tjeerdnet

Didn't think of that one of being effective. Will give it a try and keep his subscriptions on the good channels. Thanks.

This is what my dad (87) needs, filtered YouTube. He sits a lot on YouTube and often he is recommended a lot of negative World War 2 content. He is often trapped in that and although he also sees positive videos about other interesting things, depressing content gets the most attention. He has been to a geriatric doctor who also said he needs to stop watching that negative world war 2 content, since he is impacted by it.

I looked in YouTube if there is a way to filter out on key words or specific content like war, but could not find anything. YouTube Kids is a thing, but that is too restrictive.

YouTube is great for him if we could filter out stuff. This hackertube comes close. If anyone could make an app for the iPad that could filter content out by keywords that would be great.

Personally I still try to read or scan the generated code and look at the implementation and many design patterns are recognizable and are almost always exactly as how it should be done. I must admit that there are sometimes small parts of implementations that look inefficient or 'weird'. I remember that one time it wanted to store data in some sort of array type in a database instead of a separate table. Asking why AI did that it also agreed that it was a what tricky/shaky implementation. I didn't trust it and with a single prompt the code is rewritten into a perfectly fine separate table implementation.

That's the reason why I still try to inspect the generated code to see how my problem was solved and if it reads plausible. There are also moments that I am surprised by the implemented solutions which look very elegant and "smarter" than what I could have come up. These are also the moments I learn from AI. I can even ask AI why it did things certain ways and it gives a nice summary of arguments. But I am often also critical towards AI if I am in doubt, resulting sometimes in a sort of discussion and sometimes I can convince AI (with more context) that the solution it created should take another route. It really feels like working with a really fast co-worker. And on top of that, I am better in writing up my thoughts to discuss things instead of talking with someone. Doesn't mean I don't discuss in real life with co-workers, but it is so easy to use AI for it too.

I am in the minority I have the feeling. I started as hobby software developer when I was a child, then I graduated in bachelors ICT (as it was named then) and have now worked for 25 years in a mix of public sector and companies. Simply said I got tired of coding the last few years. I did not see myself coding till my retirement, but was not sure how I would get out of coding.

Then AI came a few years ago and that was interesting as a tool to play around with and do some simple small code (snippets) generation or as a buddy to discuss problems and find solutions. Meanwhile I was getting more and more bored with implementing stuff that I did already so many times at previous jobs. Same principles, different code base.

Last year I started at a new job and was at first hesitant, but I decided to go 100% AI with doing a rewrite of an existing application that will be phased out. So actually I could develop from scratch with the help of AI. First I copy/pasted code, then this year I found out about AI agents.

Never in my life have I been so productive in creating features/functionality while the code that AI generates doesn't differ that much from what I would have written myself. But then in a few prompts and 10 times as fast. Including unit tests. Which at many places that I worked were more often not a thing, then that they were.

Looking back at my 'career' it also made me realize that I do like "tech", but don't like coding as much as other software developers, I guess. I really like AI to make functionality and things working in a very short timespan. I enjoy 'AI-coding' much more than I'd have thought. So many things that you could/would not even try because it would cost too much effort, time or money. Now I can test within a morning a few different features to see which one fits best and works best.

I am now a happy 'developer' like I was when I started in this career a long time ago. I don't miss the coding part, at all. And AI will only improve, so personally I don't see a bright future for a lot of software developers to be coding in the traditional sense.

I have been developing software professionally for about 25 years now and worked on different code bases and for different companies. I was relatively enthousiastic when I started programming, but looking back I had my ups and downs when working as a software engineer. Things became repetitive and it is often mostly about shuffling data around. And especially the last few years I was wondering if I wanted to do this till my retirement. It was getting more and more boring.

Then AI arrived a few years ago and two years ago I was still in hybrid mode, so partially using AI to lookup some code or generate some stuff and doing old school coding by hand. Last year I got a new job and from day one I am doing all software development in AI. I never want to go back to the old way of developing everything by hand. So many ideas I had in the past would cost too much time and money to even try. Now I can try five different solutions for a feature in a single day and select the one that fits best.

I was influenced and learned also a lot from older developers who were in their 50s to be sort of proud on coding, but that is fading away very hard. I also don't see code as something personal anymore or something I should be proud of. But I am proud of what I can create with AI nowadays, functionally. And I also found out that I like the creativity of making things more than the often boring coding.

