Not just this. I'm linux/macos user since early 2000's and still sometimes hate macos because they have very annoying bugs that are never fixed, and annoying corpo decisions.
E.g. it keeps opening Music app whenever I connect bluetooth earbuds. I can't delete Music app, it just keeps popping up with imbecile message about "user is not logged in" or something. I run a script that monitors that Music.app is running and kills-9 it.
Or blinking desktop background issue, that's been there for years, accumulated many support threads, and still not fixed.
Random services like coreaudiod that suddenly start consuming 100% CPU for no apparent reason.
Macbook throttling (thanks God, gone with M cpu's)
I can keep going but my point is macos has legit problems that can't be simply shrugged off with "they just hold it the wrong way".
Like any other mass product tbh, except rare ideal products like Factorio game or sqlite.
> people who talk about business value expect people to code like they work at the assembly line. Churn out features, no disturbances, no worrying about code quality, abstractions, bla bla.
That's typical misconception that "I'm an artist, let me rewrite in Rust" people often have. Code quality has a direct money equivalent, you just need to be able to justify it for people that pay you salary.
Yes but the goal of school is to lift heavy things, basically. You're trying to do things that are difficult (for you) but don't produce anything useful for anyone else. That's how you gain the ability to do useful things.
Let's just accept that this weight lifting metaphor is leaky, like any other, and brings us to absurds like forklift operators need to lift dumbbells to keep relevant in their jobs.
Forklift operators need to do something to exercise. They sit in the seat all day. At least as a programmer I have a standing desk. This isn't relevant to the job though.
> At least as a programmer I have a standing desk.
When I stand still for hours at a time, I end up with aching knees, even though I'd have no problem walking for that same amount of time. Do you experience anything like that?
I kinda get the point, but why is that? The goal of school is to teach something that's applicable in industry or academia.
Forklift operators don't lift things in their training. Even CS students start with pretty high level of abstraction, very few start from x86 asm instructions.
We need to make them implement ALU's on logical gates and wires if we want them to lift heavy things.
We begin teaching math by having students solve problems that are trivial for a calculator.
Though I also wonder what advanced CS classes should look like. If they agent can code nearly anything, what project would challenge student+agent and teach the student how to accomplish CS fundamentals with modern tools.
In one of my college classes, after you submitted your project you'd have a short meeting with a TA and/or the professor to talk through your solution. For a smaller advanced class I think this kind of thing is feasible and can help prevent blind copy/pasting. If you wrote your code with an LLM but you're still able to have a knowledgeable conversation about it, then great, that's what you're going to do in the real world too. If you can't answer any questions about it and it seems like you don't understand your own code, then you don't get a good grade even if it works.
As an added bonus, being able to discuss your code with another engineer that wasn't involved in writing it is an important skill that might not otherwise be trained in college.
> Even CS students start with pretty high level of abstraction, very few start from x86 asm instructions.
> We need to make them implement ALU's on logical gates and wires
Things must have certainly changed since I was a CS student :-/ We did an assembler course in second year, and implemented a basic adder in circuitry in a different course.
This was in the mid-90s, when there was definitely little need for assembly programmers outside of EE (I was CS).
> the main goal of our jobs is not to lift heavy things, but develop a product that adds value to its users.
Well, whether we like it or not, we are all eventually going to find out if "developing a product that adds value to its users" can be done when you have no more skill than aforementioned users.
Why should I hire a dedicated writer if I have people with better understanding of the system? Also worth noting that like in any profession the most writers are... mediocre. Especially when you hire someone on contract. I had mostly bad experience with them in past. They happily charge $1000 for a few pages of garbage that is not even LLM-quality. No creativity, just pumping out words.
I can chip in like $20 to pay some "good writer" that "observes, listens and understands" for writing documentation on something and compare it with LLM-made one.
"Write a manual for air travel for someone who never flew. Cover topics like buying a ticket, preparing for travel, getting to airport, doing things in the airport, etc"
> Why should I hire a dedicated writer if I have people with better understanding of the system?
Many engineers are terrible at documentation, not just because they find it boring or cannot put it into words (that's the part an LLM could actually help with) but because they cannot tell what to document, what is unneeded detail, how best to address the target audience (or what is the profile of the target audience to begin with; something you can tell an LLM but which it cannot find on its own), etc, etc. The Fine Article goes into these nuances; it's the whole point of it.
> "Write a manual for air travel for someone who never flew. Cover topics like buying a ticket, preparing for travel, getting to airport, doing things in the airport, etc"
Air travel is a well-known thing, surely different from your bespoke product.
FTFY "Next Superfood for Poor Humans". Hollywood and politicians will shame us for not switching to maggots and roaches that are good for planet, from their jets and $20KK mansions.
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