Any pronouns. 33.

Professional developer and amateur gardener located near Atlanta, GA in the USA.

I’m using a new phone keyboard, please forgive typos.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • It’s hard to paint it in broad strokes, but yeah that was part of it. The one that really comes to mind for me is this thing called ilog which tried to map phrases in English to code (sort of like Gherkin does for tests, but I actually like Gherkin). It effectively hid very important logic for how the system worked in this really weird layer that you had to use a special IDE for that was super difficult to get working properly. I remember that seeing the text descriptions was sort of easy but seeing what actually happened was really difficult. There was a view that would actually give you something that was like code but it was just too difficult to get to. Even then, it was something generated, not something you could edit.

    I’ve sort of thought about this a lot because it’s fascinating to me. I think the best option for stuff like this if you want to really pursue it is to use “beginner friendly” languages (Python comes to mind, despite me hating it lol) with some sort of easy web interface to upload and download them. Maybe use JavaScript since it works nice in the browser and can be run right there for tests or whatever. Make some sort of sandbox to limit what can be done or just have devs more actively review it (maybe a PR process). Maybe even have the webtool just be a front end for a tool that interacts with git (or some forge like GitHub specifically if it needs to do stuff like opening pull requests).



















  • I feel like y’all are just being contrarian doomers. Listen, I get it. The ruling class of billionaires use technology for nefarious purposes to control us and extract every penny of money they possibly can by selling our attention spans in ever increasing ways. I’m not saying they don’t. I’m not saying we live in a utopia. I’m just saying that there have absolutely been a lot of technological improvements in the past 20 years.

    Folks saying “actually PDAs had internet access in the '90s” are, fuck, not even missing the forest for the trees, they’re just covering their eyes and refusing to acknowledge that they’re surrounded by trees.

    We’ve got driverless cars. Yes, they’re far from perfect, and I wouldn’t really say they’re adequate, but we do have honest to god driverless cars. Electric ones too! And they aren’t just a gimmick, they really do give gas cars a run for their money. 3d printers are a home commodity now much like traditional printers have been in the past. CRISPR lets us modify genes. The idea of watching a 4k video on the Internet in 2006 would’ve been crazy. AI has improved a lot, and I don’t even mean the modern generative AI like LLMs or Stable Diffusion, even prior to that machine learning was a huge thing.

    Relevant XKCD.

    https://xkcd.com/1425/

    That was released in 2014. You know what I can do now with my phone? I can take a picture of a bird and search to see what kind of bird it is. Reverse image search has been around for a while, but it used to just find things that were mostly pixel for pixel matches. Now it’s much more capable.