> One unambiguously positive development that's followed is that software professionals are writing specs again.
I feel this in my core. There has been a period of the last 5-6 years where folks have stopped writing specs entirely and it has driven me nuts. Everything is a story or some other abstract requirement. The absence of a specs has made software worse and less predictable in my opinion. All hail the specification!
Huge Claude user here… can someone help me set some realistic expectations if I bought a Mac mini and spun one up? I use Claude primarily for dev work and Home Lab projects. Are the open models good enough to run locally and replace the Claude workload? Or am I better off with my $20/mo Claude subscription?
The AI slop problem is not going away, unfortunately. Its surprising that the social media companies don't see AI slop as an existential threat to their platform? I guess its an indicator of how low we've sunk that 'any' engagement is good engagement.
If it was up to me, I think AI content should be OPT IN. I must choose to view AI content and not be force fed from the conveyor of slop. This is where governments should legislate but we'll never see this happen.
> Regret: Not adopting an identity platform early on. I stuck with Google Workspace at the start...
I've worked with hundreds of customers to integrate IdP's with our application and Google Workspace was by far the worst of the big players (Entra ID, Okta, Ping). Its extremely inflexible for even the most basic SAML configuration. Stay far, far away.
Fascinating tracker. So we started 2025 with nearly every browser under 80% and ending the year with every browser with >98% interop? That's a lot of amazing work done by a lot of teams. Incredible!
The learning is the point. Learning by nature shouldn't be optimized for efficiency. You learn deeply when you have to read sources, draw conclusions, synthesize information, and connect it to your own experiences. I recall writing essays in grade school and what mattered wasn't the end product but the process to arrive at the end product. The hours of research and analysis... figuring out what was true and what was questionable. When you skip steps 1-10 and arrive at the final deliverable a la ChatGPT, you miss the entire point of the assignment. Unfortunately, students are only judged on the final deliverable.
Truly, I think the only way we get back to real learning is through paper and pencil. The problem is that we've optimized our systems for learning efficiency, not learning efficacy.
This week, I posted about a women in engineering conference happening in my hometown and got zero engagement. 1000+ connections on my profile, used hashtags, and tagged the organization and received zero engagement on the post?
I hate to assume the worst but something stinks. When I open my feed, 9 out of 10 posts are from others that I don't follow or have never engaged with. Reading about your experience has confirmed my suspicions that something nefarious is going on under the hood.
I feel this in my core. There has been a period of the last 5-6 years where folks have stopped writing specs entirely and it has driven me nuts. Everything is a story or some other abstract requirement. The absence of a specs has made software worse and less predictable in my opinion. All hail the specification!