When I see the AI generated code I think it looks really really well written. Of course it helps to steer it with certain design patterns or solutions you prefer, that's the one skill that is actually very valueable to be able to prompt well.

In the end the most important thing for the business owner is that things are working, they mostly don't every care about your code.

Now and then I wonder why Doom was such a perfect game, mostly I think it is nostalgia besides revolutionary technique at that time. I've also read the book "Masters of Doom" and would recommend anyone who wants to get inspired on creating something from almost nothing by some sort of following your heart and using your (smart) brains. It makes me happy to read the book.

The main ingredients which imho make Doom classic:

- creepy/spacey/metal Adlib music, thanks to Bobby Prince (Adlib was good for that)

- simple, but effective spooky samples playing at random locations

- for the time good textures (need some good graphics artists) to give it a dark feeling

- kiss play experience (see how it probably would be done nowadays: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4yIxUOWrtw )

- VGA-graphics, I keep saying this to people: VGA is pixely, but somehow I don't see that when playing Doom, I compare it with cartoon drawings, you don't focus on the details, but how it looks globally and use a bit of fantasy to bring it to life - nowadays graphics are so detailed that I somehow get distracted by too much detail, it's becoming too realistic almost and doesn't look like a 'game' anymore

- deathmatch or coop via modem, calling your friend to play a match via the telephone line, warning your parents that they are not allowed to pick up the phone, playing not too long because you had to pay per minute (in The Netherlands at least)

- everything packed in a few diskettes (3 or 4?) was at that time almost magic that you could have such a 3d world fitting on it

There are many more reasons why for me Doom will always have a good reputation for me, mostly because of a combination of properties which came together at that time.

I would really like to know a good alternative for iGoogle too. My dad has been using it for years as his default homepage and he asks me now and then if I know an alternative because he knew it was ending. He likes it because of the widgets (weather, traffic, notepad, task lists et cetera) and the fact that the Google search is integrated on the same page.

People suggested Symbaloo, but that's only a nice iconic representation of hyperlinks. I don't think there is a site with the same concept as iGoogle. If anyone knows a good altenative then I'd really like to know to make my dad happy again ;)

I somehow understand the move of Google to stop doing iGoogle, because similar widgets are now by default integrated in Windows/Android itself.

In the previous tests Grails was also tested, I don't see it back in this round anymore?

Funny to see the 'greenhouse effect' mentioned in the beginning and later on the advice to take longer showers.

This is an ever ongoing discussion between two kinds of programmers (documenting and non-documenting). Just decide for yourself or your team what works best. I myself like to even document other people's code after I see what the method does if the method isn't speaking for itself. If I am developing I want to see in my IDE when adding an existing method, a popup which tells me quickly about what the method does and the arguments it has and what it returns. Instead of (everytime) having to jump to the code to see what it does.

Just one simple (real life) example:

  public String convertText(String text) {
   return text.toUpperCase();
  }

This method is already named wrong in my opinion and should be refactored to something like convertTextToUpperCase to understand what it does without having to document. But if your methods get more complex I think a little comment on top of the method describing what's going on really cannot harm. Especially if the code is difficult to read for new people.

The point is in the end to keep the documentation in sync with the code and that takes indeed some effort. I myself always make documentation for a method in Java-doc style, so only above the method, if it's more complex than a simple getter/setter-method. I always tend to think in terms of the official Sun Java API-documentation, which I use(d) so often to know how all the classes/methods work, that it might also make my own code more readable/understandable when I or someone else has to work on my code if I have documented it. Inside the method code I try to comment little to not.

@snowwolf: I agree, but it's just an example to show that a method name should speak for itself

I am using Google Alerts for a few months now. I set up a few alerts for physiotherapy jobs with some keywords like 'job' 'physiotherapy', 'vacancy' et cetera (in Dutch). But I only get once a month an alert and even then it only found some sort of news article about the profession, not anything about jobs. I cannot imagine that so little jobs are put online for this profession. Twitter search or plain Google search gives me more relevant information.

Not sure about the Google Alert if it is useful at all this way. I can manually search every day of course, but these are things I thought could be perfectly automated and done by Google Alert.

What about Youtube? Never in history could people so easily share their lives with the whole planet and it being archived very well (and searchable). Think about the impact it (already) has on the future, when people somewhere hundred years from now can look back at so much of human history in full color and sound etc. We as humans are currently recording so much for future generations. Half of it may be crap, but on the other side there's also a lot of good stuff.