and yet, the collective industry has still continued to expand for decades because people overwhelmingly cannot consistently do these tasks without their code collapsing on itself.
imagine if people regularly had tires fall off on their way home from the mechanic. or regularly having to get bones rebroken to set them correctly.
I can agree that much of the work is not true "engineering" but most of what I've seen produced over the years is closer to fraud than anything else.
Good engineers would communicate effectively of something is impacting the product. Good product understands how to judge that impact and prioritize it. Frankly, if the engineers are making enough tech debt that they don't want to play in their own sandbox as part of regular practice, maybe they should walk.
I very much miss the ability to never use my phone on a charging cable. Just swap the battery on an external charger and go. 5 seconds to charge to full. It was freeing and simple
as a local LLM novice, do you have any recommended reading to bootstrap me on selecting hardware? It has been quite confusing bring a latecomer to this game. Googling yields me a lot of outdated info.
The real issue is the lack of support. Real users buy those support packages from vendors. They bring their PC in to be fixed at their local shop. They might Google a problem and find a solution occasionally of they are feeling spicy but how often do you get screenshots to get something to work in a Linux GUI? Web browser only laptops are great until your uncle gets a "killer deal" on some random printer on Facebook marketplace and they can't get it to work. Or a webcam. Or a Bluetooth headset. Or a game controller. Scanner. etc etc.
On top of all of this, they will just give up and buy a new machine and return it if that doesn't fix their issue.
Linux provides virtually nothing on any of those fronts unless you get a private level 8 tech support contact provided by your grandson. Who wants to be 24/7 on call for their extended family?
Regarding slow startups, I am not sure this applies to any use cases I can think of where it would not also be a concern in python, etc. JVM startup times have never meaningfully impacted my workflow in the last 15 years.
The why is quite simple, in my opinion. I see java devs reaching for other accepted tools for such things and opening a whole can of worms by introducing a new language that is only "required" by convention. I would love a rich java ecosystem of TUI/CLI libraries to reuse all of my existing business logic and company libraries. The lack of extremely streamlined wrappers is the only barrier. In my work environment, this would be a great addition.
In my experience, this form of expense management is a relatively new development. Not so long ago, I had a company linked corporate card. Credit card transactions are already labeled with the type of purchase. You have to submit a report that corresponds to the actual charged amount. Additionally, they get all the bills with their hotel partner to cross reference the transactions with the credit card and the submitted expense. Flights etc worked the same way. Those are now additionally tracked in the company travel relationship portals which accomplish the block chain without the block chain. None of this requires a global immutable currency ledger or anything like that to accomplish their goal: just get some reasonable transaction validation long enough to process the expense then never look at it past an audit. Later, they also made people eat from the same hotel and negate the issue for meal expenses. It's just not a technology problem. If it were, they would just demand more granularity from the credit card company and the employee and reject things out of policy.
Alternatively, companies will just go back to corporate cards with very strict vendor rules. When vendor rules are not enough, they will go back to extremely tight per diem and simply not care of the expense was strictly real or not. I can't see any advantage to using a whole new currency and exchange that every vendor in the world is now going to have to support for this to be useful vs these simple measures.
I get where you are coming from. However, language like this matters when it comes to legislation. People outside there space will be guided by the sideload language to think it's just "something extra on the side so why should I care?"
I have extreme doubts that there is any meaningful number of windows users holding out on trying macos based on such a thing.
The users are much more simple than this. Most have never even tried Mac. If they want to, they will just buy one the next time they need a computer and accept the new experience as being the new norm.
I got stuck in a fullscreen YouTube video the first time I tried an iPhone. Simplicity is relative. For years, the lack of a back button resulted in this weird behavior of having to learn how each app wants you to navigate it. Even now that everyone has settled into the same list of 5ish methodologies, it can be cumbersome to figure out.
I can see how these things are convenient, if it succeeds. I struggle because my personal workflow is to always keep two copies of a repo up at once. One is deep thought vs drone work. I have always just done these kinds of background tasks whenever I am in meetings, compiling etc. I haver not seen much productivity boost due to this. oddly, you would think being able to further offload during that time would help, but reviewing the agent output ends up being far more costly (and makes the context switch significantly harder, for some reason). It's just not proving to be useful consistently, for me.
I wish I shared this experience. There are virtually no filter features for me to work on. When things feel like filler on my team, it's generally a sign of tech debt and we wouldn't want to have it generate all the code it would take. What are some examples of filler features for you?
On the other hand, it does cost me about 8 hours a week debugging issues created by bad autocompletes from my team. The last 6 months have gotten really bad with that. But that is a different issue.
I am not so sure shopping carts are that great of a counter example. There are plastic ones like target, heavier duty ones, the weird ones at microcenter, lumberyard style, hand baskets, short ones, drag behinds, ones with kids car toys built in, tiny ones for kids to yeah along, ergonomic hand baskets, etc.
Then there are the innovations people had tried over the years like different styles of kid seats, calculators built into the handle, coupon scanners built in, security boots on the wheel, Aldi store coin lock connectors, motorized baskets, Ikea escalator locking wheels.
Thinking further, the designs change across the various countries I have visited over the years.
On top of this, I can visually picture all the different styles the groceries and department stores use near me to "brand" their carts and experience directly(Target's specific branded plastic carts and baskets). The very much see the shopping cart as part of their customer experience and have experimented with different setups. One could argue that the scope of utility for a shipping cart is miniscule compared to many websites. And yet, there is actually a lot of variety.
Given how there are people dedicated to so many seemingly insignificant corporate details(email signatures and other branding activities), it seems custom "website experience rules" would slot right into that line of thinking.
imagine if people regularly had tires fall off on their way home from the mechanic. or regularly having to get bones rebroken to set them correctly.
I can agree that much of the work is not true "engineering" but most of what I've seen produced over the years is closer to fraud than anything else.