My criteria is very simple, could you handwrite the code if you needed to. Could you write this code without the LLM writing it for you. Could you write this code without the IDE auto-completing it for you. You could take it all the way to, could you write the assembly if you needed to. Of course, the complexity of the ask and the timeline has to be commensurate with the power of your tooling at each level.
Do civil engineers need to be able to personally manufacture prestressed concrete? Or do they need to know the properties of materials and how to test their designs?
As a past civil engineer, I can't manufacture concrete.
But I still could calculate and write an electrical design project and draw all necessary plans and schemes without touching PC once – if I have a ruler, few pens and enough time (I would have to reference standards, but I did have most standards in print version)
I doubt your metaphor really fit. Was manufacturing ever an engineer job?
Many specialties contribute to the manufacture of prestressed concrete. Materials scientists, chemical engineers, metallurgical engineers, mechanical engineers, structural engineers, tooling engineers to design casting beds, quality control engineers, etc.
But in the early days of prestressed concrete (1920, 1930), a single civil engineer performed all of these functions.
The point is that the role of the modern civil engineer has changed and specialized over the decades. You can be a very competent civil engineer without having the knowledge or experience needed to perform every specialty.
Just because our ancestors in the 1940s handwrote binary sequences, and in the 1950s they handwrote assembly, and in the 1960s they handwrote FORTRAN, doesn't mean that today's software engineers need to be able to do any of that.
They don't need to because that's usually not what the job calls for, but I would think most people who call themselves software engineers believe they would be able to work at a job where they wrote FORTRAN instead of Python. It's just another programming language, you just have to spend a month to learn it. Assembly is just another programing language. Opcodes is just assembly without syntactic sugar. But of course that's not what my job calls for today, but if it did, it's not really any different in my mind from any new job where I'm doing something different, but just applying my software skills slightly differently.
That first sentence already uses a ton of jargon that non-developers don't use, "web development", "new webpage", "good design", "best practices", "big block",
I guess that tokenmaxxing phase has served its purpose, of forcing people's brains to go from "i will never use AI, it's scary and new and useless" to "i must learn to use it, this is the new normal, otherwise i'm getting fired".
And now they're able to move to the phase of "let's now learn to actually use it effectively".
I am in the “I will use AI where it makes sense to make my job easier” camp. This approach was unfortunately incompatible with my SVP’s “we need to 10x AI” goal.
I found ChatGPT to be a never ending source of ideas for how to light tokens on fire as fast as possible in order to hit my target.
> Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text.
Also famously, while the tech elitists complained about all of its shortcomings, the broader consumer market fully embraced it and it single-handedly drove an entirely new generation of consumer electronics.
For the record, it let you read the same web pages as a desktop computer over WiFi. It had a usable mapping app and good music app.
The rest of the experience, stuff like alarms, calculator, address book, etc. also worked nicely.
Those turned out to be things no one else was offering. I had a Nokia N95 at the time and the original iPhone was a big improvement on everything except the camera.
Yes, as I wrote initially: the iPhone is a behemoth today, but its first version was underwhelming to say the least.
My point, which you seem to have overlooked, is that parent poster complaining that a "european iphone" doesn't exist is not realistic, considering how it went for Apple.
The consumer market embraced it despite its shortcomings because it looked nice and was easy to use; the alternatives were not. Yeah, it didn't do that much, but it did more than a flip phone. The alternatives wanted you to use a stylus just to use your phone, and tried to basically recreate the MS Windows UI on a tiny screen; their UI was terrible.
What's the fastest way to get promoted to a manager at a fast food chain -- show up on time and do your job. If anything, the managers are workers who cared enough to do a decent job.
> I understand what the author means, but I think that in any human-2-human interaction, we are all entitled to at least basic courtesy.
This only holds up for the "small" number of human interactions the average person gets. If my neighbor comes and rings my doorbell to say hello, I'm fine answering and shooting the shit, maybe invite them in for a quick coffee.
If every 5 minutes a strange comes in and rings my doorbell, I'm not getting up and answering it. And some people visiting will get angry and start pounding on the door and coming to my window and pounding on it glaring at me inside. And say, hey, I drove all the way from hours away to come visit you, the least you could do is open the door and say hello.
For them, it's their first human-2-human interaction that day, with someone they slightly admire even, and they're expecting basic human courtesy. To me, they're just the 42nd doorbell ringer today.
Ah the dehumanizing nature of affluence… a right of passage for those fortunate enough to experience.
The challenge is in how to manage and and maintain the interest, less one falls back into the realm of obscurity or worse be tarnished reputationally so as to never recover.
The term is 漢字. It's written the same in both Japanese and Chinese, with the Japanese pronunciation being "kanji" and the Chinese pronunciation being "hànzì".
It can be written this way in Chinese (in those variants using traditional rather than simplified characters).
Whether that makes it the "same word" is a philosophical question. But writing "hànzì" is proper when referring to the use of the characters to write Chinese. If one is using it to mean a set of characters (rather than the general concept of characters that come from that writing tradition), they're different sets; and there are typically different expectations for typesetting etc. The decision to produce "CJK Unified Ideographs" in Unicode was not without controversy, and quite a few words have been spent by standards committees on explaining why these characters should share code points while there are completely separate Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts (despite shared history and many at-least-seemingly overlapping glyphs).
That difference in pronunciation is why “kanji”, in English, is almost exclusively used to talk about the Japanese script.
The word “hanzi” in English is much less commonly used — people studying or discussing Chinese are more likely to call them “Chinese characters” or just “characters”.
> 7.css is a CSS framework for building interface components that look like Windows 7. It is built on top of the GUI backbone of XP.css, which is an extension of 98.css.
Sort of mimics Windows itself - you famously have to do some archeology every time you want to change an important setting, and will work your way through many iterations of windows ui components as you do
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