentioned how it's often nicer to walk on than grass.

Couple important notes from our yard. * Our yard is mowed fairly frequently so when there are no flowers there are no bees. * The bees are only active during parts of the day. Evenings they're usually not out. * In our yard bees are very visible if you just look down. They're mesmerizing to watch. * The clover doesn't cover our entire yard. * We have stepped on wasps but that was unrelated to clover