I know a an accomplished CS professor, ACM fellow, cited in Knuth's TAOCP (as well as being an easter egg!), who still hunt-and-pecks. In fact, hunt-an-pecks incredibly slowly.
While this is a witty reply, most people are working on corporate CRUD apps. For us, I still follow Jeff Atwood's advice from a 2008 blog post: "We Are Typists First, Programmers Second" Ref: https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-are-typists-first-programme...
I've always told my Jr Engineers to "think twice, code once".
If I gave them a task and they immediately started typing it out, I would tell them to stop typing and ask them to explain to me what they were doing; they'd often just spit out what they thought the code should do, and I'd often point out edge cases they missed and would have missed had they just spit out code and a PR, wasting everyone's time. I would also insulate them from upper management to give them time to actually think (e.g. I wouldn't be coding so they could think then code).
To your point and to the GP's point, and one point I keep raising with LLM's: "typing is not where my time sinks are"
That's very true, which is why I find it insulting that so many AI proponents use the word "typing" to refer to writing code. It carries an implication that if you enjoy writing code by hand, you enjoy a mindless activity.
A former colleague of mine used to work for a boss who would periodically stick their head into the office where the programmers were and yell "I can't hear typing! Why are you not working!?".
The reason I just remembered that is that the other day they proudly announced that everyone in their company would now be vibe-coding exclusively.
The only thing I liked when I did use Facebook was the "wall". To be able to post on a friend's wall semi- publically where their friends can see it. Most other Facebook clones have had the idea of tagging, but it wasn't the same. (E.g. Google+)
This may be pure conjecture, but my first thought is always that it might be a marketing ploy by the AI companies to make their products seem more advanced than they really are.
I would imagine, in this example, that the fact that you put in the numbers yourself gives you a mental map of where the numbers are and how they relate to each other, that having AI do it for you doesn't give you.
You could stare at a large sheet of numbers for a long time, and perhaps never get the kind of context you gained by entering them.
Additionally, if there was a mistake, it may not be as noticeable.
In business, it's sometimes more about people's expectations for a company's future than their past performance.
We must never assume the market is rational, and enough people getting hyped at the same time can give a company enough short-term cash to make an unexpected move.
I don't have a reliable source, but I've heard that the original script had the machines use us for our processing power, not our energy, but that the studio thought it sounded too complicated and had them change it. Of course, changing it makes it make ZERO sense.
I used to use XSLT all the time, but I had forgotten all about and haven't used it in years. It was perfect to do a quick SQL query with "for xml auto" and then add an XSLT stylesheet to it. Instant report.
I also do the text file thing. I use EditPad Pro. The only additional thing I've done is create syntax coloring in any file named 'tasks-*.txt'.
I added simple things like:
- Color anything ending in a ? green, so when looking at a list of notes, so I know where the questions were.
- Any line beginning with an all caps word is highlighted (e.g. TODO: )
- Any line ending in a : is highlighted light blue (e.g. title)
- Any Line Containing "Error" is red
I do suppose I could be using Markdown, but I've had this going for 20 years now.
I've always had this idea that perhaps the whole universe had already collapsed into many black holes and perhaps each galaxy was actually formed via hawking radiation. Then our galaxy came out of Sagittarius A*.
reply