I’ve paid for a few things for work, but I’m always living a bit outside of corporate rules when I do that. This makes it hard for me to justify if it’s only for work. In other cases, the licensing of the product doesn’t allow me to bring my personal license to work.
I’ve paid for 2 text editors, that I used personally, but also took it to work. Now I use VS Code, because the company essentially mandated it with the way they rolled out GitHub Copilot and wanted to see metrics on it. This pushed me to VSCodium at home, so I don’t have to live 2 different worlds.
I paid for the font I use in my editor, I assume that’s not something that will get flagged.
Transmit (from Panic) and Kagi are the other two things I’m using at work with my personal account. I keep waiting for them to randomly stop working one day.
Getting an actual license for software through work, that isn’t already approved, requires so much bureaucracy and red tape; I don’t even know where to begin.
I sometimes daydream about working for myself or a small company, where I can use whatever I want.
I don’t see how people would tolerate a government bailout of trillion dollar companies making a bad bet.
That’s the game. If they want the reward, they have to be ready to accept the loss when the risk doesn’t work in their favor.
If they were dumb enough to bet the entire company on it and they go out of business, oh well. Let them go under and make sure the CEO walks away with nothing. No golden parachutes for tanking a company due to unchecked greed. That would serve as a nice warning before the next overhyped bubble.
I’d be more apt to sit in the boring middle ground if all of the people hyping it up weren’t convincing the c-suite to lay off entire departments. Some wet blankets are needed to cool things down and get the general tone back to reality.
> “There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” said Karp
“More than enough jobs”… so enough jobs for all the citizens, and then more available jobs? Am I interpreting this correctly? That sounds like a case for immigration, not against it.
The idea that vocational jobs will be it, is pretty unsettling to someone who went the office route specifically to have a job that could be done as I age. Now that I’m aging and my knee stops working if I walk too much, the idea of retraining to hang drywall sounds more ludicrous than all those “learn to code” ads people loved to get upset about. I’m hoping the realities of all of this will take long enough for me to retire. If it’s anything like FSD, it will. It been 3 years away for 12 years now.
It’s usually just a slightly faster web search. When I try to have it do more, I end up spinning my wheels and then doing a web search.
I’ll sometimes have it help read really long error messages as well.
I got it to help me fix a reported security vulnerability, but it was a long road and I had to constantly work to keep it from going off the rails and adding insane amounts of complexity and extra code. It likely would have been faster for me to read up on the specific vulnerability, take a walk, and come back to my desk to write something up.
I put tinycorelinux on an old laptop a family member was looking to get rid of. It was the only OS I could find that still supported the ancient cpu.
It worked ok, but had a bit of a learning curve. I also had to run a couple commands every time I booted it up if I wanted to connect to wifi. I tried to get this to happen automatically, but wasn't having much luck. The password for the network also gets stored in plain text, so there was that. I didn't spend too much time on it, since it seemed like it was ultimately headed for the recycle bin and they just wanted to make sure none of their data was there, but thought if it worked decently well, maybe it could still be kept around and used.
I have a lot of unused gift cards. I'm sitting on about $500 worth, which is better than the $1,500+ I was sitting on a few years ago. I tried to make it a point to spend them down, hoping to get to 0, but no such luck.
Beyond the issue of not really knowing what to buy, I find the friction of them holds me back from bothering with them most of the time.
For example, I have a gift card to a Speedway gas station for $25. The date on the back is from 2012, I've been sitting on this for over a decade. If I want to use it, I need to go find a Speedway, instead of getting gas in my usual pattern, and then I can't just fill up the tank. I need to just pump exactly $25, which seems like a small thing, but I'm then not leaving will a full tank. The alternative is having to split the charge over multiple forms of payment... can this be done at the pump or do I need to go see the teller? These are a bunch of questions and friction that aren't worth it. If the total is less than $25, then I have a card with just a few dollars on it, which is even less likely to be used, as the friction remains, while having an even lower payoff.
I've been debating handing them out to random people on the street, but I'm not sure if that is actually helping anyone, or just shifting the obligation.
The free tools are still free. If coding is the hobby, why would someone want to delegate their hobby to an agent? Is the goal of a hobby the journey or the destination?
A good question! Both I would say. There's a reason people pirated Photoshop.
Not everyone will want to automate the coding of course. But if I'm dreaming of becoming a game dev and like writing games in the evenings after class, I for sure want the best tools I can find.
If I'm working as a shop assistant, but are intertested in coding and dream of a dev job, then it will help if I can use the same tools as professionals use.
If I want to contribute to open source, but all easy beginner tasks are automated away, or are 10x as difficult without an AI, then maybe I will give up.
If my friend writes a Minecraft mod supported by AI, but I can't, then I might never become interested in coding in the first place.
When I have more than a week off I usually start itching to start a project… just in time to start it, then abandon it when I start back up at work.
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