I’ve seen the comparison to pair programming with a junior programmer before, and it’s wild to me that such a comparison would be a point in favor of using AI for improving productivity.

I have never experienced a productivity boost by pairing with a junior. Which isn’t to say it’s not worth doing, but the productivity gains go entirely to the junior. The benefits I receive are mainly improving my communication and mentoring skills in the short term, and improving the team’s productivity in the long term by boosting the junior’s knowledge.

And it’s not like the AI works on the mundane stuff in parallel while I work on the more interesting, higher level stuff. I have to hold its hand through the process.

I feel like the efficiency gains of AI programming is almost entirely in improving your speed at wrestling a chatbot into producing something useful. Which may not be entirely useless going forward - knowing how to search well is an important skill, this may become something similar, but it just doesn’t seem worth the hassle to me.

This article from last year compares LLMs to techniques used by “psychics” (cold reading, etc).

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

I think it’s a great analogy (and an interesting article).

“Remain wary of the frailty of men. Their wills are weak, minds young. Were it not for fear, death would go unlamented.”

“Seek the old blood.”

“Let us pray, let us wish… to partake in communion. Let us partake in communion… and feast upon the old blood. Our thirst for blood satiates us, soothes our fears.”

“Seek the old blood.”

“But beware the frailty of men. Their wills are weak, minds young. The foul beasts will dangle nectar and lure the meek into the depths.”

“Remain wary of the frailty of men…”

I like that I can currently adjust the volume or silence a call on my phone in my pocket by feeling the physical buttons. I miss being able to deliberately unlock my phone with touch id as I’m picking it up without having to look at it square on.

Hell, I even miss the chin and bezel. I liked having neutral space to grab the phone without it registering a tap or swipe.

Maybe I’m getting old, but smartphone design largely peaked several years ago, and they insist on making changes to parts of the phone that are perfectly fine.

This means something.

GPL can be used for commercial purposes, but it requires all software derived from it to also be open source and GPL compatible. So no one whose commercial business relies on selling software will use GPL because their customers can copy and distribute the code.

Neither Safari nor Chrome’s rendering engine is GPL. Safari’s engine is LGPL, which means the binary library can be linked into a closed source program, but modifications to the library’s code must remain open.

Chromium is BSD, which doesn’t even require modifications to remain open. So I can take chromium’s source, change it however I want for my own browser, and never distribute that code.

If Safari’s and Chrome’s engines were GPL, Safari and Chrome would be forced to be open source, and they very much are not.