I tend to go by Binary Large OBject (BLOB) storage to discern between this kind of object storage and “object” as in OOP. BLOB is also what databases call files stored in columns.
Forgot about that GPU cluster you spun up last month and built up an astronomical AWS bill? Don’t worry, you won’t have to sell a kidney, stay at Amazon Workhouse Services until you've cleared your debt!
I’m not sure I have much sympathy for the problem. Copilot is going to force everyone to move up the abstraction stack.
I absolutely disagree with how Copilot has been trained on the intellectual property of others, and I think Microsoft/GitHub should be taken to court over it (and I say that as an IP cynic, but if you play that game, you should stick by the rules), but this technological cat is out of the bag.
Students (and everyone else) should be thinking much harder about how they test and verify the behaviour of any given piece of code and how they design systems to stick together. This class of technology is going to automate away many of the jobs where you just pump out code. This is fine. It’s no different to someone inventing a burger-flipping machine, and I’m sure many here would agree it’s better if humans didn’t have to flip burgers for a living (modulo solving employment being necessary for a decent/tolerable existence). It may turn out that the next step in software productivity is not a new generation of cool and highly-abstract declarative programming languages (4GL) but simply automating away the drudgery of writing code in the extant kinda advanced languages (3GL) which are ‘good enough’.
Arguably Copilot doesn’t change much about the software development process. You can already get software developed pretty cheap if you farm it out to low-quality contractors or a lot of juniors straight out of school. There’s a whole branch of the industry that will hire anyone straight out of university to manage and front development teams in South Asia. But as we say, quantity has a quality all of its own. And the only way to manage software (not code) quality with this method is to verify and test that the deliverables actually meet your criteria and expectations.
It’s currently a great time to focus on TDD/BDD and code specification because our time spent on the D is about to get a lot shorter. There is still a place for artisanal hand-crafted code. But the mechanical loom has arrived.
I very much enjoyed the [Vortex Race 3] which is 75% with all the F-keys and the home/delete/pg key cluster in a line down the right. It works really well and lets you switch between Mac/Windows button order for the CMD/Windows/ctrl buttons in the bottom left through a keyboard shortcut if I remember correctly. It comes with both colourful _and_ grey keys for the clusters! A really handsome and well thought-out keyboard if you want something nice without getting sucked into the keyboard modding rabbit-hole.
Unfortunately a friend spilled coffee on mine, and it's hard to justify buying another one at >£100. And it's often out of stock whenever I do manage to justify it to myself!
I found it helps to set boundaries and in one instance make it clear that I do not appreciate being called out of the blue. I feel almost everyone understands that a texting before a call is polite these days. Clarification was only required once for a colleague who tried dialling me into a meeting I wasn’t party to, just to ask me some questions that could have been an IM. They were actually a little younger, and so I think it was more a case of realising your impact on other people (who may be in or trying to achieve flow) if you interrupt them because it seems urgent to you. Like the article notes, the open plan office engendered interruptions too easily because it was convenient rather than urgent.
As a millennial I suppose I fall in between the two camps. When I was younger, social anxiety about taking up people’s valuable time with my silly questions made a phone call seem like a terrible burden to subject someone to, but with age and (remote work) experience, I’ve realised that conversations are indeed much higher bandwidth and often appreciated more than a letter or thread of back-and-forth clarifications. If I _had_ to stereotype by generation (sorry GP) I could say voice and video seem easier than reading and writing for boomers and Gen-Zs, but even that doesn’t sound right. It’s probably just a communication style thing. There’s a reason many of us struggle to read a book when we can watch some TV instead. As humans we communicate with our voice, face, and body. The main benefit of text is asynchronicity. The challenge is how to thread the needle of asynchronicity in an increasingly post-literate world.
>There’s a reason many of us struggle to read a book when we can watch some TV instead.
Most people don't watch TV to obtain information, yet at the same time, videos can convey information better than a book would thanks to audio and video. Quality audio and video material far surpass books when they augment the original text-only format. Shoddy video material is still preferred over shoddy writing for reasons beyond conveying information.
