It rubs me like “Tom Clancy” novels not written by Tom.

Like we would likley never see them or care if it weren’t for the name.

This is not Python, or even within three orders of magnitude of Python.

Concrete things that helped me:

- Prioritize savings if you haven’t already. Do everything you can to have a cash cushion. Not having a cushion will multiply all other stresses.

- Work your contacts and network, If you don’t have one, start building one. You may be surprised even faint acquaintances can help

- Prioritize self-care. Exercise, eat healthy, don’t fall into alcohol or drug traps. And if you do fall into them, forgive yourself and try again

- De-stress your current job to the extent you are able

- Take time out in your day to do something you perceive as positive

This probably sounds trite and easy, but when you’re in the thick of it it can be very hard. Get the body and savings account in shape, the mind will have a better foundation to heal.

I hope Apple can take all this cash and do some stability releases like they used to do, bugs around things like Family Sharing, the painful "update" to Settings App, etc could all use a lot of love.

I have found the LLMs work best where I have some knowledge already, and I can spot the gaffes and mistakes more quickly. It has to be rough on people flying them blind, as it were.

Unrelated but I have tried out LLMs on some legal research, and it has been appallingly bad. The LLMs get the gist of a lot of it, but falls down completely because the legal realm requires a certain amount of exactitude. Time and time again I will ask about laws in a certain U.S. State, and it will show me a law from Arizona or something which has no or limited applicability (you can try to cross reference other State laws in certain State courts, but usually that doesn't go very far unless it is a very novel argument).

You hit the nail on the head with the fancy outputs, I am guilty as charged there. The LLMs are frankly better at it then I am.

I've been working software development for close to 40 years now. I've worked in plenty of languages, software stacks, ecosystems, from assembler to VAXen to Unix (pre-dating Linux), to cloud stacks to...well, a lot of systems.

The software ecosystem has ballooned so tremendously in that time frame that no human can really be an expert in all of them, or even in a tiny subset of all of them. As I mentioned in another comment, I couldn't be bothered to keep up with the Javascript/Typescript/Web front end drama. I don't do rollercoasters, and that ride is enough to make even the staunchest stomach heave with distress from the endless loop-de-loops.

With LLMs, I can describe a little problem unique to my problem space, inspect the output, research it and even reverse engineer it, and see how well it fits (or doesn't). This is not unlike being a software engineering manager leading teams.

When I said being able to see the results was "cool", I did not mean or imply it was about me trying to "look cool". In fact, I really don't know where that is coming from. I do this for my day job and also on the side for a lot of different causes and personal projects, and no one could give a rats ass about how "cool" I am. Seriously.

People need to stop taking this all so personally. It's a tool. Maybe you all need to step back to my world in 1981 when I first started playing with code as a kid, and compare it to 2016. The advances from '81 to '16 are probably far more dramatic than what AI is doing now.

With AI, I can describe my exact use case and see what it gives me. Sometimes it will just cough up a furball like a boilerplate example, but usually it gets pretty close, and I can see how my (maybe weird) edge case fits into the framework or API or whatever.

It may be that I approach problems in a weird way, and that is why examples are less helpful than with some, but AI generally does better here for me.

To be clear, I am closing in on 60 years old. I’ve written a lot of code in a lot of languages. I have not bothered to check every fad that has come down in front end web and Javascript for the past umpteen years. Front end hasn’t been my thing. With current AI, I can leap frog a lot of bull crap I don’t care about and see what at least the AI thinks is good. I still retain a brain, I can still investigate what it did and form an opinion about it.

I treat the AI stuff as idiot savants that can make really nice stuff or go totally off in the weeds. But it is more than good enough to help me be a better me at what I do.

Of course there are errors and gaffes and weird bits all over, but that helps keep me in the loop and understanding it better.

I can now (more) boldly go where I feared to tread before.

Laying in your bed trying to be restful and feeling your heart slamming away at 140 beats per minute with little you can do about it goes behind miserable into outright alarming, even if you are "used" to it.

It deals with a small town psychiatrist who takes a whole town off of anti-depressants, and an ancient monster is summoned from the depths attracted by all the heightened emotions and terrorizes the town.

I was really surprised when I first came across DuckDB at how good at it is for its target use cases. It is a game changer for me for the "local analytics" space, and its ability to scale up to a large degree helps a lot.

It is simply awesome to be able to point DuckDB at a mess of CSV and other files and have an instant database on top of it that I can run regular SQL over, and it is fast and just works.

Pirates! was a gift from my wife years ago, and I kind disappeared for a couple of weeks. The dancing was tedious though :-)

A 12x increase in volume should not be world ending for Microsoft given that the number of developers in the world is a pretty small baseline number to start from.

Taking every developer in the world and multiplying by 12x-24x is not a-lot compared to many consumer oriented sites.

Second, you can’t ignore the payloads, even an AI mostly text push is nothing compared to, say, 10 iPhone pictures or one moderate video.

Youtube and Insta and Facebook and many other social media platforms handle very resource intensive media for billions of people plus bots.

Increased influx from AI is not plausible when viewed from that lens.

From what I have seen, his ideas were formed in a vacuum divorced from real coding. You can see it in the small amounts of open source he has released. The kind of guy who will always prefer 50 classes to 5. Who clutches his pearls at an if statement.

I remember he was invited to give a talk at Bloomberg and the majority of us were simply disgusted that an obvious hack like him was lecturing a group of software engineers who had really been there and done that.