With AI people aren't reading, writing, or thinking about the code. I would not say something that helps me remember a function name is comparible.

That's because you are used to it. I am old enough to have been there during the rise of things like intellisense and language servers, people were making the exact same arguments about them. That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. I'm sure for IDEs themselves there were similar arguments and it goes all the way back to Socrates' warning against writing. These arguments always end with "but this time it's different". And inevitably each time it's not.

> That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer.

Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue. This was maybe 15 years ago.

> Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue.

It was not unless you were part of some very weird circle. There was always manuals and other references that listed everything about a platform or library. Then we got ‘man’ and ‘info’. And I remember being able to download the full docs of windows’ various documentation.

That’s like saying as a writer you were looked down at because you had to look at a dictionary every once in a while.

I'm not sure what you're saying, or how it is not what I'm saying? You're giving examples of places to read documentation, and I'm saying that the expectation was that behaviors caused by not checking documentation would be your fault. If that isn't your experience, cool, it was definitely mine when posting on forums online 15-16 years ago.

Why wouldn’t it be? If you were in charge of writing a letter and use words that hinders the purpose of the letter, thus resulting in a flawed communication, wouldn’t it be your fault? Especially when dictionaries are easily available?

Sweet, okay so we're on the same page and the culture is still alive.

>people were making the exact same arguments about them. That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer.

And they were correct. You're entirely right that this time it isn't different, but in the sense that the quality of both developers and code has been going downhill for decades. The only thing that has kept this industry alive is that hardware got more performant faster than developers became more inept.

The non-strawman version of Socrates warning, that writing-based cultures would lose memory, take recorded fact at face value and mistake knowledge for wisdom was true as well. Your post is an example of this, you read something about Socrates, you didn't investigate and were fine with the appearance of knowledge, and because books can't defend themselves you mistook that for understanding.

That's what he was concerned about, hordes of people with a vague assemblage of facts but no genuine capacity to critically think.

I am not arguing that things don't change and certain skills dont atrophy. I am arguing that the atrophied skills are compensated by new skills we develop. But your personal attack makes me feel like your purpose is to win, not to be right.

>I am arguing that the atrophied skills are compensated by new skills we develop

is there a lot of evidence for this? You can broadly put technology into two camps. Technologically that, as it becomes more powerful, demands more attention and skill from the user and just the opposite. A bow is more powerful than a stick but also more demanding to use. A car is more powerful than your feet but your population ends up obese. Almost every single piece of software, with the exception of maybe debuggers, who an astonishingly amount of seasoned developers do not utilize (I suspect for that reason), is a car and not a bow.

There's a study on English college students roughly ten years ago who were tasked to read the first few paragraphs of Dicken's Bleak House. They were even allowed to use a dictionary and the internet. A majority could not interpret the text. That's where we were at before LLMs. My rural working-class grandfather at an underfunded Catholic school had to translate Ovid from Latin into German in 8th grade. It wasn't even a personal attack, we're just this fried now.

You are equating governance failures with technological ones. At one hand you are asking me to prove how technology like writing or cars are useful but on the other hand you are bemoaning people's declining reading abilities. What even is your point?

that's not what I said at all. I pointed out that there are technologies that facilitate human development, and there are technologies that stunt and replace it, say a car.

What I was asking was is: If it's true as you say that we have replaced our atrophied skills with other ones, what are some of those, or technologies that facilitate them? Be that governmental, social or otherwise. Because we have a decline in reading, a decline in physical ability, a decline in sociality, to the topic of the thread a decline in the quality of software and engineers, but very little to show for it in my book.

Bro we recently saw the trailer for GTA 6. I personally work on machines which have to compensate for relativistic effects of individual photons in real time. I am not sure how else to prove that we are doing more advanced in making software systems.

Go back to 2007 on this blog archive. It's incredible to read

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/author/vcblog/

code didn't matter even before LLMs. we only ever cared about the product of it.

the current pace of LLM advancement only has to keep for five more years for handmade code to be considered a liability. I wouldn't worry about being able to recall obscure APIs or whiteboard leetcode. I'm far more worried about having to change careers at 40.

