I've had a different experience. My code is better. The ease of refactoring and practicing very defensive programming without getting burned out from the repetitive boilerplate. It all comes together better than it did when I was programming professionally too many moons ago. IFF I don't let the LLM toddler run amok. :-)
Seriously, I find I need to slow down the rate of change. I don't move forward until I understand the change proposed and have updated the docs. At the same time, I find that keeping up with the LLM/agent is exhausting. 3 hours with an LLM leaves me as tired as 6 hours with a keyboard had previously. I find that coding when tired or fuzzy yields code that shouldn't have been written in the first place. Sadly, once it's been written and debugged, the temporary fix becomes permanent.
They are called “entitlements” because we have a reasonable expectation of getting what we were promised when we agreed to pay taxes as our part of the social contract.
If you say, “We should have invested more,” I point you to the 40% of current retirees that were not in a position to invest because their jobs didn't pay them enough above the cost of existing. And then there are any number of events, such as age discrimination, common medical issues, divorce, and bankruptcy, that destroy retirement plans.
From what I can tell, it's not possible for the vast majority of the population to be able to save for a 20 plus year retirement.
One of the things that keep people from saving are the activities driven by their investing in the stock market. To increase returns, "Activist investors" and private equity drive companies to shed jobs. You shed a job, you destroy a person's ability to save for retirement, which makes them more dependent on the social contract of Social Security and Medicare.
Cutting benefits will only cause suffering. The cost will fall on society in other ways in terms of elderly homeless people filling the ERs, begging in the streets, or committing suicide. Is it time for a "Modest Proposal II"?
The solution I'm advocating (until somebody can prove that I have my head up my ass on the topic) is increasing moments where an asset becomes cash before it is transferred.
For example, borrow, spend, die is effectively a financial instrument to cash conversion.
Inheritance: Get rid of the inheritance taxes and treat it as cash for tax purposes and have the estate pay the tax.
Make stock buybacks illegal.
I can see there would be an advantage to storing the income averaging part of the tax code so that if someone like us mortals gets a big windfall (inheritance, IPO grant), you can spread the income out over time.
I could use a much smaller house than I have now and a much larger garage for tools, workshops, art studio, etc. But for me, the value of a larger property is that I get to go out of the house and spend time in the garden. Sometimes something as simple as pulling up weeds is a considerable boost to my mental health. Kneeling on a garden bench in the sun in the weather and pulling weeds is not something that's “enjoyable," but it is rejuvenating.
My 92-year-old mom has been the same way. Until one of her daughters moved in, she lived by herself in her house and garden. Just being able to go outside and experience the green space she planned and planted has kept her alive and healthy. If she were in some senior living place, she'd be dead by now. She would have withdrawn into her room and waited for her time.
Like others, I'm getting the one-frame every 2 or 3 seconds behavior. But I'm finding something I didn't expect. I'm listening to the sound and not watching the koi, and that is incredibly soothing/relaxing for my ADHD mind. If you generate the audio locally, maybe that should be a single page all by itself and not worry about the fish, or perhaps I should say, And thanks for the fish.
A properly funded education works only if you pair it with writing practice and continued correction of grammatical errors that creep in as you develop writing habits. A properly funded education doesn't fix grammatical errors caused by language-processing deficits. Tools like Grammarly give the language-deficient writer more confidence and willingness to write. To me, they are as essential as a spell checker.
A properly funded public education doesn't cover speech-recognition-driven errors. I've talked about this before, but when you write using speech recognition, you need to shift from speaking spoken speech to speaking written speech.
Spoken speech is very sloppy with grammar. We forgive a tremendous amount of detail, forgive a lot of errors because we're focused on what they are saying, not how they are saying it. Grammarly also catches speech-recognition errors.
The usual retort is that one should spend more energy on proofreading your writing; many speech recognition users come to understand that your brain sees what you said, not what's on the page. The fix is to stick your writing in a drawer long enough to forget what you wrote, which isn't a great plan when you need an email in 5 minutes.
Thanks for the reference. I'm trying it out now, and I'll see how well it works over the following days, but assuming it works right for me, I'll probably ditch my Grammarly subscription and go to this package (assuming it's a saner company).
Just went through my first corrections, and I think I like it. It isn't as aggressive as Grammarly, and I have mixed feelings about that, as I thought Grammarly did improve my writing, clarity, and presentation. It also feels easier to learn by example and reinforce better grammar from the start.
I tried out the AI rewrite, and man, it hits the uncanny valley hard.
---- Below is the above corrected by grammarly
Thanks for the reference. I'm trying it out now and will see how well it works over the next few days, but if it works for me, I'll probably ditch my Grammarly subscription and switch to this package (assuming it's a saner company).
Just went through my first corrections, and I think I like it. It isn't as aggressive as Grammarly, and I have mixed feelings about that, since I thought Grammarly improved my writing, clarity, and presentation. It also feels easier to learn by example and reinforce better grammar from the start.
I tried out the AI rewrite, and man, it hits the uncanny valley hard.
[Edit: Corrected a sentence that was missed by both Grammarly and LanguageTool. See if you can figure out which one it was]
I suspect my opinion on this won't be very popular, but it's like driving a car. If you're going to learn how to drive four wheels, you should start by taking the motorcycle safety course and learn on two wheels first. We can discuss why later.
Taking that concept to programming, I wouldn't start with a desktop or a web app. I would start with a little embedded system like an ESP32 or one of the small Raspberry Pi controllers (2350). I've come to this opinion because of the people I've mentored as they improved their code-writing skills. The ones who did best were the ones who started with embedded systems.
I believe you have to get down and dirty with the machine to understand the code and what it's doing. If you're making a motor controller work, you can use an LLM to generate code using a library or some cut-and-paste MicroPython code. But when it doesn't work, you have to break out the cheapy mini scope you got from Amazon and look at the waveforms.
Seriously, get your hands dirty at the controller level; understand queues as driven by hardware, not hidden in a library. Or, even simpler: you need to understand why the blinking lights are blinking, but not the way you thought they would.
If I were writing a course on programming, I would give students deliberately and increasingly wrong cut-and-paste code and leave the solution as an exercise to the reader.
Seriously, I find I need to slow down the rate of change. I don't move forward until I understand the change proposed and have updated the docs. At the same time, I find that keeping up with the LLM/agent is exhausting. 3 hours with an LLM leaves me as tired as 6 hours with a keyboard had previously. I find that coding when tired or fuzzy yields code that shouldn't have been written in the first place. Sadly, once it's been written and debugged, the temporary fix becomes permanent.
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