The oxford comma debate is so annoying because it clearly has nothing but advantages. Removing commas from a delimited list does nothing to resolve ambiguity, whether lexicographically or syntactically.
It's so useful as a delimiter and anti-ambiguity machine, that you don't even need spaces for it to work! See CSV or Japanese.
I have found AI great in alot of scenarios but If I have a specific workflow, then the answer is specific and the ai will get it wrong 100% of the time. You have a great point here.
A trivial example is your happy path git workflow. I want:
- pull main
- make new branch in user/feature format
- Commit, always sign with my ssh key
- push
- open pr
but it always will
- not sign commits
- not pull main
- not know to rebase if changes are in flight
- make a million unnecessary commits
- not squash when making a million unnecessary commits
- have no guardrails when pushing to main (oops!)
- add too many comments
- commit message too long
- spam the pr comment with hallucinated test plans
- incorrectly attribute itself as coauthor in some gorilla marketing effort (fixable with config, but whyyyyyy -- also this isn't just annoying, it breaks compliance in alot of places and fundamentally misunderstands the whole point of authorship, which is copyright --- and AIs can't own copyright )
- not make DCO compliant commits
...
Commit spam is particularly bad for bisect bug hunting and ref performance issues at scale. Sure I can enforce Squash and Merge on my repo but why am I relying on that if the AI is so smart?
All of these things are fixed with aliases / magit / cli usage, using the thing the way we have always done it.
This was a fun thing to realize in my early days of programming in Delphi. I guess the author will soon realize why old systems name things ticket "00001" and so on.
If the thing standing in your way to engineering a great product was syntax, and a bunch of gate-kept and inconsistent linux cli tooling, then its fine to call it engineering.
Man I miss Chef. It was wildly good for its time with a vibrant community. Habitat was cool but tried to carve into some niches that were too ambitious. And InSpec was an incredible tool but failed to build the critical community to drive it forward. I haven't experienced anything like the Chef Community since. (AI has some of these vibes in small pockets but it's very disjointed)
Now we're stuck with what I call the "DevOps ball of mud". I gotta learn 15 different yaml formats alongside the nuances of every hyperscaler and micro cloud. Like seriously it's 2025 and we still gotta deal with stateful bullshit and a bunch of unoptimized docker containers flung all over the place. It feels like nobody has solved the application runtime stateful egg and we're all just dancing to the dark gods of Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm in hopes that our blood sacrifices make the engines go for another month.
Is this what it feels like to become one of the gray bearded engineers? This sounds like a bunch of intentionally confusing marketing drivel.
When capitalism has pilfered everything from the pockets of working people so people are constantly stressed over healthcare and groceries, and there's little left to further the pockets of plutocrats, the only marketing that makes sense is to appeal to other companies in order to raid their coffers by tricking their Directors to buy a nonsensical product.
Is that what they mean by "agentic era"? Cause that's what it sounds like to me. Also smells alot like press release driven development where the point is to put a feather in the cap of whatever poor Google engineer is chasing their next promotion.
Death by a thousand cuts. Microsoft Recall in a vacuum isn't the issue, but rather a decade of
- Forced Cortana (oops no let's shut that down)
- Forced OS Updates (oops your computer doesn't have the requirements)
- Ads in your start menu
- "Yes" and "maybe later" interactions everywhere
- Edge force defaulting itself on occasion
- Literally needing configuration management to run powershell on a daily cadence because settings might not get respected
- 5 Layers of failed UI frameworks duct taped together
Basically Windows is becoming such a bear to wrangle that you might as well use Linux and save yourself the pain and $100 per computer.
Anecdotally I am seeing communities I am part of gone from Reddit and other public social media in favor of private or semiprivate ones like Discord, or avoiding digital entirely in favor of physical spaces.
What I see on social media is more just the leftovers. There's little authentic interaction and engagement there.
Maybe the closest thing to this is a Blackmagic box of some sort. I use a the Ultrastudio 4K to capture 4K60 output, pipe through OBS and pass through as well.
Will run you $1K though. Corsair/Elgato has some solutions in your price range but the devil is in the details of precisely what you're trying to accomplish.
Absolutely nobody is arguing that optional items are what is making it tough on people. It's housing and basic groceries.
In 2005 I managed to wiggle my way out of poverty by splitting a $615/mo apartment 4 ways on minimum wage (and I considered that quite lucky at the time). I ate mostly rice, soy, beans, and frozen veggies because that was the cheapest thing I could eat. Eggs were a luxury.
That same apartment is $1799/mo now and minimum wage is virtually the same. I would probably be dead or worse trying to escape poverty in those same conditions. Add in that the humiliation people must feel driving for Uber or running Doordash. You're helping others live a lifestyle that's unreachable for you, ever.
Even though I can afford it these days I still refuse to Doordash / Uber because I feel like these services are fundamentally dehumanizing. I will fetch my own food, and drive/transport myself. It's not hard.
These unemployment numbers just bury the struggle of regular people with a numerical handwave.