I am in software and a software engineer, but the least of my concerns is being replaced by an LLM any time soon.

• I don’t hate LLMs, they are just a tool and it does not make sense at all to hate a LLM the same way it does not make sense to hate a rock

• I hate the marketing and the hype for several reasons:

  • You use the term AI/LLM in the posts title: There is nothing intelligent about LLMs if you understand how they work
  • The craziness about LLMs in the media, press and business brainwashes non technical people to think that there is intelligence involved and that LLMs will get better and better and solve the worlds problems (possible, but when you do an informed guess, the chances are quite low within the next decade)
  • All the LLM shit happening: Automatic translations w/o even asking me if stuff should be translated on websites, job loss for translators, companies hoping to get rid of experienced technical people because LLMs (and we will have to pick up the slack after the hype)
  • The lack of education in the population (and even among tech people) about how LLMs work, their limits and their usages…

LLMs are at the same time impressive (think jump to chat-gpt 4), show the ugliest forms of capitalism (CEOs learning, that every time they say AI the stock price goes 5% up), helpful (generate short pieces of code, translate other languages), annoying (generated content) and even dangerous (companies with the money can now literally and automatically flood the internet/news/media with more bullshit and faster).

Java is IMHO one of the most underrated platforms outside of enterprise environments.

Most people also forget, that Java is not only a language, but also a platform, an ecosystem and active research is applied to many parts of Java.

Concerning Oracle: OpenJDK is actively supported by very different but big and capable companies (IBM, Amazon, Eclipse Foundation…). The quality of the language, libraries and documentation needs people which are payed to work on this, full time.

Bring to this the free IDEs one can get for Java - Eclipse and Netbeans are a little bit old school, but offer everything to build/debug and develop complex software.

Java is not my favorite programming language, but when I want to write interesting software and ensure it will be running for the next decade w/o significant changes, Java is really hard to beat.

Of course, in hindsight we know how to do a lot of things better as they were done in Java. Still, what other open source Language/Platform/documentation with the backing of capable companies and really independent and interoperable builds are out there?

One last note to all people which were damaged by Java in university or school: Usually the teachers/professors/lecturers have no real world experience of software development besides the usually university projects, and for the usual university projects which basically means getting small to midsize projects to run Java is total overkill.

Don’t confuse this with real world software projects in the industry, which are mission critical and need to work a decade from now on. Java was always a bread and butter language, but one which learned from other languages and even the verbosity makes sense, once one dives into code written a few years back by another person.

Yes, Apple! :-) Obviously Apple doesn’t have the win margins to put proper parts in their hardware…

Just yesterday I realized my Thinkpad Edge 330 is running w/o any trouble for 11 years now, cost me little above 300€, brand new back then. :-)

there is no android phone that I am passionate about,

Not what you asked for:

A phone is a tool which should enable you to do stuff. Be passionate about friends, hobbies, art, not a piece of plastic.

Being forced to use iOS (work phone) and Android (Samsung, also work), both suck IMHO but Android sucks less.

My next Android will be a Pixel, as others suggested custom roms are the way to go, but even vanilla Android is more functional/open/practical for my needs than iOS.

I would never buy Apples shit with my own money: Dumped down, locked down and in the end you are renting a device from Apple to pay fees for their Appstore and Cloud offerings and vendor lock in. No thanks.

Seems SAP’s investment in good arguments pays off.

OTOH Europe and Germany have obvious problems in the cloud sector: They cannot do it on their own and thus are depending on either the USA or other countries who have the know-how.

Not a situation you want to find yourself in, when IT is the backbone which keeps everything running.

Luckily German government’s investment in paper, floppy drives and fax machines makes it secure against attacks towards IT infrastructure… ;-)

Good points, and I mostly agree with you, especially with feedback loops!

Still, I never argued for waterfall. This is a false dichotomy which - again - comes from the agile BS crowd. The waterfall UML diagram upfront, model driven and other attempts of the 90s/early 20s were and are BS, which was obvious for most of us developers, even back then.

Very obviously requirements can change because of various reasons, things sometimes have to be tried out etc. I keep my point, that there has to exist requirements and a plan first, so one can actually find meaningful feedback loops, incorporate feedback meaningfully and understand what needs to be adapted/changed and what ripple effects some changes will have.

Call it an iterative process with a focus on understanding/learning. I refuse to call this in any way agile. :-P

… I cannot count the number of times at my different workplaces where we had an agile process, dailies and everything else of the agile BS for projects which where either trivial or not solvable. No worries, the managers, product owners and agile coaches made money and felt good, we developers went for greener pastures…

Agile is a scam, nothing they do is based on any facts and when you challenge agile coaches / other people which profit it is always ‘I believe’ or ‘proven by anecdote’.

Combine this with the low quality of people in the average software projects and you have a receipt for failure.

Writing the requirements first at least forces people to think trough a project (even if only superficial), so I am not surprised the success rates for this projects goes up.

Nah, didn’t mind the meme!

I totally accept that Eclipse doesn’t work for and life is too short to waste it on tooling.

In that sense, good luck with your current & future setups and happy coding! :-)

Eclipse has its share of problems (and outdated UI and workflows), still I’ll happily use it over IntelliJ w/o hesitation.

Funnily enough, a lot of other (Java)Senior developers who tried both are fine with Eclipse, too.

Besides the astroturfing from IDEA which is really annoying, Eclipse integrates far better with standard build tools and is our last descend Open Source IDE (Netbeans effectively being a zombie at this time).

