I have tried a few times but I can't last more than 2 weeks on twitter without deleting it.
Even people I have enormous respect for intellectually end up coming off as unfunny comedians, obnoxious and vapid performance artists or political hacks.
I'm an American that have been living in Europe for 15 months. My perspective is that Europe is ruled by old aristocracy that is happy with the way the life is. They're very afraid of any change, especially of giving people something constructive to do on a large scale. Another reason might be that Europe went through the two World wars, and therefore they're generally scared of any change.
I have a unpopular opinion about this, but IMO it is the population that causes this. Vast swaths of Europe are rural especially in the south. Very, very averse to any kind of change.
I'm in the Netherlands as you can tell and 'even' we are not that much more progressive. There is currently a massive farmer uprising and everybody is complaining literally non-stop about just about everything. Meanwhile nobody has even tried GPT. I get pitchforked even in my own country for saying we need to stop focusing on breeding cows and get (and stay) better at real tech.
Then again, my social skills are not really up there..
EDIT: "real tech", I know. Simplification. I know it's hard and I know it's important we eat, but countries with like 5000% more arable land can provide for us.
Just one sample quote, but it's worth reading it all:
> The dispute over nitrogen permits has put Microsoft’s data center developments in direct opposition to an increasingly powerful farming community. Earlier this month, a new political force, called the Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB), did so well in provincial elections, it became the joint-largest party in the Dutch Senate. The party, which emerged in response to the nitrogen crisis, also has strong views on data centers. “We think the data center is unnecessary,” says Ingrid de Sain, farmer turned party leader of the BBB in North Holland, referring to the Microsoft complex. “It is a waste of fertile soil to put the data centers boxes here. The BBB is against this.”
And another one because it shows some of the thoughts:
> “Of course, we need some data centers,” he says. But he wants us to talk about restructuring the way the Internet works so they are not so necessary. “We should be having the philosophical debate of what do we do with all our data? I don’t think we need to store everything online in a central place.”
I mean, it's kinda based, as an advocate of local first software. Maybe we should compute as much as we can locally on our client devices and less on the server.
> “Of course, we need some data centers,” he says. But he wants us to talk about restructuring the way the Internet works so they are not so necessary.
I'm waiting for them to suggest it should be moved to the cloud rather than put in data centres.
This is a symptom of widespread technological illiteracy, globally (at least in the west)
Ah - now I actually have to come to his defense. Because I only quoted the part immediately after this one and thought it was enough:
> Ruiter says he’s continued to talk about data centers because he wants to remind people that “the cloud” they’ve come to rely on isn’t just an ethereal concept—it’s something that has a physical manifestation, here in the farmland of North Holland. He worries that growing demand for data storage from people, and also, increasingly, AI, will just mean more and more hyperscale facilities.
> I have a unpopular opinion about this, but IMO it is the population that causes this. Vast swaths of Europe are rural especially in the south. Very, very averse to any kind of change.
And vast swathes of technologists are insanely over-enthusiastic about technical change, to the point of it resembling a religion (and the singularitarians are like the monks who self-immolate themselves, except they want to immolate all the rest of us, too).
Frankly, it's probably far wiser to take it slow than charge full speed ahead for no good reason and just hope you can fix the problems you cause.
This is fair and I agree. GPT is way too fast. My point was more about stuff happening in timespans measured in decades that they still think is too fast.
Can you help me understand what exactly is so scary about ChatGPT? The only places where I see this hype/fear around ChatGPT is here on Hacker News. I've played around with it a bit and the magic wore off in less than 10 minutes. I asked it to generate code for a sudoku solver and the result it gave me was perfect. I then asked it to write code for a crossword puzzle generator and gave me a word search puzzle generator instead, where it simply shoved all the given words together at the bottom of the puzzle. These were just toy examples - I can't imagine ChatGPT is actually useful at work outside of generating very basic text snippits.
