I feel like ive been stuck in that cycle, and I know its partially just me being in my head about my career, but I really have been basically doing CRUD apps for a decade. Ive made a lot of front end forms, Ive kept up on the latest frameworks and trends, but at the core it really hasnt been dramatically different.
If you really distill it, I've been doing API Glue for about a quarter century.
I connect to a 3rd party API with shitty specs and inconsistent output that doesn't follow even their spec, swear a bit and adjust my estimates[0]. Do some business stuff with it and shove it to another API.
But I've done that now in ... six maybe seven different languages and a few different frameworks on top of that. And because both sides of the API tend to be a bit shit, there's a lot of experience in defensive coding and verification - as well as writing really polite but pointed Corporate Emails that boil down to "it's your shit that's broken, not ours, you fix it".
At this point I really don't care what language I have to use, as long as it isn't Java (which I've heard has come far in the last decade, but old traumas and all that =).
[0] best one yet is the Swedish "standard" for electricity consumption reports, pretty much every field is optional because they couldn't decide and wanted to please every company in on the project. Now write a parser for that please.
another 'anyone but Java' developer! For me its not even the language or syntax, its the way people code it. Not every line of python ive ever read is gold, but every time i delve into Java code its like the developer was mad, at me specifically.
I would say they dont contribute. I don't think Jeff Bezos has contributed anything positive, at all. He's managed to become insanely rich in a system that rewards bad behavior, so what? All that value isnt doing anything.
Are you saying Amazon isn't a positive? Or that Bezos didn't contribute to making Amazon what it is?
I think it's pretty clear Amazon is quite a positive given by how many people like using it so much for it's convenient 1-stop shop, quick shipping, and hassle-free return process.
Are you saying it would be better to have to shop at 1000 different little websites with probably crappy or at least inconsistent return processes?
OK but how realistic is that? Not everyone lives in a city nearby local stores.
There is such a wide variety of products that people go to Amazon for. I know I do. So many things are niche I can't see how any local stores could exist to stock things like that in even a 1 hour range from a majority of the population.
How many people are going to drive hours to go to a special boutique that has this random thing they want or need?
Maybe people use Amazon to buy routine things that could easily be stocked locally. But I guess I use Amazon to get things that I can't really get or even usually find anywhere else for that matter. Most come from small operations using Amazon as their sales platform. Amazon is providing a lot of discoverability and logistics to them and I am not sure I would even stumble across the seller if I had to find some tiny website that they operated themselves.
I am not sure most people would prefer to shop locally, most people don't seem to even go to the store anymore and instead use delivery services for everything. This saves so much time to allow us to do other things that we enjoy in our lives. I don't think small shops would be able to offer this level of convenience.
And you don’t have another big online marketplace that’s basically similar?
And if not, you are saying you have a similar availability of such a vast network of goods, almost anything you might want and the convenience of fast delivery and simple returns via local shops or something?
I guess I’m not sure what you are suggesting. I personally find that shopping and finding and acquiring the products I want is vastly more convenient and easier with Amazon than before we had Amazon and yes I was around back then too. I’d never want to go back personally. Most family and friend I know seem to feel the same.
Absolutely. Creating value in the stock market is not the same thing as creating value for society. Are we really better off as a society now that amazon has closed down all the mom & pop stores?
Are we really better off as a society now that the entire internet is centralized around AWS? It made a lot of people rich, but the internet sucks more than ever
this post reads like a parody you'd find on linkedin lunatics. I mean, sure, how could the joys of raising a human being compare to a slight bump in relevant kpi's?
Nearly every woman I know who is an English as a second language speaker is leaning hard into these things currently to make their prose sound more natural. And that has segued into them being treated almost as a confidant or a friend.
As flawed as they are currently, I remain astounded that people think they will never improve and that people don't want a plastic pal who's fun to be with(tm).
I find them frustrating personally, but then I ask them deep technical questions on obscure subjects and I get science fiction in return.
And once this garbage is in your context, it's polluting everything that comes after. If they don't know, I need them to shut up. But they don't know when they don't know. They don't know shit.
I am reminded of AI summaries and Microsoft Copilot. All push low value. But I separate that from the underlying potential of the technology. And I wish we heard more from deep domain experts like Karpathy and less from influencer dilettantes like Dylan Patel about where this is going.
As an EE working in engineering 30 years, I ran out of fingers and toes 29 years ago trying to count the number of asocial, incompetent programmer Dark Triads who can only relate to the world through esoteric semantics unrelated to engineering problems right in front of them.
"To add two numbers I must first simulate the universe." types that created a bespoke DSL for every problem. Software engineering is a field full of educated idiots.
Programmers really need to stop
patting themselves on the back. Same old biology with the same old faults. Programmers are subjected to the same old physics as everyone else.
hear me out though: What if every time you used an sql query it made a bunch of stuff up? 80% of the time its what you want but sometimes it just imagines data and pulls it out of its butt
something I havent seen mentioned: the people who are AI's biggest proponents are distinctly unlikeable humans. Look at Elon Musk with Grok, its disgusting. Look at Sam Altman, Alex Karp, look at Peter "Im not sure humanity should continue" Thiel. These people are wildly misanthropic, of course it gives the whole thing an unpleasant miasma.
