90% of my my experience has always been dealing with large-ish corporate systems.
I am in Europe, so YMMV even when talking about corporate instead of smaller scale projects.
In my experience stuff like RAILS had negligible impact in my field because companies would always require solid backup from some big name vendor (MS, Oracle, IBM, Sun - back in the day, or even SAP).
So most if not all the smaller silver bullets did not even make a blimp on the radar... and stuff like Java or .NET, while definitely better than C or COBOL... did not really deliver in terms of productivity boost (in part because, as noted in the message I am answering to, expectations kept growing at the same pace)
Well... the actual problem is, imho, that it looks like the LLMs seem to have reached (or are close to reaching) a plateau.
You might be right about the "three months ago it could not produce a working implementation of a DBMS... but what if in 3 months (or 3 years) it stays stuck at the 20K slower threshold?
Everybody already has local regional tickets anyway. And most people can't be in more then one place at the time anyway. And most people stay in the same region most of the time anyway.
I live in Rostock. So if I want to go to Berlin or Hamburg (you know, where stuff like actual airports are) I am crossing "regional borders" even if it is a 200-250 km trip to each city
About non-replaceable batteries: from what I understand, if a battery can be replaced by any random device owner you must design it with a robust cell to avoid risk of it being punctured, breaking, being crushed.
And therefore you have more shell, less actual battery and therefore it lasts less.
This does not mean that I believe this was done exclusively for altruistic reasons. More like: this will result in a slightly better experience for the user... and more revenue for Apple. So let's do it.
I think that what erased "programmer vs computer illiterate" dichotomy was BASIC in the 80s.
I've met lots of "digital natives" and they seem to use technology as a black box and click/touch stuff at random until it sorta works but they do not very good at creating at mental model of why something is behaving in a way which is not what was expected and verify their own hypothesis (i.e. "debugging").
I am from that era, so I might add something that perhaps is not obvious at all nowadays.
The microcomputer explosion gave birth to an large number of actual paper magazines and at least 50% of their content were... actual source listing you had to manually retype.
Basic was already fragmented in a billion different flavors and dialects (especially if your program had any kind of graphics) so the more ambitious user could also try their hand at translating a listing from - say - TSR-80 to Apple Basic.
In any case you were directly exposed to the actual source code, and tweaking or experimenting with it felt very natural.
This are just the last three Social Media I subscribed in the past and range from Stagnant to Pretty Much Dead.
I suppose that the problem is that if you already have 1000+ followers on, say, Twitter or IG you try posting the same stuff in parallel on both... after 1 month of doubled effort you notice that your followers on the new platform is an order of magnitude smaller... you want to stop double posting because it is too time consuming. Guess which one you will opt out of?
Sorry, I should have been more specific maybe: I do know about Montecarlo, and yeah, the circle stuff is a more or less canonical example - but I wanted to know more about the Markov Chains, because, again, I only know these in terms of sequence generators and I have some problems imagining how this could "solve problems" unless your problem is "generate words that sorta sound like a specific language but it is just mostly gibberish".
I am on the move so I cannot check the video (but I did skim the pdf). Is there any chance to see an example of this technique? Just a toy/trivial example would be great, TIA!
TBH I haven't tried to learn anything from it, but for now I still prefer to use it as a brainstorming "partner" to discuss something I already have some robust mental model about.
This is, in part, because when I try to use it to answer simple "factual" questions as in the example above, I usually end up discovering that the answer is low-quality if not completely wrong.
Am I the only one that remembers how Microsoft tried to convince everyone to adopt .Net because this way you could have teams where one member could use J#, another use Fortran.Net (or whatever the name was) and old chaps could still contribute by writing Cobol# and everything would just magically work together and you would quadruple productivity just by leveraging the untapped pool of #Intercal talent out there?
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