Hah. When I worked for a very big Just Print Money bank circa 2008, they gave me, a SDE with the Lenovo ThinkPads running Windows with 4GB of RAM and a bonus of Lotus Notes for email. This thing was slower than molasses. Not to mention because we had an offshore team in India. every morning every engineer would begin the day with syncing the Subversion repo. My team was in central US but we had to connect to a proxy in NYC for network traffic inspection. This makes the sync over 45 minutes long. Repeat the same for every SDE, from both sides of the world, and you can guess the amount of time wasted.

I don’t think I would want to work in that environment anymore.

Similar story, I had a customer who wanted me to change the entire UI of a legacy application, because some information would not fit on the ancient 1024*786 15" desktop monitor of one employee, meaning he would have to use horizontal scroll constantly.

I recommended them giving this employee a larger monitor, not only would that be much cheaper than having me rebuild the entire UI, it would also boost this employee's productivity. Not to mention that swapping a monitor takes 10 minutes, changing a UI probably weeks.

Customer insisted to change the UI, because "if we give him a new monitor, everyone in the office will want one". I nearly got fired for responding with "Great! Then everyone can benefit from more productivity!".

In the end we did change the UI, I believe the total cost was something like 30k. The customer had maybe 15 employees, so new monitors would still have been much cheaper.

A few months later their offices were remodelled with expensive designer furniture, wooden floors and custom artwork on the walls. Must have cost a fortune. In the end, the employees still worked on ancient computers with 15" monitors, because new computers didn't fit the budget.

What stops the senior from using AI to review the AI generated code the junior published?

That’s something that the junior can do. What companies want to do is put responsibility on someone who has more knowledge and skin in the game

You also sound like me I have NielMed. I’m wondering if you used that before and how Navage compares to it? Appreciate the recommendation.

I developed sever allergies to something later on in life (still trying to pinpoint exactly what, all I know is I get random flare ups), and NasalFreshMD is the one you want for serious sinus issues. It's bigger than either of those other devices though. The Navage has this proprietary pod thing going on so either you but their pods or you get a defeat device but the NasalFreshMD just has an open port for you to dump whatever brand of salt (including NielMed refills if you like their formulation) and however much water you want into so is much easier to use. It has three speeds to the Navage's one. (Not sponsored, just a happy user.)

You sound like me! I have had sinus issues all my life before 17. I even had a surgery at 16 but I honestly don’t think it helped. Now I have the sinus problem a bit under control, aka I still have occasional infections during allergy and cold season. I use NielMed to wash my sinus and I think it helps a lot. Besides that I really don’t know what it would take to fix it permanently. I constantly can feel the mucus dripping down my throat everyday.

Have you considered seeing an allergist to test if you have some environmental allergies? If so, they may be able to recommend or prescribe meds to moderate the effects of those allergies. (disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, just someone else with sinus issues)

I did this 15 years ago. I didn’t feel like it helped much at all. But, that doctor was later on got sued for insurance fraud so it got me wondering if I was scammed as well. I’ll discuss this with my primary physician next exam. Thanks for the reminder!

Or as a plan B, you can try hayfever tablets / over-the-counter antihistamines, they're harmless to take (I am not a doctor / this is not medical advice / read the information) but if it's allergies they might provide relief already.

I’m confused. The iOS device line gradually shifts towards the M chips. Why does Apple make a laptop with the A chips? Isn’t the M line is more performant and energy efficient comparing to the A chip?

> The iOS device line gradually shifts towards the M chips

No it doesn't - no iOS device has ever shipped with an M series chip...

> Isn’t the M line is more performant and energy efficient comparing to the A chip?

Yes to A, no to B.

Also, you're completely leaving out scale and cost. Apple has already made (ok, had TSMC make) hundreds of millions of A18 chips, so throwing an A18 pro in their least expensive laptop ever makes a lot of sense.

Yes, the iPad Air and Pro all come with M chips.

You said iOS, which means iPhones. iPads are ipadOS.

I don't think the M line is more energy efficient (at equivalent performance), just more performant overall and with more advanced features (more maximum display outputs, more maximum USB interfaces, more maximum memory channels, etc).

Why is that confusing? The A chip is cheaper, hence is goes into their cheaper laptop. The more expensive laptops get the more expensive M chips.

I am also not surprised that many P.E. have become Political Engineer as opposed to Principal Engineer.

You know, all of a sudden, I am starting to lose interest in meticulously drawn Mermaid diagrams in README, perfect grammar and spelling in doc reviews, or neat generated general photographs. They are all correctly presented, of course. But the ideas are mostly wrong, too.

I guess my stick figure hand drawn diagrams, a doc with few mistakes in grammar or spelling would be seen as more worthy to read as long as my ideas are sound. Right? :-)

Yes, genuineness, authenticity, quirky imperfection will be prized. But presumably some of that can also be trained into the models so...

If this becomes a trust signal, you can prepare for next gen models to do stick figure hand-drawn-like diagrams with spelling mistakes.

> Since most projects now use main instead of master…

I see that even the CIA, a federal government office, has not fully used DEI approved, inclusive language yet :-)

The leaked material from which this came was described as being from 2017, which makes that the latest this could have been written - GitHub only changed the default for new repos in October of 2020, and there had only been consensus building around the switch for a couple of years beforehand.

Kimi 2.5 nails it:

Walk. It's only about a minute away on foot, and driving such a short distance wastes gas and isn't great for your engine (it won't warm up properly).

*Wait*—if you're taking your car to the car wash, you'll obviously need to drive it there. In that case, yes, drive the 50 meters, even though it's barely worth shifting out of park.

Plot twist: humans become the new Proof of Work consensus mechanism. Instead of GPUs burning electricity to hash blocks, we burn our sanity verifying whether that Medium article was written by a person or a particularly confident LLM.

"Human Verification as a Service": finally, a lucrative career where the job description is literally "read garbage all day and decide if it's authentic garbage or synthetic garbage." LinkedIn influencers will pivot to calling themselves "Organic Intelligence Validators" and charge $500/hr to squint at emails and go "yeah, a human definitely wrote this passive-aggressive Slack message."

The irony writes itself: we built machines to free us from tedious work, and now our job is being the tedious work for the machines. Full circle. Poetic even. Future historians (assuming they're still human and not just Claude with a monocle) will mark this as the moment we achieved peak civilization: where the most valuable human skill became "can confidently say whether another human was involved."

Bullish on verification miners. Bearish on whatever remains of our collective attention span.

Human CAPTCHA exists to figure out whether your clients are human or not, so you can segment them and apply human pricing. Synthetics, of course, fall into different tiers. The cheaper ones.

Bullish on verifiers who accept money to verify fake things