Wrench

@Wrench@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LG and Samsung are adding Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant to their TVs⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Former smart TV app developer. I’m going to drive my old dumb lcd TV into the ground before I’m forced to use a “smart” TV.

  I prefer casting, but for convenience for my wife, we have a fire tv stick.

  I want my panels rendering, not thinking / reporting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uber Eats undercover: Delivering your food for $1.74 an hour⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Best to just call it in. Even for pick up, all these online providers take a huge cut, eating the profit margin from the people actually making the food you like.

  I try to only use online orders for restaurants that have their own website cart. I do sometimes resort to the big ones when I’m busy / lazy, but I make a point to try to make sure the actual restaurant gets my money, because I want them to survive and keep making me tasty food.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Rofl. As a developer of nearly 20 years, lol.

  I used copilot until finally getting fed up last week and turning it off. It was a net negative to my productivity.

  Sure, when you’re doing repetitive operations that are mostly copy paste and changing names, it’s pretty decent. It can save dozens of seconds, maybe even a minute or two. That’s great and a welcome assist, even if I have to correct minor things around 50% of the time.

  But when an error slips through and I end up spending 20 minutes tracking down the problem later, all that saved time vanishes.

  And then the other times where my IDE is frozen because the plugin is stuck in some loop and eating every last resource and I spend the next 20 minutes cursing and killing processes, manually looking for recent updates that hadn’t yet triggered update notifications, etc… well, now we’re in the red, AND I’m pissed off.

  So no, AI is not some huge boon to developer productivity. Maybe it’s more useful to junior developers in the short term, but I have definitely dealt with more than a few problems that seem to derive from juniors taking AI answers and not understanding the details enough to catch the problems it introduced. And if juniors frequently rely on AI without gaining deep understanding, we’re going to have worse and worse engineers as a result.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intuit possibly succumbs to the Streisand effect⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh. Honestly, the line of “questions” was rather stupid.

  “Why aren’t you lobbying to make your business irrelevant” is essentially what the interviewer pushed aggressively.

  Sure, I get calling out a CEO for deflecting tough questions with corporate BS. But it was a pretty dumb line of questioning in the first place.

  Why isn’t Google lobbying for privacy protections?

  Why isn’t Comcast lobbying for net neutrality?

  Just make your statement and ask for comment. “Our listeners consider Intuits lobbying against tax reform that would benefit tax payers to be adversarial to their customers. What would you say to them?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Edge gets "unfair advantage", browser makers claim⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because we should wipe away 2 decades of history and pretend the next thing is flawless on release?

  Edge came in with a freight train of baggage, and didn’t make it. It’s absurd to frame this otherwise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Edge gets "unfair advantage", browser makers claim⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And Google established a lot of the standards that were both open and long living.

  Yeah, Google has strayed far from the “Do no evil” philosophy in the last decade. But this rewriting of history to praise IE and demonfy Chrome from that era is ridiculous.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Edge gets "unfair advantage", browser makers claim⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Rofl. So let’s white wash the browser history before chrome, then. Back when IE reigned supreme. You must either be too young or not in the industry to champion that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Edge gets "unfair advantage", browser makers claim⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So Google establishing a now industry standard of evergreen versioning so that they could iterate relatively quickly on features, rather than have to maintain compatibility with years old versions, and iterating quickly on their own major websites - is a bad thing?

  Right.

  Yeah, let’s go back to having to maintain terrible legacy browsers that behaved completely differently for the rest of time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Covid turned out to be a giant goldmine for Corporate America⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And why we need to prevent “mergers” to force companies to continue to compete before they reach mega Corp size and power