I asked a group 10 friends, none of who work in tech, about what they think about ChatGPT and then consensus is that it's a slightly better Google in certain situations. None of them are worried that it's going to put them out of work, take over the world, or violate their privacy. I have to agree with them. I think all this AI stuff is way overhyped, just like all the other fads that came before: VR, crypto, drone delivery, CRISPR, autonomous vehicles, metaverse, etc.
The first car was slow too. The first computers were awful and nothing like today. There's countless examples like this. Lots of people are showing disturbing levels of lack of vision.
But now you're asking the government to regulate against a hypothetical damage that may never occur. The problem with "vision" is that we can all let our imaginations run wild about new technology is capable of.
I remember having the exact same discussions on HN about autonomous vehicles over a decade ago. The consensus then was that autonomous vehicles would make truck and taxi drivers obsolete within 5 years, and that this massive, sudden loss of jobs would cause a lot of social unrest. Yet here we are in 2023 and there are a grand total of zero driverless trucks on the road. I'm not saying AV tech is totally useless or that we won't someday get to a world where a large percentage of vehicles are self-driven, but it's clear now that the hype and fear around them was heavily exaggerated.
I feel the same way about ChatGPT. It's definitely cool and impressive, but the hype will die down once people realize how truly limited it is.
Oh right. I didn’t mean to say I think it needs regulation. I meant to say that I can imagine conservative people feeling threatened by this. Not saying they should, because I agree. It is limited and the real uses of GPT are quite a bit more subtle than “do everything for me” and it all needs to diffuse into society for a while. Which will probably take longer than we techies imagine it.
Edit: I do think there is a slight difference from your example here. Trucks are already here and driving them is a known thing and it is easy to see how it could work (making it work is still hard). Automating cognition itself is automating a nearly unknown skill. Nobody quite knows what it is we are doing and what box we are opening.
> But now you're asking the government to regulate against a hypothetical damage that may never occur.
That is entirely reasonable ask, especially when the harm could be large. It's a lot harder (and often impossible) to put a genie back in a bottle once it's out.
> I remember having the exact same discussions on HN about autonomous vehicles over a decade ago. The consensus then was that autonomous vehicles would make truck and taxi drivers obsolete within 5 years, and that this massive, sudden loss of jobs would cause a lot of social unrest.
So some internet commenters' schedule was wrong, but that doesn't mean the bigger point was wrong. Some people thought we'd die in a nuclear war in the 80s, and they'd still be prescient if it turns out we die in on in the 2030s.
Technologists tend to be pathologically optimistic about technology, and tend to hand wave away the problems it will cause. It's important to keep that attitude in check, because they sure as hell don't seem to have the wisdom to do it themselves.
The US has massive areas of rural space and a political system that gives a lot more power to rural areas than they realistically should have and we don't run into this problem so I don't think it's rural vs urban.
I don't care, but a few decades ago we signed some papers at the EU level that said we should stop doing them in the way we do them. I know it sucks, but the Dutch are fast at pointing out other countries' misbehaviour so it's IMO only fair that we comply with what we said we would do.
Massive simplification, but I don't think it's a completely unfair characterisation.
Maybe because you are suggesting removing these people's job without giving them an alternative first.
Also, reverse the tables: If someone comes suggesting to you to ban computers and the Internet completely and pull a study out (Internet damages brain). Would you be happy, offended, indifferent... okay I hope you get the point.
But don't they also export much of that agricultural output? Maybe the citizens do not eat it, but they sure are dependent on its exportation. Not like farmers can easily switch to something else.
"Nobody has even tried GPT" is as meaningless as possible. Not sure if this is satire, but exactly this is a kind of cargo-culting. 99% of persons are better off not "trying ChatGPT".
Your country is very lucky to have its own high-quality farmland and the culture around it. The food there is of such a quality that "countries with like 5000% more arable land" will never have a chance at of having. See the US, for all its land, most of the food is low in nutrition or outright toxic.
