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Comment Great idea but (Score 1) 74

I don’t care to live in the past. Yes, that was a great keyboard but having switched to keyboards with ergonomic layouts (e.g. the Microsoft Natural), there is no way I’d go back to a linear keyboard. I wish manufacturers would build ergonomic versions of that IBM keyboard. That would be something. I’ve seen a few attempts but none of them felt as “natural” as the MS one, or even the one from Logitech

Comment Bye bye Linux (Score 1) 41

Bye bye Linux..developers will get sloppy (just like those lawyers who submit briefs written by ChatGPT without checking them) and just sign off on whatever the tool generates. I know how useful is ChatGPT when I supervise it, particularly for busywork, but it can easily produce compilable code but with broken semantics.

Comment Re: ChatGPT has been a livesaver (Score 1) 248

What does that even mean?
If you don't know what a GUI is, then I'm certainly not going to explain it to you. But here is one of the examples from a query I used last year. https://i.imgur.com/3CV4zNZ.jp... This one was pretty simply but you get a result in a few seconds as opposed to spending 10-15 minutes writing it manually.

What kind of schema do you have .... So first of all, understand that I'm not an SQL expert, never really liked that stuff. The database schema was developed by one of my partners who was no longer alive. I wanted to remove a product entry from a web view and (innocently) thought I could just delete the product name from the list of products in table. I didn't understand that removing that entry would remove all the customers that were tied to that product. It is pointless to debate whether the schema design was properly designed or not. I had to deal with the consequence of what I did

That was your prompt, was it? And it just worked? What happened to the other 2000 customers?
Pretty much - I just went back to my ChatGPT history - I forgot that I also had to reinsert that information into Drip (customer management tool we were using). Here's a screen shot of the beginning of that particular interaction so you can see exactly what was happening. https://i.imgur.com/I8WTxkx.jp...
This worked for all customers

Amazing that your entire post sounds nonsensical. You should stop making things up.
Maybe you know the old saying, "Science doesn't give a shit what you believe". Well, guess what, I couldn't give a damn what you believe. The post asked for examples and I provided some of mine. Why you would think I would spend time making it all up is just bizarre.

Comment ChatGPT has been a lifesaver for me (Score 4, Interesting) 248

This tool has both saved me time and also rescued me from some emergencies. Examples: I used it to write GUI functions. It’s not that I don’t know how to do such things but it can do in 1 minute what would take me a1/2 hour so it’s a massive time saver. I just have to check the code and sometimes tweak it a bit. I consider this to be “busywork” but that alone saves thousands of dollars a month in developer costs. Last year I deleted an entry in a SQL database table not realizing that cascading delete was enabled and I ended up deleting license keys for about 2,000 customers. There was no backup because the person who implemented the backup had recently died and his backup implementation had started failing due to changes in SSH keys.However, the information was available in a database managed by our payment fulfillment company via a pretty complicated REST API. I was able to instruct ChatGPT to “ write a python function to retrieve customer information from that company and generate a SQLinsert query to merge it back into our own database”. After a little tweaking, the damn thing gave me a function that just worked. Since I rarely use Python and SAL, It would have taken me hours if not days to both decipher that REST API, figure out the right SQL query and write the python code. Major customer catastrophe averted. Separately from the above, I’ve found it very useful for quick how-to tips when using applications that I don’t use much, e.g. how do I do”X” in Photoshop, etc. If I was a young recent graduate, I would be very concerned about my future opportunities and I remain very concerned how such tools will have detrimental affect on society due to how well AI can replace what previously required significant expertise and experience,

Comment MehFPC is out there (Score 1) 50

I used UDSD on an Apple II back in the day and I also had a Western Digital Pascal Microengine. Terrific back then. Today, with compilers like the FPC that can generate really native good code for almost anything, other than for someone who has too much time on their hands I can’t see the value in this.

Comment Re:Codeweavers Crossover (Wine) does this already (Score 1) 52

It's no different than the PowerPC days of VirtualPC and such. Any time you have to translate each and every instruction from one architecture to another, shit's gonna get slow.

First of all, I was referring to the use of CodeWeaver to run Windows apps on non-Windows OS but still with Intel processor. No instruction translation involved. Secondly, in terms of translating, clearly you have not used systems like Apple's Rosetta. It does translation ahead of time (AOT) and Intel apps can run at almost native speeds on Apple Silicon. They did quite a remarkable job.

Comment Re:Codeweavers Crossover (Wine) does this already (Score 4, Interesting) 52

Meh, it looked so promising but, I tried it last year on a couple of regular windows apps and it seemed to work fine so I bought it. Found out pretty quickly that it’s not really that reliable beyond the few standard apps and a bunch of games. It failed miserably when I threw some real apps that I really needed, even after all the configuration options I tweaked wguided by their support. Given the price of Crossover, it would have been significantly cheaper to just buy an Intel NUC and access it remotely.

Comment GUI vs CLI (Score 1) 44

I think that is just a silly argument. You might as well argue that nobody should use rules to differentiate equations and instead do it from first principles every time. A GUI can be thought of elevating the level of abstraction for many tasks allowing one to ignore unnecessary details, just like a biologist can explain behaviors and work with models without having to invoke particle physics, for example. With apologies to Newton, it's just another example of standing on the shoulders of giants. As developers or managers of developers, we want everyone to be as efficient as possible and focus on the added value developers bring to the project at hand. For example, when we switched to git some years ago, we were able to be instantly productive by installing a GUI that wrapped all the underlying git commands and provided a decent visual representation, a nice visual diff view and so forth. Similarly, if we need to administer one of our Linux or BSD machines as well as the daemons and other background servers (file server, web server, MySQL (Maria), etc) we can use Webmin, click on the appropriate boxes, etc and I'm done. Same for firewalls - why futz with iptables and configuration files when there are tools like pfSense (yes, running on BSD machines) that significantly decrease the time and effort needed. Sure, over the last 8 years or so on one project, once or twice, I have had to look up the appropriate git command to address a really obscure problem that the GUI tool (or an older version of such a tool) doesn't handle properly but that is extremely rare. And these days, with some of the really usable AI tools out there, fixing such problems when they occur becomes really trivial.

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