well today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is a bit bittersweet.
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well today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is a bit bittersweet.
Back at the beginning of the month, I plotted all the projects on my remind(1) calendar, grouping various categories together. Two days ago, lynx¹, yesterday was Dillo², and today it was supposed to be #Firefox. Yet this week has been full of sad Firefox news, with them ignoring users' desires to keep AI rubbish out of the browser (or at least relegated to an optional plugin)
The browser that I started using as Netscape, grew to be Communicator, that kinda became Phoenix, then shed the non-browser functions off to Thunderbird (already got mentioned³) and became Firefox. Despite the rise of Chromium/Chrome, I still use Firefox as my daily driver web-browser for the modern web (rather than the *pleasant* web where lynx & Dillo serve me much better).
What used to be a "User Agent" has become something that no longer puts the *user* first. 😢
So in this time of wishes and gifts, I wish that the Firefox leadership team would take a strong look at what they're doing and change their course.
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¹ https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@gumnos/115735221496156078
² https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@gumnos/115740808963678498
³ https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@gumnos/115684337296307283 -
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@rubenerd @exchgr also, note that weather app has all the things I probably wouldn't have bothered doing on a small throwaway project because they're tedious: Good test coverage, every static analysis option possible, nice packaging and automatic deployment to the server when tagging a release via Github actions. All that would have taken me days to write by hand, even though that's exactly the kind of stuff I do every day at work, versus a few minutes of prompting and occasionally correcting.
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@aeva ahh I see, makes more sense knowing about swipe. I never did figure that out myself, heh.
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@rubenerd @exchgr I could have built the weather app in...maybe 3x-4x the time it took? But, I probably wouldn't have, because I didn't want it three or four times more than that amount of effort.
I've got two other much larger projects that haven't really launched yet, that have also taken remarkably less time than I would have required doing it myself.
I hate being "rah rah AI", but I'm not going to lie on the internet about it when I know it's gotten really good at writing code.
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@johnlogic I’d remove the AA and the “just classes” from education. If you’re concerned about gaps, you already call it “career impact” so it doesn’t have to be complete.
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By posting on here, tapping into my social network is exactly what I'm trying to do.
I've heard that weak ties can be the most powerful, especially when job seeking.
I also have a pretty extensive professional network, as I volunteer for the world's largest technical professional organization, IEEE.
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@rubenerd @exchgr I was dragged into it by my employer, as I like having health insurance, but it works. Over the holidays I built a bunch of stuff (an absurd amount of stuff), more working code than I've ever written in such a short time in my life. I wanted a weather app without ads, so I built one in a couple of hours. https://wthr.lol/ (And, if you're curious about code quality, it's here: https://github.com/swelljoe/wthr.lol )
I've used it to find bugs in huge projects and build from scratch.
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@aeva *it turns out, sometimes the juice is not worth the squeeze
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@rubenerd @exchgr yeah, I read all the studies and felt quite smug about AI, as well. And, then I actually built some stuff and found some bugs with current gen frontier models, and my priors were upended.
I'm not saying I like it, as it's going to cause a tremendous amount of disruption, and not in a good way, given who holds every leadership position in government and industry right now. But, I simply can't pretend it doesn't work, anymore, because I've seen it with my own eyes.
