The real sin is combining security updates with feature updates. An argument can be made for enforced security updates(1). There is no good argument for forcing feature updates.
Most security-only updates have a low risk of interfering with with the user or causing instability. Most feature updates have a high risk of doing so.
(1) Although I think there should be some way of disabling even those, even if that way is hard to find and/or cumbersome to keep the regular users away.
Alright, I can buy that. Although from a dev POV I can also appreciate the not-fun of testing a combinatorial explosion of security updates vs features.
Basically, if I trust you (the dev/software maker/whatever) to not change UIs and add in bullshit, I'm okay having auto updates on. Unfortunately can't trust much now
The problem is that there's dozens of security updates every month, so even if you can skip feature updates, you'll have to reboot every Patch Tuesday anyway.
Even the Server Core edition, which has a much smaller "surface area" needs reboots almost every month.
Windows has been going downhill for too long for me to take them at their word. I'll believe it when I see it.
> Windows is as much yours as it is ours.
Microsoft has been inflicting unwanted crap on me for years now, and they keep expanding with more unwanted crap (even to the point of wanting to force people to have Microsoft accounts) as time goes on. Reading this line actually made me laugh out loud. No, Microsoft, you don't believe this even a little.
> There is no learning curve*, that's the nature of AI.
There isn't? Then why is it that whenever devs have tried it and not achieved useful results, they're told that they just haven't learned how to use it right?
You aren't holding it wrong, the truth is AI is a mixed bag, leaning towards a liability.
If people really counted all the time they spend coddling the AI, trying again, then trying again and again and again to get a useful output, then having to clean up that output, they would see that the supposed efficiency gains are near zero if not negative. The only people it really helps are people who were not good at coding to begin with, and they will be the ones producing the absolute worst slop because they don't know the difference between good and bad code. AI is constantly trying to introduce bugs into my codebase, and I see it happening in real-time with AI code completion. So, no you aren't "holding it wrong", the other people are no different than the crypto-bro's who were pushing blockchain into everything and hoping it would stick.
Imagine you are a JS dev and github comes out with a new search feature that's really good. it lets you use natural language to find open source projects really easily. So whenever you have a new project you check to see if something similar exists. And instead of starting from scratch you start from that and tweak it to fit what you want to do.
If you were the type of person who makes tiny toy apps, or you worked on lots of small already been done stuff, you'd love doing this. It would speed you up so much.
But if you worked on a big application with millions of users that had evolved into it's own snowflake through time and use, you'd get very little from it.
I think I probably could benefit from looking at existing open source solutions and modifying them a lot of the time, and I kinda started out doing that at first. But eventually you realize that even though starting with something can save you time, it can also cost you a ton of time so it's frequently a wash or a net negative.
Nothing you described in this comment is only achievable with "AI". I've been able to search for and find open source projects since forever, and fork them and extend them, long before an LLM was a glimmer in Sam Altman's beady eye.
No it’s not at all. AI just makes finding it faster. But that’s my point AI isn’t that different from what you could already do before. Most of us didn’t do things that way before, so maybe programming like that is just a bad idea.
I've started "racing" Claude when I have a somewhat simple task that I think it should be able to handle. I spend a few minutes writing out detailed instructions, which I already knew because I had to do initial discovery around the problem domain to understand what the goal was supposed to be. It took a while to be thorough enough writing it down for Claude, which is time I did not need to spend if I had just started writing the code myself - I'm sure the AI-bro's aren't considering the time it takes just to write down instructions to Claude vs just start coding.
So then Claude starts discecting the instructions. I start writing some code.
After a while Claude is done, and I've written about two or three dozen lines of code. Claude is way off, so I have to think about why and then write more instructions for it to follow. Then I continue coding.
After a while Claude is done, and I've written about three dozen more lines of code. Claude is closer this time, but still not right. Round 3 of thinking about how Claude got it wrong and what to tell it to do now. Then I continue coding.
After a while Claude is done (yet again), and I've written a lot more code and tested it and it's working as needed. The output Claude came up with is just a little bit off, so I have it rework the output a little bit and tell it to run again.
I downloaded the resulting code Claude wrote and compared it to my solution, and I will take my solution every single time. Claude wrote a bloated monstrosity.
This is my experience with "AI", and I'm honestly not loving it.
It does sometimes save me time converting code from one language to another (when it works), or implementing simple things based on existing code (when it works), and a few other tasks (when it works), but overall I end up asking myself over and over "Is this really how developers want the future to be?"
I'm skeptical that these LLM-based coding tools will ever get good enough to not make me feel ill about wasting my time typing instructions to them to produce code that is bloated and mostly not reusable.
Because the AI bros hyping it up are incapable of admitting that the hype is overblown. That would mean they have nothing to sell you, so of course they aren't going to say that.
> For all of you repeating "learn to sharpen" - that's nice, but if you deal with people in the real world, you know that they don't want to be bothered with sharpening their knives. It is better for them to get new knifes, rather than stick with dull knifes.
There's almost certainly a business in your town (regardless of where you live) that will sharpen your knives for you. The one near me charges $1 per knife. Surely that's cheaper than buying a new one, not to mention less wasteful.
I wouldn't be so certain that knife sharpeners are that common. But I also take mine to a sharpener every once in a while, and it's cheap.
For most people it's probably too much of a hassle unless they have expensive knifes. Easy to pick up a new knife when you're at the department store, and keep the old knife for yard stuff.
One more thing for first time knife buyers: If you're going to chop a lot of onions, get a knife with a thin blade. If you're going to cut a lot of stakes, get a thick blade.
I've been doing this for many years, and I don't know why it's not more common. The most common thing I hear when I explain to people, though, is they don't see the point if the VPN isn't shielding your traffic from your home's ISP.
I think that just speaks to people thinking that's the only use case for a VPN, probably because of all the marketing from VPN service providers.
I originally set it up in order to be able to funnel all of my smartphone traffic through my home network so my firewall rules apply to my phone as well. Since then, though, I've discovered numerous other advantages.
Yeah I see that. But for me it’s more about everything just working. What kind of firewall rules do you have? Maybe that's not the best question to ask on the open internet haha.
I'm coming at it from a more basic NPC angle after ChatGPT started blocking VPN IP traffic. So I'd love to hear a more nuanced angle.
The part of my firewall setup I most wanted to extend to my smartphone was my policy of whitelisting outgoing communications. I don't want applications to be able to talk to the outside world without me explicitly allowing it, so I block all outgoing communications by default and whitelist specific things as needed.
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