I know you are joking but I'm sure that there is at least one director or VP inside GitHub pushing a new salvation project that must use AI to solve all the problems, when actually the most likely reason is engineers are drawing in tech debt.
Upper management in Microsoft has been bragging about their high percentage of AI generated code lately - and in the meantime we've had several disastrous Windows 11 updates with the potential to brick your machine and a slew of outages at github. I'm sure it might be something else but it's clear part of their current technical approach is utterly broken.
<mermaid>
flowchart TD
A["Claim: Bridge opening is conditional"] --> B["Actor: Donald Trump"]
A --> C["Project: Gordie Howe International Bridge"]
A --> D["Condition: Canadian concessions required"]
B --> E["Public statement"]
C --> F["Status: not opening (per claim)"]
D --> G["Type: policy/trade concessions"]
E --> H["Outcome framing"]
F --> H
G --> H
H["Message: No opening unless concessions are granted"]
</mermaid>
<mermaid>
flowchart TD
A["Claim: Bridge opening is conditional"] --> B["Actor: Donald Trump"]
A --> C["Project: Gordie Howe International Bridge"]
A --> D["Condition: Canadian concessions required"]
B --> E["Public statement"]
C --> F["Status: not opening (per claim)"]
D --> G["Type: policy/trade concessions"]
E --> H["Outcome framing"]
F --> H
G --> H
H["Message: No opening unless concessions are granted"]
</mermaid>
When I first typed up my comment I said "their current business approach" and then corrected it to technical since - yea, in the short term it probably isn't hurting their pocket books too much. The issue is that it seems like a lot more folks are seriously considering switching off Windows - we'll see if this actually is the year of the linux desktop (it never seems to be in the end) but it certainly seems to be souring their brand reputation in a major way.
Honestly AI management would probably be better. "You're a competent manager, you're not allowed to break or circumvent workers right laws, you must comply with our CSR and HR policies, provide realistic estimates and deliver stable and reliable products to our customers." Then just watch half the tech sector break down, due to a lack of resources, or watch as profit is just cut in half.
> And a thinkpad running Linux is just not doing it for me. I want my power efficient mac hardware.
Are you talking about the battery? I bought a T16 AMD a month ago with the 86Wh battery and it lasts between 8 and 12 hour depending on the usage. Not as much as a macbook but enough to not worry too much about it. New intel ones are supposed to be much better on power efficiency.
It's off course one level bellow on the mac on that regard (and others maybe too), but if you want to use linux I think the trade-off is worth it.
The two groups are very different but I notice another pattern: you have people who like coding and understanding details of what their are doing, are curious, what to learn about the why and think about edge cases; and there's another group of people who just want to code something, make a test pass, show a nice UI and that's it, but don't think much about edge cases or maintainability. The only thing they think is "delivering value" to customers.
Usually those two groups correlate very well with liking LLMs: some people will ask Claude to create a UI with React and see the mess it generated (even if it mostly works) and the edge cases it left out and comment in forums that LLMs don't work. The other group of people will see the UI working and call it a day without even noticing the subtleties.
Sadly the times where people joined software engineering for passion are way behind. People nowadays join just for the money or because it has lot of jobs available.
It is very easy to notice at work who actually likes building software and wants to make the best product and who is there for the money, wants to move on, hard code something and get away with the minimal amount of work, usually because they don't care much. That kind of people love vibe coding.
> It's the same reason you don't need to run a double blind study on whether seat belts work
Actually, seat belts are a weird example. After they were invented, there were more car crashes since people trusted they were protected. Without seat belts people were more cautious. They were a net positive of course, but some different situations/inventions/studies might have effects that are the opposite of what you would expect.
Actually my bank already requires me to use the phone app for any operation on the website. When I want to login from my laptop I need to use my phone with their app to approve the login, same for almost any operation.
Ah, and it can only be installed in one device at the same time :D Don't have your phone available? Bad luck for you
> can only be installed in one device at the same time
I neither like nor understand this restriction. It makes device failure / loss / theft a much more difficult experience to recover from than it would otherwise be. The device should be throwaway. I specifically keep old phones in case something happens to the new one.
WhatsApp is probably the stupidest example of only being able to be on a single device (but I'm forced to use WhatsApp for one specific purpose, so I already resent it). Signal does the same thing, so maybe it's related to the E2EE that WhatsApp licensed from Signal...
>WhatsApp is probably the stupidest example of only being able to be on a single device
that's not really an artificial limitation but a design choice. They don't store your messages, only deliver them. Once the message is on your device, it's gone from their servers, like old POP3 mail.
I use the Signal fork Molly to get messages on multiple phones. One remains the primary and the others linked, but I get messages even if the primary is off.
The authenticator app that I use for most 2FA can be on multiple devices, and you can export and import some or all of the entries, password protected.
I would be extremely F'd if my 2FA was able to be lost or stolen due to a single device limitation.
I have a huge problem with companies using their own apps for 2FA.
Google started doing this for Gmail. To use Gmail on my laptop, I need to approve it with Gmail on my phone. I never signed up for this. I’m now afraid if I delete the Gmail app from my phone that I’ll lose access to my email.
I hate the direction “security” is taking us. It’s done in the name of security, but it feels more like blackmail to get and keep the company app on your phone.
Is that a thing Google logins can be set to require? I _can_ use the Gmail app on a device for 2FA, I can also press "try another method" and use any 2FA app.
I guess I’ll have to look. It just started happening one day.
One huge fear I have no is breaking my phone while away from home and getting locked out of everything.
I was on vacation several years ago and broke my phone (the only time I’ve ever done that), and got lucky in several ways. I had a 2nd work phone with me. I was able to use that to call an Uber to get to an Apple Store; I was lucky to be in a city with an Apple Store. Then I got lucky again that I was able to talk Apple into giving me a replacement right there instead of a repair, they happened to have a single phone in stock to do that with. Then I got lucky yet again when I went to set it up, because I had an iPad with me by dumb luck, which was able to do my Apple 2FA that I didn’t sign up for.
If I go somewhere with just my 1 phone and no second device… I’m thinking I need to setup and bring a bunch of recovery codes, which has its own risks. My plan would be to cryptically write them down and put them in a money belt, as if those got into the wrong hands I’d be screwed.
I really don’t know what people do who only have a phone and nothing else. It seems they would always have this risk.
i do like how many apps are starting to play nice with 3rd party authenticators. i use ms authenticator for a bunch of things. Although knowing MS it has some massive license fee for them to support.
The worst offender to me is Google Maps. I'm a native Spanish speaker but set my phone to English because I hate app translations. The problem is when I want to read reviews it automatically translates them from Spanish (my native language) to English. It doesn't make any sense!
At least it's still Latin. In places like Korea, the roads are often only in transliterated Latin alphabet, so if you read the local language (and know places in that language) you'd need to transliterate it back to know what it's saying.
This despite Google already knowing what languages I can read…
Could you share what metrics they optimistize or monitor? Or how do they improve their algorithms? I don't know how much you can tell but I always wanted to hear it from someone who has worked with them
