Notices by Jason Gorman (jasongorman@mastodon.cloud)

Increasingly I find that Windows is too busy doing other things to find the time to be my operating system.

How many of my CPU cycles are being used in the service of Microsoft and not me, I wonder?

Having lived and worked through multiple computing industry hype cycles, I've learned to be wary of calls - nay, *demands* - for us all to use a solution that don't mention any actual problem.

Most kids figure out that one of their parents is more likely to say "Yes", and it's usually the one who doesn't end up cleaning up the mess (e.g., walking the "puppy" after it stopped being cute, driving to the party to pick you up after midnight, etc etc).

Well, customers usually figure out that if they deal with someone who isn't doing the actual work, they're more likely to get a "Yes". That's what those intermediary roles are really about.

Here's the thing with these results: the Tories lost roughly the same number of seats Reform gained, and Labour lost roughly as many seats as the Lib Dems and Greens gained.

Now watch Labour conclude that they need to be more like Reform.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2025/may/01/local-elections-2025-full-mayoral-and-council-results-for-england

If you've been using an LLM to summarise documents for you, I highly recommend trying it on a document that you wrote.

I don't see what all the fuss is about. All US businesses have to do is build a few tens of thousands of factories and then hire and train 10 million specialised workers who'll be willing to work 60-hour weeks for $3 an hour.

Should take 6 weeks, tops. 3 if they use ChatGPT.

@corneil They're advertised in the UK and US as "X-ray specs". Presumably because it scans better 🙂

Being a software professional at the moment's a bit like being a doctor in a time when every hospital administrator believes the X--Ray specs they advertise in the back of newspapers actually work.

"LLMs will replace software developers" is a roundabout way of saying "Your job requires neither comprehension nor reasoning".

I have news for you on that front...

"Universal Basic Income would remove the incentive to work", say people with enough money to never have to work again but who mysteriously carry on.

Ask yourself this: will fares in self-driving cabs be cheaper? Will subscriptions to vibe-coded SaaS cost less? Will tickets to see model-generated movies be a fraction of the current price?

Or do all these technologies just solve the problem of having to pay people, with no benefit to anyone else except shareholders?

And then ask yourself this: if nobody's getting paid, who's hailing the taxis, using the SaaS and watching the movies?

Dumb Luck: "Here's a trillion dollars. Solve any problem in the world."

Big Tech: "Er... OK... Give us a minute. Okay, got it! Chatbot? Erm. Unreliable chatbot? How about an unreliable chatbot that consumes the resources of entire cities? You've put us on the spot here. Hey, can anyone think of any problems in the world?"

"If your development process is full of blocking practices like after-the-fact testing or Pull Request code reviews, then faster code generation will just make the bottlenecks worse and the lead times even longer."

https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/03/27/its-the-bottlenecks-stupid/

I've been saying it as a joke, but I'm now seeing what appear to be genuine sentiments that the "trick" to using "AI" coding assistants is to precisely describe the program you want.

Instant water. Just add water.

A code generation tool that gets you 80-90% of the way there is like a boat that gets you 80-90% of the way.

You'll need to be a strong swimmer.

"Can you give me an example?" is one of the most powerful sentences in the English language. Second only to "Can you show me what you mean?"

Elmo tweeted 220 times in a single day. If I was an employer looking for workers who appear to have a lot of time on their hands...

Code generation tools fix the problem of software development being slow and expensive in much the same way that faster cars fix traffic congestion.

I've been trawling through all my old drives for a presentation I gave in, gosh, 1997 (?) that I recall was titled "Getting Shit Done?"

It was about stuff I'd learned through hard knocks about not being seduced by the *feeling* of being more productive.

Can't find the damn thing anywhere. I suspect I never backed it up. QED.

In a nutshell