And that's the real issue. People are using bad writing and asynchronous communication skills as a cop-out to push more, not realizing their other communication skills are just as poor. Sure, the guy waving his warms during a presentation feels more humane, but how much does it really add one week after? You're stuck only with the notes he left, the notes you made (probably none) and your own memory probably muddied along the way. It's the same for meetings or any kind of call. Taking notes takes far longer if you ask the one conveying information to slow down so you can keep up. Most people are awful at communication in any form, and half of the problem comes from them trying to blame the medium or believing they are better using a different medium or it's flat-out the medium's fault. Newsflash: it's probably you, not the medium.
It's most astounding this has to be told to developers of all people. The field moves fast, new information is thrown out at rapid pace, the work is mostly mentally straining and you're expected to know a lot. Surely, that alone would make enough people question whether fast-paced, transient communication is a great fit. Writing is easier to point at people and say "this doesn't make sense" without the answer being another call.
I tracked down a good condition 2009-2010 vintage A1242 aluminium ten-keyless Apple Keyboard[1] on ebay for £54 last year for exactly that feeling. Supposedly they came with iMacs for just a year or so before they were discontinued. My first-gen Magic Trackpad fits perfectly where the numpad would be. My only complaint is I can't position the trackpad below the spacebar like on a MacBook so have to move my hands from the home row, but that's because the keyboard and trackpad both have a slant to them.
The lede is buried in section "5. Reader Memberships with a 50% Author Revenue Share":
> A Leanpub Reader membership ($19/year) or a monthly Standard or Pro plan is now required for (almost) all free purchases of books, bundles, courses and tracks.
> 50% of the revenue from every Leanpub Reader membership goes to authors of the books, bundles, courses and tracks which were purchased for free using the Reader membership. This way, authors can earn money from free purchases.
> Paid purchases of books, bundles, courses and tracks do not require a Leanpub Reader membership and still pay 80% royalties.
Leanpub has essentially added a paywall for works that were previously free to download, and will split reader membership revenues with the authors. While this seems equitable, it's also a big change in the product direction.
I'd be interested to hear from authors who have self-published using Leanpub intending to maximise readership rather than revenue, and what this might mean for them.
e.g. Try adding a free ebook to your cart, for example this one[1] (no relation, just the one I tried to download). Your cart will now contain 2 items: the ebook and a "One Year Reader Membership - $19.00" with no way to remove it.
This maybe takes “identifying as an Apple user” a bridge too far!
And really, who’s going to know (how) to do that, especially in an emergency? It also relies on either your phone or watch surviving an accident intact. It’s your life, but it’s just going to frustrate identification attempts when it’s important.
A wallet doesn’t have to be bulky a to hold a couple of cards or a few slips of paper. I have a cardholder which is much more minimal and compact than a standard wallet, and even Apple makes cardholders that attach to the back of MagSafe phones now.
I would hope that in this situation, a persons first response would be to call for professional help. And the medical professionals would know how to access it (it shows a button labeled “emergency” on the home screen if it scans a face not of the owner).
When my phone was lost once, it was dropped off at the police station and they opened the emergency access screen to call someone to get the phone returned. So it’s not completely unknown.
Who is going to know about a default-on user-facing feature in one of the most popular mobile operating systems in the world? Did you really just ask that?
I’ll see a “Hi!“ in a notification or followed by _x is typing_ then safely know that I can start slow context-switching out of whatever mode I’m in, start reviewing that block of work for check-in or noting the key takeaways to come back to, and start pre-loading whatever I was talking about with that person last, without the fear of “here’s a big block of text, please respond to it in kind (all right away)”. And more than that, I can also interrupt any incorrect lines of thought or rambling if it’s more rubber-ducking than a request, or turn it into more of a conversation than a message which can read “please do this” and a reply which says “um... let me get back to you”.
I don’t know about you, but a large technical question or “hey can you... X Y Z” generates much more uncertainty than a chat between colleagues, even if the format is only different. Hell, modes of communication are a thing, we’d be as well use each one for its strengths.
