"Software-related CO2 emissions account for 4-5% of global emissions. This is equivalent to the emissions of all aviation, shipping, and rail combined."
My company is asking all the software developers to use AI assistants for our coding. So I decided to give CatGPT a try. My keystroke count has gone through the roof!
There's so much emphasis on people learning to program/code as a path to supposed riches (hey, we're not all in Silicon Valley), but very little talk about being able to use that craft to solve small, personal, local problems. I recently wrote a custom program to solve a thorny planning problem for my fianceé, and small bits of code help around the edges with my streaming and other tasks. Bespoke is beautiful, and underrated!
Tomorrow, Apple will shut down My Photo Stream, after 12 years of service.
I wrote the code that ran the service on iOS devices back in 2010, and it has been faithfully syncing hundreds of millions of photos between iPhones and iPads and their respective macOS Photo libraries for more than a decade. It survived the introduction to iCloud’s Shared Photo Streams (I also wrote its client software), the shutdown of Aperture, and the introduction of iCloud Photo Library. And today, we finally bid it goodbye.
It’s been a good 12 years. 1000 photos, hosted for 30 days, for free, so you can save them on your Mac—those were the days, eh?
First of all, let me assure you that I truly appreciate your work. Releasing software under a free license is a gift to us all. It shows that you care about the widespread adoption of your project, and that's quite commendable. However, I have a humble request – please, pretty please, don't release it with the statement, "compiling it is so complex and full of dependencies that the way to use my program is 'docker compose up'."
By doing this, you're limiting access to your software for those who can't use Docker or those who can't/won't use Linux. It's almost like telling someone to click on 'Install.exe.' Surely, you can do better than that.
I trust you'll consider my request. Thanks again for your hard work!
AI has already been used to run scams, rip off artists, destroy search engines, and drown publishers under an avalanche of shit.
Now AI boosters found a new thing to enshittify: #UserResearch .
"AI research is better than nothing" is the latest in a long series of "bad research is better than nothing" arguments that miss the point of research in the first place.
I would implore you all to use ISO 8601 for dates (year-month-day, biggest to smallest)! I sent a message out to my team at my job about this before discovered that XKCD actually made a comic regarding this haha. My favorite feature is that it allows for “natural” (lexicographical) sorting so that you can just sort your files on your computer by name! It also plays nicely with file paths on operating systems since it does not use / to delineate year-month-day.
The ambiguity between month/day in many date systems really hurts my brain. I admit that I sometimes use the US-standard of month/day/year for those individuals whose brains are likely not ISO 8601 compliant.
My lab (http://devsuccesslab.com/ ) has a new pilot survey open about developers' work experiences & how they see AI tooling in dev work.
This is a different kind of dev survey. We're not interested in tallying who's using what brands for some trends report. We're interested in how developers are DOING. This is also a pilot test of new measures, so the more folks take it, the more we learn how to design deep research on this! Please share widely. #softwaredevelopment
About a month ago, I entered into a small "language contest" that was set to prove that no "newschool" language (Rust, Zig, Nim, etc) is ready to replace C in the embedded field.
The deadline was about 10 days ago, and according to the original technical evaluation criteria, my Free Pascal solution won, but got disqualified, because "we already know, Pascal could not replace C".
Programming languages rise and fall, human stupidity remains. I rest my case.
Turns out #Gitea was turned into a for-profit company two years ago. The software remains MIT-licensed, but it's now centered around enterprise solutions
However Gitea's community was not happy about this and created a soft fork that remains fully-compatible, community-driven. It's called #Forgejo and #Codeberg switched to using it in favor of Gitea.
So, I have a few days this and next week to spend on helping you! Can I help you? Perhaps you're stuck somewhere? Need some advice on architecture, or how to contribute to open source with your company? Help me help you, and I'll make a special price, just for you!
Contact me here on Mastodon, or shoot me an email: stefan@ingewikkeld.net
Slide deck for my #monkigras talk 💬 "I Didn't Grow Up Speaking Code": GitHub Copilot as a Programming as a Second Language Tool 💬 is now live and accessible via my website!