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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 10th, 2025

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  • It is important to understand that most of the job of software development is not making the code work. That’s the easy part.

    There are two hard parts::

    -Making code that is easy to understand, modify as necessary, and repair when problems are found.

    -Interpreting what customers are asking for. Customers usually don’t have the vocabulary and knowledge of the inside of a program that they would need to have to articulate exactly what they want.

    In order for AI to replace programmers, customers will have to start accurately describing what they want the software to do, and AI will have to start making code that is easy for humans to read and modify.

    This means that good programmers’ jobs are generally safe from AI, and probably will be for a long time. Bad programmers and people who are around just to fill in boilerplates are probably not going to stick around, but the people who actually have skill in those tougher parts will be AOK.






  • It was not as big a deal as you might think. In order to get a visa that we can renew each year, we basically had to prove these things:

    -We have valid passports and identities -We are not going to take a French person’s job -We have health insurance (so that we don’t end up stiffing the French healthcare system) -We won’t be homeless on arrival in France -We have enough savings to support ourselves for the time of our Visa’s validity (because we’re not allowed to work for a French based company while we’re here, see second point)

    I’ve been saving 50+% of my gross pay for the whole time I was working, and my wife is doing the same, so we had plenty of money available to buy plane tickets, pay lawyers to advise us, buy health insurance, and get help with the application process. Honestly, the lawyers were not needed and we’re very expensive I would not use lawyer again. I used them because we needed to get out fast and I wanted to make sure that the first application would be successful. The instructions on the website for the French government were clear and straightforward and we could have done the application ourselves without major difficulty. There were even versions of the application forms available in English with checklists of documents to bring.

    My wife is not French, but my mother, my stepfather, and my three step-siblings are. Unfortunately my mother naturalized here after I could have gotten French citizenship through her (I was 23 when she became a French citizen).


  • It probably didn’t have anything to do with Firefox itself. It’s likely related to something I messed up in FF or it was something to do with the ancient laptop I had at the time being a junk heap, but I tried Chrome and noticed that the trouble didn’t exist there. So I started using Chrome.

    I kept using it because of all the google integration, which was really handy when I was using the google business suite to run my own small business. I shut that down two years ago now, so there’s nothing really keeping me on Chrome any more.

    I swapped back to FF a few days ago and YouTube works fine now. So I’m back on the FF train and giving Google the finger the whole way over banning the adblockers that I liked.


  • For sure. There can also be a problem of too little moderation, though. There is a balance to be struck between censorship of opposing views and getting rid of off-topic spam.

    For instance, there were a few regional subreddits that were obviously intended to be for thing like “Which restaurants are worth a 30 minute drive to go to” and “Come to my band’s concert at the waterfront this weekend”, but had turned into basically nothing but off-topic spam wars about national level political topics.

    The mods refused to do anything about it, so I just left because 90+% of the content was stuff I didn’t come to that subreddit to read. Keep that shit on r/politics.