I've seen the result of "code doesn't matter" and it's difficult to change and maintain. I guess if your business is ok with frequent P1 incidents or ships a complete product and never touches it again, but I've never been part of one. I've also never been in a position that cared about leetcode or remembering APIs, so it's possible my experience is completely different from yours.

ah, but if there are incidents then the product is faulty. by "code doesn't matter" I mean exactly that we don't care what's under the hood as long as it runs. code with "good enough" quality delivered in a week is most often preferable to premium quality code delivered in a month, and even "it's ugly, slow, and there are edge cases when it breaks"-quality code hacked together during the lunch break is often sufficient for the product to function.

> With AI people aren't reading, writing, or thinking about the code.

Writing, definitely. Reading, maybe. Thinking is another thing. I can think about code in a lot of ways just by reading a description of the code, or knowing how I directed the code to be written, etc. I think people are thinking about the code differently.

I’m genuinely curious why it matters to make abstract moral judgments about the differences between remembering function names and deep understanding of the syntax used in a function.

Why don’t we just care about results? Code quality, performance, clarity are all measurable. Why bother with philosophical positions on these?

How do you trust the results of a black box that are hard to verify? Most of us use proxies that are easier to check, like historical competence and maturity. For example, it's difficult to verify my compiler produces a binary that correctly implements the code I wrote. I can partially validate the result with testing, but when I send it out into the world to handle unknown inputs I'm trusting that the compiler has done its job correctly. I can have that trust because I know the compiler people (in aggregate) have thought very hard about correctness, and the project is mature enough that bugs are rare. If the GCC developers tomorrow were to start merging anything that passed the test suite and some other list of objective metrics, my trust would rightly decrease.

What is the point of this comment? Do you mean to say we should cease the pursuit of DEI because we've "come so far"? Of course that's engaging with you with the assumption that you're not intentionally ignoring the weaponization of the movement in the US to further the goals of the current administration.

That would be a strawman. I am not living in US and don't care about US politics other than they are rising my diesel prices.

I'm just pointing out that historically this is the most DEI friendly we have ever been. If americans would be able to see outside a 4 year election cycle and realise there is a whole world outside the TDS zone, we could have a more civilised conversation than throwing strawmans around.

I'm not refuting what you said, I'm asking you to elaborate why you said it.

Because I feel like it's unappreciative to act like we didn't make any progress. It's really degrading to people that really did put in an effort (like myself). It's like comming to a celebration of a sport victory with "you could have done better" attitude.

So let's now focus on why you assumed a hidden meaning somehow connected to "current administration"? Why this knee jerk reaction?

I think the reason discord got so popular is because of the ease of use. Being able to join a server with a link (and not even having to download a client if you don't want), being able to see who's in voice without "connecting" to the server like mumble or teamspeak, persistent chat. This is what is unique about discord; all those other things came later. This is the user experience the alternatives need to replicate. Custom emojis are not a deal breaker, the hangout experience is.

We have masked men grabbing people off the streets with no accountability. Perhaps you should be asking for evidence of lack of human rights abuse.

I thought I recognized that name: Nylund also wrote some books for the Halo series which I enjoyed, although I was already a fan of the games.

I believe he was a staff writer for the Halo series in house as well, something like Marc Laidlaw at Valve, and the books emerged from internal storytelling written for the series. Very interesting stuff.

I also highly recommend his older books Pawn's Dream, Dry Water, and especially A Game Of Universe. They're available on Kindle and part of the Unlimited program so easy to check out.

I enjoyed Braid and this revelation doesn't change that, but there's a lot of entertainment and it's easy to not support someone who has views (or at least doesn't express them publicly) that conflict with my own personal values.

If you don't care about competitive balance or the "identity" of magic it probably didn't.

Long answer: the introduction of non-magic sets like SpongeBob SquarePants, Deadpool, or Assassin's Creed are seen as tasteless money grabs that dilute the quality and theme of magic even further, but fans of those things will scoop them up.

The competitive scene has been pretty rough, but I haven't played constructed formats in a while so I'm not as keyed into this. I just know that there have been lots of cards released recently that have had to be banned for how powerful they were.

Personally, I love the game, but I hate the business model. It's ripe for abuse and people treat cards like stocks to invest in.

yeah I hate that Lego has been doing this too. most new sets are co-branded garbage.