I see it less as an aristocracy (most of which are sidelined and/or laughed at), but instead a highly-evolved technocracy which runs Europe according to their ideal of what the citizens should want, and with a certain fear of democracy based on the occasionally vile things that European democracies have done. There is a definite fear of the people, and a elite consensus that they must be managed for their own good.
Yeah everything is geared towards the aristocracy - like VAT and Income Tax are insanely high meanwhile there is often no land value tax, property tax, inheritance tax, wealth tax or gift tax at all.
And even capital gains are taxed far less than income.
I think it's more that the US was made up of immigrants so it got to start anew without a massive established aristocracy and monarchies.
The U.S. have had centuries now to re-build dynasties, and they have, from industry to politics.
There is an issue on the capital gain / income in the E.U., but my understanding was that the U.S. was even worse in that regard (people can live of their salary through most of Europe).
Although the UK, despite having a literal aristocracy and monarchy, has a near-identical percentage of self-made millionaires, markedly more than the Continental social democracies, where far more wealth is inherited.
Why though? Italians had more freedom and choice before this ban. They were free to decide for themselves whether they wanted to use ChatGPT or not. Now they have one less option. Is that really a good thing?
Remains to be seen if the ban is sustained, but it would be great if there were a few holdout counties that can act as controls. AI tech and robots has a pretty big social dimension too.
Any examples? The only one I've encountered in the last few years is editing .net core WinForms UIs with the visual editor. In every other use case of mine, Rider has outclassed Visual Studio.
WPF, Blend, hot code reloading, repl, mixed language debugging with C++/CLI, C++/CX, C++/WinRT, SharePoint, Dynamics, SQL Server SP, Architecture tooling, coverage and automatic unit tests, COM interop tooling, Azure workloads integrations, some of the examples that come to my mind.
Also, when already paid for MSDN license which includes VS, why pay for Rider?
I believe a lot of companies are not directly paying for MSDN licenses, but retrieve them for free through a Microsoft partnership and by fulfilling conditions to obtain silver and gold competencies. I think this is the case for a lot of smaller companies.
Microsoft however is changing their partnership conditions by focusing more and more on Azure. To be able to stay a partner with similar benefits, you basically need to generate more and more revenue on Azure for Microsoft. Something that will not be doable for a lot of smaller companies in my opinion. And this also depends a lot on the focus of the company, whether it is a pure software development shop or also a reseller of Azure services.
Besides that, .net development is no longer necessarily windows development. My current team consists of 6 people. 1 uses Linux, 2 use OS X, 3 use Windows. We use Rider, Webstorm and Datagrip. We develop .net backends that run on a Linux app service plan. The front end is in Angular. The database is postgresql.
A lot of the .net developers in our company asked to use Rider instead of the VS they get through an MSDN license. Most of them are Windows users. Some people clearly think Rider is superior to VS, myself included…
As polyglot agency, we use Java for UNIX workloads, .NET is having its Python 2 / 3 moment with .NET Framework / Core, and plenty of stuff in large enterprises will probably never migrate. It is no accident that Microsoft is doing all the blog posts about how internal teams are migrating, or eventually started coming up with porting tools, which in the beggining they refused to provide (like in WCF's case). [0]
And even so, plenty of Microsoft products like Dynamics, SharePoint, VS, SQL Server CLR, are yet to make the transition to .NET Core.
So when doing UNIX workloads, we rather use languages what were created and grew up on that environment.
Visual Studio for .NET, Eclipse for Java, VSCode for node/devops (any of them for C++ workloads if needed as well), are basically how things go over here.
[0] - To be fair, Java is also having its Python 2 / 3 moment with anything beyond Java 8. Finally got to deploy Java 11 LTS into production (hurray!).
> plenty of stuff in large enterprises will probably never migrate
I think you are right. I worked, and still assist, on a couple of big projects that are built on .NET Framework. I recently pushed to have those upgraded to the latest .NET Framework version, latest version of their libraries, and have the csproj-files upgraded to the new style. Those projects are all WCF, they use NetTcp, they use transaction flow over WCF, some use WCF-msmq. There is a big dependency on distributed transactions over service boundaries, sql server and queues, and on WCF. It would be a major effort to rewrite those to run on .NET Core without distributed transactions and over HTTP APIs.