IDEA is already pushing/forcing their own solutions/build tools/etc. to up sell their shit, once Eclipse is gone, there will be no alternative and IDEA/IntelliJ will start the entshittifaction…

People really forgot what a shit show were the 90s, paying lots of money for commercial IDEs.

I love C, but C definitely is the problem.

While one disciplined programmer can in theory write correct code, once there is a small group of even good C programmers and a code base with more than around 3000-5000 LOC, there will be bugs. There is a good reason for tools like Valgrind etc.

While I think C and C++ are the problem, I don’t think Rust is the solution, tho.

Add to that, that every news is owned by someone, makes a minimum of 50% of its revenue from ads, and gets the rest of its revenue from paying customers from a class with expandable income who don’t want their worldview challenged or destroyed… It is really scary, how easy it is to manipulate public opinion by simple strategically choosing how facts are reported (pictures of humans vs. reporting numbers, wording, etc.), which facts are reported in the first way and where to position the information (top of page vs. footer). It is fun to call out Russia, instead calling out the ruling class, companies, the western governments etc. They all lie and they all try to control/direct public discourse.

Great write up, thank you very much!

I expect Google to keep Mozilla/Firefox on the lifeline indefinitely to avoid antitrust issues in the states and EU, so Mozilla/Firefox won’t go anywhere.

Still, this doesn’t mean anything, because I often need Chrome or Safari to access some websites.

In the end it is quite funny: Moving a lot of stuff to the web made Linux a more realistic desktop option, at the same time to access a lot of stuff on the web one needs to run a Blink browser.

IMHO the most annoying thing is, that we could have at least some laws, which mandate that every government service must be available to Open Source users and every government paid software must run on at least Linux. Thanks to lobbying and power this will never happen.

Edit: To state it more clearly: Firefox is IMHO in bad shape and in a bad situation. Firefox won’t die, but at the same time right now I already need Chrome/Safari browsers, because Firefox support is broken on many sites. I see no way Firefox can gain significant market share, especially seeing what regular consumers tolerate from Microsoft/Edge and Google/Chrome.

In my personal life, I run Linux on all my devices and I would never invest in non-opensource technology for my career. (Work forces me to run macOS, but that’s another story).

For years now, I happily and only buy games on Steam, even if I have the choice between Steam and NoDRM. Simply because Steam just works™ and is convenient. (Of course one never buys games on steam with a forced additional starter from Ubisoft etc.).

Steam is really great from a technically POV, from a giving back to the community point and from a customer friendliness point (never had a problem with a return).

I even bought a SteamDeck although I am no big fan of handhelds, and for what it is, it is great.

I’ll happily waste more money on my Steam backlog of shame. ;-)

Had an Eee PC and it was great for its time. It was a later version, I think a 100X with an Intel Atom and 2GB of RAM. I used different Linux distributions on it (could order it w/o operating system in my country) and was quite happy with it, although it was slow (but not painfully so).

Funnily enough, a few months back I bought an HP Stream 11" in a sale, which I am using to type this right now. Depending on your use case, and your willingness to run Linux, I can really recommend the HP Stream 11". Initially I just bought it as a cheap travel option (in this role it performed absolutely perfectly), surprisingly I use it also at home for surfing/watching/emails every day, although for work I use a more powerful machine and a bigger display.

What really is crazy for me, that nowadays a HP Stream 11" offers a much better user experience than an Eee PC back then, IMHO thanks to better browser optimizations and ZRAM on Linux.

Had a 100X EEE PC, for my use cases they where totally usable, but of course I installed Linux with a lightweight desktop environment on them. It was even possible to run Docker containers and virtualize Windows XP.

Did you check out the HP Stream 11"?

Fanless, descent battery, camera, light and small. Best feature: Full size keyboard with a mostly standard layout and sd card slot. The display is a little weak but good enough for one person usage. I would not use it with Windows 11 (tried and it was painfully slow), but running Fedora Linux I can use it mostly like my desktop machine.

(Typing on this machine right now. ;-))

Is a lobotomy needed to become a lobbyist?

1.) Article claims w/o any kind of source/data, that people cannot afford subscriptions 2.) Article warns that the big services have to raise their prices soon, because of losses made by piracy, which according to 1.) is caused by people not having enough money for the subscriptions

The article doesn’t mention the shareholders, which get billions of wins by milking the subscribers stupid enough to sign up for the bullshit. … oh, but the article mentions the poor artists/working people, which loose money because of online piracy. I almost forgot about the recent strikes, because the people actually producing the content don’t get shit from the companies/shareholders.

Seriously, I’ll cancel my last subscription right now, because I am feed up giving my money to shareholders, companies and lobbies who buy politicians and laws.

The joke being, that all browsers by now depend on ad money directly (or indirectly aka Firefox) - this means browsers can by definition never favor protection of your privacy over their money stream.

(I am using Firefox, but even they try to upsell their VPN solution with in-browser advertisement :-/)

I fully agree about the damage done at universities. I also fully agree about the teaching professors being out of the game too long or never having been at a level which would be worth teaching to other people. A term which I heard from William Kenned first is ‘mechanical sympathy’. IMHO this is the big missing thing in modern CS education. (Ok, add to that the missing parts about proper OOP, proper functional programming and literally anything taught to CS grads but relational/automata theory and mathematics (summary: mathematics) :-P). In the end I wouldn’t trust anyone who cannot write Assembler, C and knows about Compiler Construction to write useful low level code or even tackle C++/Rust.