I recently tried to replace Dropbox with Filen. Filen supports full encryption, so like you say better on privacy.

Then I mounted it as a drive on my MacBook, and moved some backup files there. The move took a while, and after it, no backups on my MacBook, and no backups on Filen. Just nothing, no log of it, nothing.

Going to stay with Dropbox.

So in this case, Europe definitely does not do it better.

Edit: I also tried to replace Sendgrid. All European alternatives are crazy expensive, so not going to replace that either.

Instead of focussing on old tech, and keep running behind US and China, maybe we should jump on the next boat.

I switched as a heavy Linux user to a MacBook because of this reason.

1. Battery is better than any other laptop out there

2. Touchpad is better than any other laptop out there. I don't even use a mouse anymore

3. Sound is better than any other laptop out there.

There is no other laptop that comes even close to this hardware.

I get what you are saying, but as someone who was coding mobile apps in 2003 (iPhone was released in 2007), I have to give a few details.

By the time iPhone was released, it was already too late for small companies. When you developed apps and games for MS PocketPC and Blackberry, you charged $20 per app, and any average quality product would make money.

In 2007, there were only 2 kinds of success stories:

1. Companies that were able to throw a lot of money around (Your example of Candy Crush).

2. Some rare flukes of someone getting rich with some app.

So what I was trying to say: The golden days were really before the release of the iPhone.

My ideal curriculum would be to go through the entire evolution of computing, and at the final years you end up in modern computing. In the end we kind of went over all those topics, but it would have been a very straight forward curriculum. You start at basic electricity and the Turing machine, in the middle somewhere you learn about neural networks (I learned that around 2000, and it was old technology then).

When you graduate, you have a full understanding from bottom to top.

That's how I would have loved it, but maybe for others that would have been too boring, so they mixed it up.

In the end I got great value from my master in CS. All the practical things you learn at the job anyway, and I definitely learned a lot those first few years. But my education allows me at certain occasions to go further when other developers reach their limit.

Yea I think a general history of computing that teaches from first principles would be great. Could help students realize neural networks and transformers aren’t really new concepts just needed the data and hardware to catch up. Can dispell a lot of myths and magical thinking about AI.

I do agree with you, but don't underestimate the projects where you can actually apply this 10x. For example, I wanted to get some analytics out of my database. What would have been a full weekend project was now done in an hour. So for such things there is a huge speed boost.

But once software becomes bigger and more complex, the LLM starts messing up, and the expert has to come in. That basicaly means your months project cannot be done in a week.

My personal prediction: plugins and systems that support plugins will become important. Because a plugin can be written at 10x speed. The system itself, not so much.

I think there will also be a lot of work in how to modularize month long projects into plugin sized pieces.

Yes, definitely. I also don't think every project is able to create a plugin platform. Sometimes you just have a lot of interconnected components, where they kind of influence each other.

What I was trying to say is that in future developments, as a developer, one of the extra questions on your mind should be: can we turn this into a platform with separate plugins? Because you know those plugins can be written fast, cheap, and don't require top notch engineering work.

But I think I get what you are saying: what you gain in plugin simplicity, you pay in effort to design the platform to support them.

I guess it will depend from project to project, and so the typical "it depends" applies :).

People have been thinking about that a long time though. For that objective, LLMs don't seem to open up any new capabilities. If that problem could be solved, with really clean abstractions that dramatically reduce context needed to understand one "module" at a time, sure LLMs will then be able to take that an run. But it's a fundamentally hard problem.

Exactly my experience to, and I'm doing hiring at the moment. We used to filter out the worst with a hacker rank test, but now the idiots cheat with AI, and then we have to waste our time in an interview. It's difficult at the moment.

I don't see the value of a junior instructing an AI, because I as a senior can also instruct an AI.

I perceive the AI itself as a very fast junior that I pair program with. So you basically need the seniority to be able to work with a "junior ai".

The bar for human juniors is now way higher than it used to be.

>The bar for human juniors is now way higher than it used to be.

What do you think that is now? How does someone signal being 'past the bar'? If I hand wrote a toy gaussian splat renderer is that better than someone who used AI to implement a well optimized one with lots of features in vulkan?

'past the bar' means you have to be smarter than AI, simple as that. You need to be able to tell when it delivers good work, and when not. If you are not smarter than AI, you will not be able to tell the difference. And then what is your added value?

Perhaps in a year or so the AI will tell the human juniors what to do

> When fixing bugs, yes.

One thing I want to mention here is that you should try to write a test that not only prevents this bug, but also similar bugs.

In our own codebase we saw that regression on fixed bugs is very low. So writing a specific test for it, isn't the best way to spend your resources. Writing a broad test when possible, does.

Not sure how LLM's handle that case to come up with a proper test.

Here's a tip from an old timer: read the official docs.

I work a lot with juniors, and they all seem to prefer watching video's. But videos in my opinion are a slow way to gain superficial knowledge.

Do it the hard way and read the official docs, it will be your superpower. Go fast over the easy parts, go slow over the hard parts, it's that simple.

And in other news, the Trump appointed ambassador in Belgium, Bill White, is fine with adult men sucking the blood from a baby penis.

And if you think I'm kidding, no I'm not.

Some of those boys end up with herpes, but it's all fine in MAGA land.

Source, straight from the horses mouth: https://youtu.be/KolvU5m0CZI?si=KMnq_y8KfGuhXkDY&t=410

Didn't a bunch of kids in NYC get STIs cuz of this like a decade or two ago? A bunch of rabbis were biting baby dicks, oh sorry I mean performing a religious ceremony, and giving kids STIs.

That is likely indeed, because in the interview, she explicitly mentions that New York is also questioning that practice.