Firefox (and probably others) allows you to set up custom search engines (like Wikipedia). So when I know I am trying to get to Wikipedia or npm or whatever I just do an @wikipedia and type my search.

I’ve used keyword search for many years, maybe since Netscape. Set it up and type “w thing”, no quotes. Can be a lot shorter.

Yep, I prefer the Firefox keywords for various sites, and to disable search support entirely.

For those who haven't tried this yet: the bookmark for Wikipedia might look something like this:

    Name:    [SEARCH] WIKIPEDIA
    URL:     https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s
    Keyword: w

Then, when you want to do a Wikipedia search, go to the URL&search bar, and enter `w` as the first word, followed by the search term, such as `w cats`.

Also, you might want to disable the other search engine and portal page features as much as you can. This requires setting some preferences not on the Preferences pages, so going to `about:config` preferences, to set, e.g., `keyword.enabled` to false.

Note that you control the keywords. So I thought Wikipedia deserved a one-letter keyword. But `a` went to archive.org Wayback Machine (which also meant I could just prefix any URL with `a` and a space), while I made myself spell out `amazon` every time I was in danger of unnecessary consumerism.

Also, there’s a shortcut to make the entry. Right click on the search input of the desired page and select make keyword search.

I disagree with this thought. I think it's really easy for people to react to things being done for other people (who may have it better or worse off than you) with a sense of abandonment. The reality of the situation is that some people do need more help than others, and a lack of empathy prevents us from seeing that. The idea that receiving help means that person has "given up" their responsibility to society is harmful to society itself in my opinion.

I've been looking at moving to Austin and love board games. Unfortunately with everything canceled I can't currently use Meetup to check out the scene. Would you mind talking a little bit about what the board game scene is normally like in the area?

Sure thing! I'm caveating this with the fact that I've only been in the area for 2 years now. After I found some good groups, I haven't actively looked as often.

Meetups - Austin is pretty heavily split between North/South of Town Lake (Lady Bird Lake). A lot of people don't "cross the line". - North Austin has a lot more gaming groups than the South Austin region, at an estimated ratio of 3:1. - A majority of groups meet at local game stores, but there are a few that meet at restaurants and breweries (which I prefer the vibe of). - Most groups meet in the evenings on weekdays. I haven't seen many weekend groups, unfortunately. - Most groups play a wide variety of modern games, so you'll always be learning new games. There are very few groups if you like the "classics" (Monopoly, Life, Sorry, Catan, etc.) - Most groups are decently sized, with anywhere from 10-30 folks showing up on a weekly basis.

Locations - Austin has a small, but high-quality selection of Board Game cafes. Favorites are Vigilante and Emerald Tavern. - Austin has a lot of local game stores. One of the more heavily trafficked ones is Dragon's Lair.

Conventions - Austin has a yearly board game convention with a great group of regulars (https://www.boardgamebash.com/) - You're only 3 hours away from the Dallas/Fort Worth area which holds BGG.con in both the Spring and Fall (https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/BGGCON). Biggest board game convention in the US next to GenCon. - You also have PAX South in January held in San Antonio, only 1.5 hours away.

Other Notes - There's a really welcoming community of 20-30 folks that meets once per month to help board game designers get feedback and playtest their games. One of my favorite recent finds. - There used to be a REALLY popular weekly meetup that was specifically for heavy games (2+ hours) that pulled in a crowd of 30-40 folks, but it got dissolved and never really had a replacement. I'm not sure what happened, but there is more of a demand for that here. - It's an unfortunate truth that the board game hobby can sometimes cater to some...interesting characters. From my experience, there's MUCH LESS of that in Austin and everyone has been super friendly and welcoming.

I hope that helps! If you're interested in more info, feel free to reach out to me. Email is just my username@gmail.com.

Awesome thank you! I'm up near the twin cities; the saint paul board game meetup goes to a lot of breweries and I prefer that vibe too. I like the game aspect but I think the social part is important too. I'm hoping to move this year, but a lot of that depends on how long the pandemic lasts unfortunately. I'm happy to hear there's some good groups. I don't mind traveling a little bit to meet up, but I'll check out the north side a bit more if it's nerdier.