I switched from an Obsidian fanboy to only writing by hand, and I'm never going back.
It seemed preposterous to put notes in something I can't back up or "CTRL+F" search, but I've found that yes, sometimes I spend two minutes looking for a note, but when I do I generally never have to look up that information again... as opposed to things I'd search Obsidian for constantly that seemed to never get stored in my brain.
That's exactly how I used "AI"... to augment my thinking and writing process.
On it's face, it seemed insane to not utilize this instant resource.
After a year I could no longer write for shit.
Now we're getting studies coining words like "deskilling" and "cognitive surrender", and I felt both acutely and personally despite guardrails I thought could keep me from those traps.
I used to use DuckDuckGo out of protest, despite it being inferior, but sometime in the last year (between general improvements and Google's rapid enshitification) it started outperforming Google for me.
I've seen some prank calls (a YouTuber cloned Tucker Carlson's voice and called Alex Jones) but he just had a sound bank with a few pre-generated lines and it fell apart pretty quickly.
At least for now there's too much lag to do a real time conversation with a cloned voice.
Speech to Text > LLM Response > Generate Audio
If that time can shrink to subsecond, I think there'll be madness. (Specifically thinking of romance scammers)
I've tried giving it languages like Turbo Pascal or telling it to obscure frameworks like fp-ts and while sometimes it's not syntactically perfect, but I can guarntee it's not just scraping code snippets from somewhere.
also the skeptics are really hung up on semantics of "intelligence" and not addressing the model's output, much less where this is going to be in upcoming years.
like, take home coder test is probably just dead. today.
That's very false in my experience, and I did 100% TDD for years (have a more nuanced approach currently in TypeScript/React)
As a programmer with a problem, you first instinct is to start at the solution.
TDD pulls you back, and you first have to write the api and decide how you verify it.
If you're doing it well, you make both of those things as simple as possible, first. Reduce dependencies and inputs, etc.
That's actually the most important part, an easily consumable api that's easy to verify, not the implementation, and TDD forces you to do it first.
Also, a pet peeve of mine is seeing a line or more of code that doesn't do anything. With TDD, such detritus is impossible as you can't write production code unless it's making a red test turn green.
When Apple does this, it's really hard to undersell the "reliable" aspect of it.
The responsiveness and web experience of the first iPhone was just, a generational leap.
Same thing with Universal Control. I've used Synergy, ShareMouse and basically every clone, and I've never seen close to this same precision as Universal Control which Just Works out of the box.
I'm actually upgrading to a new Mac right now, and Universal Control is an absolute game changer for that workflow.
I'd prefer to work an environment where I can't get interrupted synchronously by someone wanting their problem resolved that moment.
Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting how decisions are made.
But ultimately, I have no desire to waste an extra 5 to 10 hours of my life just driving back and forth to sit at a different computer.
I do think it's great to meet your coworkers so they're more than faces in Zoom, but I am absolutely never going back to rotting away in a car and office most of my waking week.
blog at barrison.com, podcast at turing.cool.