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 very much enjoyed the [Vortex Race 3] which is 75% with all the F-keys and the home/delete/pg key cluster in a line down the right. It works really well and lets you switch between Mac/Windows button order for the CMD/Windows/ctrl buttons in the bottom left through a keyboard shortcut if I remember correctly. It comes with both colourful _and_ grey keys for the clusters! A really handsome and well thought-out keyboard if you want something nice without getting sucked into the keyboard modding rabbit-hole.
Unfortunately a friend spilled coffee on mine, and it's hard to justify buying another one at >£100. And it's often out of stock whenever I do manage to justify it to myself!
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.
I tracked down a good condition 2009-2010 vintage A1242 aluminium ten-keyless Apple Keyboard[1] on ebay for £54 last year for exactly that feeling. Supposedly they came with iMacs for just a year or so before they were discontinued. My first-gen Magic Trackpad fits perfectly where the numpad would be. My only complaint is I can't position the trackpad below the spacebar like on a MacBook so have to move my hands from the home row, but that's because the keyboard and trackpad both have a slant to them.
The lede is buried in section "5. Reader Memberships with a 50% Author Revenue Share":
> A Leanpub Reader membership ($19/year) or a monthly Standard or Pro plan is now required for (almost) all free purchases of books, bundles, courses and tracks.
> 50% of the revenue from every Leanpub Reader membership goes to authors of the books, bundles, courses and tracks which were purchased for free using the Reader membership. This way, authors can earn money from free purchases.
> Paid purchases of books, bundles, courses and tracks do not require a Leanpub Reader membership and still pay 80% royalties.
Leanpub has essentially added a paywall for works that were previously free to download, and will split reader membership revenues with the authors. While this seems equitable, it's also a big change in the product direction.
I'd be interested to hear from authors who have self-published using Leanpub intending to maximise readership rather than revenue, and what this might mean for them.
e.g. Try adding a free ebook to your cart, for example this one[1] (no relation, just the one I tried to download). Your cart will now contain 2 items: the ebook and a "One Year Reader Membership - $19.00" with no way to remove it.