For perspective, that's >$320k today. For 'switching apps'. It's always kinda crazy to look back and realize how incredibly minute and small programs were back them. Like 'spellcheck' being a project you'd assign half a dozen programmers to or Knuth would write almost a book about.
> AI is a powerful tool because it can use tools and can also build tools for you to use or for it to use. But it is not a calculator.
It’s both, and a million other things. Of course AI can do complex calculations today. I can’t even remember the last time I saw an AI make a mistake on something like that.
The problem is that people’s mental image of what AI can do always has an inertia of 6-12 months. Like you can still see people talking about how image generation models supposedly can’t draw hands, even though today we have 2K AI-generated video with perfect hands.
Reading these types of of stories growing up was always humbling.
I started at Microsoft on the Windows Mobile compiler team, having never taken a compiler class in college. I was surrounded by people who had already done great things, and by the time my career started the glory days of doing real software engineering was already waning.
I got to work with a few of the greats during my time as Microsoft, and I wish I'd taken up an in offer I had to meet Raymond Chen.
Sitting next to people of old school caliber and watching them work is, to use the proper word yet again, humbling as hell.
Fuck your design patterns. These people can debug starting at assembly, and sometimes when that fails they'll debug by pulling out an oscilloscope. Then when that is done they'll build design patterns on top of the foundations they laid themselves.
For interest searching for "IBM PC Memory Shift software utility 1984" returned no useful hits for the software described that way early on the article.
As a 1980s developer I wonder if that may have been a reference to Borland's Sidekick launched in 1984.
At least that’s what ChatGPT says
It won't solve problems with code unless asked, but if you ask, it has its own full computer!
AI is powerful because it can use tools and can build tools for you to use or for it to use. But it is not a calculator.
It’s both, and a million other things. Of course AI can do complex calculations today. I can’t even remember the last time I saw an AI make a mistake on something like that.
The problem is that people’s mental image of what AI can do always has an inertia of 6-12 months. Like you can still see people talking about how image generation models supposedly can’t draw hands, even though today we have 2K AI-generated video with perfect hands.
I started at Microsoft on the Windows Mobile compiler team, having never taken a compiler class in college. I was surrounded by people who had already done great things, and by the time my career started the glory days of doing real software engineering was already waning.
I got to work with a few of the greats during my time as Microsoft, and I wish I'd taken up an in offer I had to meet Raymond Chen.
Sitting next to people of old school caliber and watching them work is, to use the proper word yet again, humbling as hell.
Fuck your design patterns. These people can debug starting at assembly, and sometimes when that fails they'll debug by pulling out an oscilloscope. Then when that is done they'll build design patterns on top of the foundations they laid themselves.
As a 1980s developer I wonder if that may have been a reference to Borland's Sidekick launched in 1984.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick
Or was Memory Shift an actual TSR swapper I simply never encountered?
Switcher (2004) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32414661 - Aug 2022 (30 comments)
"Don't argue with me. $100,000 is fair, and you know it." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1637862 - Aug 2010 (110 comments)
Mac OS gets multi-tasking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1319308 - May 2010 (7 comments)