First, it looked amazing - solid aluminum body, powerful i7 inside, 16G RAM, high-resolution touch-sensitive screen. And that amazing Google-styled LED strip that showed the charge when double-tapped.

Then the hardware started to fail. First, the shiny chrome letters saying "Chromebook" slid aside, revealing a glue-filled depression. I struggled to properly glue it back ever since. Then, the hinge mechanism seal failed, and a sticky substance started to leak from the back. Then the battery started to fail even though it was maybe 2 or 3 years old. And finally, the screen backlight started to fail, and bright spots started to appear from the edges to the point that it can no longer be used. Dead in 3 or 4 years.

For comparison, my also 2015 MacBook Pro 13 still works perfectly, except for the software - Apple also stopped updating macOS, and I'm considering just installing Linux on that otherwise fully functional hardware.

It should be illegal to force software obsolescence on otherwise functioning hardware, increasing the global e-waste footprint.

Kyiv metro is one of the deepest in the world. We have one station that is 105 meters deep. So even with fast escalators, it feels like an eternity to go up and down there.

I expect one day some slopware will succumb to one of these weird production bugs, no LLM will be able to fix it, and when the biz guys ask me for a fix estimate, I'm going to say "3 years".

Maybe it is not even about the tools themselves, but how they are used. It is like a cargo cult of constructivism that praises mechanical results instead of celebrating creativity, inspiration, spirit of exploration, and confidence that it is possible to build something new.

The whole point was a very visual way of learning with immediate feedback, where you build stuff in order to understand it.

Papert based his own ideas of constructionism on children's cognitive development theories of Jean Piaget, a famous Swiss psychologist with whom he worked in the 50s - early 60s.

Logo pioneered a whole class of tools and languages built around constructivist ideas (e.g. Ozobot, Scratch, EToy, Processing, Design by Numbers...) and I hope these ideas will not be totally forgotten in the era of slop, when people prize ignorance and no longer seem to appreciate the concept of "build to understand".

Since Alienbrain was quite popular back then, I assume they are still around now. Given that git still has no out-of-the-box facilities to handle large binaries and asset previews conveniently.

Not really. There are better products out there.

When I worked at Triple-A studio, we used Alienbrain, which is specifically tailored for huge binary versioning with previews and stuff. We had terabytes of assets, and Alienbrain handled it well, including seamless integration into pipelines - something a stock git or Perforce would never achieve.

But it is hardly unique, and it concerns the community more than the platform itself. Many communities with anonymous access end up toxic. It is nothing new and dates back to early BBSs and FidoNet, where a hostile attitude reached unbelievable levels.

Sure thing, the LLMs will be more polite than humans. For now...

Step 2: The platform becomes the ultimate knowledge base with community-curated answers on virtually any question related to software development.

Step 3: Another company scraps the community-driven database to train its model.

Step 4: The model is so efficient that people start asking questions of the model, killing in the process any traffic to the platform that helped to create it in the first place.

Step 5: Profit. People who spent years asking, answering, and curating programming knowledge for free are now paying for that knowledge repacked in the model weights. The original knowledge base is essentially dead.

Question: What programming knowledge base will be used to train future models?

Are we at the Skynet moment where people will be totally cut out of the loop from now on?

I've seen so many of these already. It would be hilarious to see Brooks proving right once again.

That is why I prefer to call them "bots" or "computers" - just to separate them from a shifting mess of definitions of what "AI" actually means. It reminds me of "Destination Void" by Frank Herbert, where the main characters were trying to build artificial consciousness and were struggling to define what it actually means.