Same situation, once I discovered the CLI and got it set up, my happiness went up a lot. It's pretty good, for my purposes at work it's probably as good as Claude Code.
They have copilot-cli, which is something like Claude Code, it's actually pretty effective, at least more effective than Copilot+VSCode.
I think in the end it's branding. They want people to think "Copilot = AI" but the experience is anywhere from fairly effective to absolute trash. And the most visible applications are absolute trash. It really says something when Ethan Mollick is out there demonstrating that OpenAI is more effective at working with Excel than the built in AI.
There was an article posted here yesterday that said "MS has a lot to answer for with Copilot", and that was the point: MS destroyed their AI brand with this strategy.
I saw this about 20 years ago in an exhibition at the Denver Library. I'd wondered how they really knew who the real people behind the characters were, it turns out that Kerouac didn't change any names at first so it's right in the manuscript.
I'd heard about it from a friend in the mid-80s, this friend was an aspiring writer and he mentioned OTR but then was musing about his new word processor typewriter, saying that he felt like the need to physically change pages added breaks to his writing process and he was worried that with the basically infinite page on the word processor it would be too easy to write crap. I wish I had a way to look this guy up and get his take on writing today.
This reminds me of the line from "Jackie Brown": "You can't trust Melanie. But you can trust Melanie to be Melanie".
I owned an early Roomba an it would just bump into things and "bounce" off. There was some sort of rudimentary fencing devices you could use to keep it in an area. I guess they decided cameras and things work better but I feel like the original worked well enough. You still had to vacuum but especially with pets it kept the disorder under control.
I think that the most effective way to get change would be if the economy tanked, that's the one thing the electorate seems to be motivated by. A general strike would be one way to do that, but I doubt that one could be organized on any meaningful scale. I'd love to be wrong about that.
I'm trying to restrict my spending as much as possible. No new car, no vacation (or at least nothing big), limiting eating out, etc. I'm cutting back on as many unnecessary expenses as I can, and being mindful of what businesses I do spend my money on.
They're not fully exempted, the order does apply to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in connection with its conduct and authorities directly related to its supervision and regulation of financial institutions.
In other words, when it comes to banking regulation, the President has the final say.
Not only did they put out a playbook, they actively recruited and screened people to take government positions. I read a post on Reddit from someone who went through the training. The whole idea was to find ideological supporters. Trump's problem in 2016 was that he wasn't prepared and relied a lot on existing government supporters and established GOP figures, who weren't completely loyal. This time, they were prepared. That's the reason why he's been able to move so quickly in the first month.
About 20 years ago, I used to do interviews that were "write a program to add two numbers together" (I think specifically I asked for a web application). It's trivial, right? There's actually a lot going on. They have to parse input, and sometimes you get strange things like "well if I make it use doubles then I'll cover all scenarios". You have opportunities to talk about error handling (bad characters in the input, int overflow, etc). You can talk about refactoring (now make it handle -,* & /). You can ask them about writing tests. Ask about how they'd handle arbitrarily large numbers. There's a bunch of ways you could take the conversation and really just talk about average developer activites.
What I liked about that process is that it relied less on their ability to suss out a solution to some problem they'll never have to solve on the job and focused more on average activities. Sometimes I'd get a candidate who would go "wait, is this a trap?" and start asking a lot of questions - good! Now I got to see them refine requirements.
Having them review a PR is a good exercise too, you can see how they are at feedback.
I loved mine until the transmission blew out at 96,000 miles. Could be a one-off, but then a friend bought a used one with 108,000 miles, and the dealer proudly noted that it had a new transmission just installed. I think that vaunted reliability is gone.
That aside, the one thing I haven't liked is the electronics. Many times it gets out of sync with the phone and simply can't connect, the only fix is to shut the car off, open the door so the stereo shuts off, then restart the car. The FM radio also quit working at one point, which I didn't really care about, but the dealer applied a software update and it started working again. That's just the visible stuff though, so much of the car is software controlled now, I think you have to start taking any software issues as a warning about the overall car.
These are two wildly different companies. AMZN still has some upside and pays a lot in equity. The only reason to own T is for the dividend while your capital sublimates.
That said AMZN is a lot more like the old model, they never really subscribed to the Microsoft & Silicon Valley ways of doing things.
Yet the author wrote tools to do that. Part of what I thought from looking at these dashboards is that the author by their own admission[1] arbitrarily doubly prioritized customer communications over internal discussion and gave credit for doing things in the ticketing system when presumably none of the actual work takes place in the ticketing system.
I know those events were over a decade ago and I appreciate the author's willingness to reexamine their beliefs, but that's what's meant by second-order thinking. What I got from reading a few of their writings is that this is a person I probably would avoid interacting with.
I'm sure there are thousands of resumes out there with a Medium blog URL on them, which probably impresses HR but not so much if you actually read them. It's all just another way to "build your personal brand".
Medium was flooded with human-created slop before OpenAI got big. I work in Spark a lot, and basically every question I put into Google has a few lame Medium articles that basically recap the docs or have some trivial example code. Ironically, I turn to Claude now as my primary source. It's very good at Spark.
I just skimmed the article but the author had a statement about JS being "working class" in that it didn't enforce types and that he dislikes TS for that reason. Rust is completely anathema to that attitude, you have to make a LOT of decisions up front. People who don't see the value in a compiler are never going to like working in Rust. The author is completely satisfied with optimizing hacks in the toolchain.
If Google is falling behind, it's because they are not and never were a product company, and that's a direct result of Schmidt's leadership. His CEO experience was at Novell, which also had lousy product focus and lost to Microsoft, which say what you will, is pretty good at product. He led Google and damn near 20 years ago Steve Yegge famously called out Google for being terrible at product, and nothing has fundamentally changed since.
Let's face it, at this point creating an LLM is not that difficult, relatively speaking. I can download dozens with Ollama, and many of them are brilliant. But look at ChatGPT or Claude and then look at Google - which is the better product?
I have very few SO contributions so I don't have much at stake personally, but I have observed that there was a trend of people using their SO profiles for career advancement. I'd see people reference their SO activity on resumes and I had job applications ask for my SO profile if I had one, and I've seen advice that a good SO profile was valuable the way a good Github profile is. Is that something people factor in to their decision to delete? And isn't that social capital a kind of compensation for their contributions?
Not so much anymore though. I've seen over the last year that SO ranks lower and content farms like geeks4geeks, Programiz, etc. are getting much higher in results.