Those systems have been running just fine for over 10 years, are deployed on-prem and are only used internally on the company network. As long as .NET Framework is supported, there is no value in a rewrite to .NET Core for the business.
In the company where I work, we actually do C# on .NET Framework (maintenance, support) + Core (all new projects), Java, Delphi, and Angular + TypeScript for frontends. We use a lot of the JetBrains tools: IntelliJ IDEA for Java development, WebStorm for frontend development. We used to use Visual Studio + ReSharper for C# development and since Rider came out, a lot of people moved to that.
Rider has a great WPF editor (again, I would say it often surpasses VS in terms of code completion), and is capable of hot code reloading (for server code - it doesn't work with WPF AFAIK).
I'm also not sure what you mean by "REPL" as I tend to think of that as a language feature, not an IDE feature (most read-eval-print-loops are done through a terminal, which Rider has).
Rider also has coverage and automatic unit tests (and it's sibling product Resharper had it for years before Visual Studio added it).
"Architecture tooling" could be a quite broad category, but as far as where I've used Jetbrains products in this sense, they can automatically build class diagrams and the like from your code, and even export them to PlantUML if you want.
Jetbrains also offers an IDE that can handle C++ just fine - https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/. I don't know how well it handles WinRT, but I'll admit I've never had the need to develop or deploy a WinRT application. I do know that they've started building in MAUI integration [2].
I'll confess I don't use Dynamics, or know what SQL Server SP is, but Rider has great Database tooling built in. I've never had a problem connecting to MS SQL Server, SQLite, Postgres, or MySQL databases with it.
> Also, when already paid for MSDN license which includes VS, why pay for Rider?
I guess this question is aggressively asking why someone would choose Rider if they already have Visual Studio Enterprise, and beyond it's great tooling, the main benefits for me are the great code completion, the snappiness of the UI (you can use the editor before it has loaded the AST), and how rare crashes are with it (and it has seemingly gotten even rarer in the last few months, I can't remember it crashing). Beyond that, if you have to choose between the two, an Enterprise MSDN license is $6k/yr [0], and a commercial Rider license + the other Jetbrains C# tools is $470/yr [1]. The former is usually a difficult question with your manager and/or purchasing, while the latter hardly raises an eyebrow.
> The former is usually a difficult question with your manager and/or purchasing, while the latter hardly raises an eyebrow.
The one thing is that everyone on your team probably uses Visual Studio or has a license if you’re a .NET shop, that may not be true of Rider or ReSharper. Your manager is already convinced of the need for VS. (I just bought my own JetBrains Toolbox because I had a coupon, but my company will pay for ReSharper if we want it)
I don’t know about .NET, but REPLs don’t need to have anything to do with terminals. One example of a REPL are Swift Playgrounds in XCode. Jupyter Notebooks are also a kind of REPL.
Rider does have parallel stacks, but does not have a function to show tasks. Some deadlocks are much more difficult to debug if you can't show the tasks.
Not just industry. Linux has been my daily driver OS for ~20 years now, but I just installed windows 10 on an old laptop so I could run some old music production-related software on it, such as editors for the Virus TI and Nord Modular synths that stopped working on MacOS years ago. (And of course, has never been available on Linux outside of Wine/VMs).
I think so too. It makes me wonder why they don't update all their apps to look like W7 or Windows 10 instead of changing their design language with every release.
I'm sure there are some technical reasons there, but I suspect it's also the result of poor judgement.
The road to multicore OCaml was indeed longer and harder than expected. At the end of the day, the constraint of trying to preserve the behavior of almost all existing programs ended up driving a majority of design choices. Typically, this required at least one major rewrite of the multicore runtime along the way.
