The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Make computing personal again (News)
Mon, 20 Jan 2025
Benj Edwards wants to put the "personal" back in "personal computer", the answer.ai folks took Devin for a month-long spin, Asaf Zamir explains why senior engineers can remain ICs and still have a fulfilling career, Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti rethinks documentation by putting user actions first & Tero Piirainen lays out his case for Nue, the standards first web framework.
Full Episode
What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, January 20th, 2025. Have you ever heard of Coyote Time? No, not your annual Coyote Ugly rewatch party. Coyote Time is an affordance in video game design where the game intentionally waits a brief period after you run off the side of a platform before it plummets you to your imminent demise.
It's named after the wily coyote cartoons and it's apparently been making me feel better at video games than I actually am for the entirety of my life. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss. Okay, let's get into this week's news. It's time to make computing personal again.
Benj Edwards deftly describes how surveillance capitalism and DRM turned home tech from friend to foe by asking a litany of rhetorical questions about the past. What percentage of your income had to go towards annual software subscriptions on a 20th century Windows PC? Which part of this TV set kept track of everything you watched and then secretly sold the data to advertisers?
Which part of Windows 95 fed you ads without your consent and kept track of everything you did remotely so Microsoft could keep stats on it? Which part of Amazon.com in 2000 tried to get you to buy millions of no-name counterfeit and dangerous goods propped up by stealth advertising and fake reviews?
Which part of Google in the 1990s and early 2000s blanketed its results with deceptive ads or made you add Reddit to every search to get good results that weren't overwhelmed by SEO-seeking filler content? When you say it like that, Benj... He continues, quote, End quote.
Benj has a few ideas on what we can do individually to push this idea forward, but he believes it will take collective action to make meaningful changes. Whether through purposeful reform or the eventual collapse of digital strip mining, I believe the personal computer will eventually rise again along with our chance to reclaim control of our digital lives. Thoughts on a month with Devin.
Hamil Hussain, Isaac Flath, and Jonna Whitaker from Answer.ai put Devin... the product whose creators promised it to be a fully autonomous software engineer through its paces. They were optimistic. Quote, something about Devin felt different. If it could deliver even half of what it promised, it could transform how we work.
But while Twitter was full of enthusiasm, we couldn't find many detailed accounts of people actually using it. End quote. Their conclusions confirm my priors, so I'm happy to share them with you. Jono says, Here's Isaac's take.
I had initial excitement at how close it was because I felt I could tweak a few things, and then slowly got frustrated as I had to change more and more to end up to the point where I would have been better off starting from scratch and going step by step. And Hummel's findings...
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