Kyle Leinen

Rockin' the dad life (and dad bod), advocating for the developer experience at @JohnDeere, doing my best to help guide others

[Jon Finkel📚💪 @Jon_Finkel]

A Blockbuster Video Nostalgia Manifesto:

The thing our kids miss out on with streaming movies is the anticipation and what I call the BOLD CHOICE...

Anticipation: Dads, you know what I mean...

That mid-90s Friday afternoon feeling: home from school, gonna hit Blockbuster with your friends, maybe sneak an R-rated movie past your parents....

And you kinda know what movies might be out... but you never really knew what the new releases were gonna be...

So you'd roll into Blockbuster and cruise the New Release wall and there would ALWAYS be a surprise

A movie you missed in the theater... a movie you never knew existed... Whatever... But you'd see something and man you couldn't wait to grab it...

OR, you see a movie but it would be all rented out... then you'd pull the veteran move of checking the return pile and BAM, you got your movie...

Then you had 48 hours to watch that movie before you returned it. It was a mini-event.

And since you had limited time, we've reached our:

BOLD CHOICE

Modern streaming is a buffet of mediocrity. You can watching something, hate it, try something else, and another thing, then another...

You're never penalized for a crap decision. You have endless options from your couch.

BUT, back in the day... At Blockbuster, you had to make a Bold Choice... What 1 or 2 movies were you gonna rock with for the weekend?

You miss, you're stuck with a dud. It's on you.

Your parents weren't driving you back because you tried Stop, Or My Mom Will Shoot and hated it...

No, no, no...

You had to be damn sure you were gonna like this movie.

The cover mattered. The description mattered. The stars mattered.

Then you went with your gut and made the bold choice.

And once you left Blockbuster, you'd already paid for your decision. Now, the anticipation: would you be rewarded? Or not?

Streaming has ruined all that. I know there's no going back, but damn... I'd love to take my kids to a Blockbuster just once. Old school.

Make'em browse. Make'em choose.

I'm 100% confident they'd love it.

If you're nodding your head right now, share this and follow me @Jon_Finkel for more columns like it.

[Kyle Leinen @kleinen]

@ChrisMWilliams So much resting bitch-face in that image, it's hard not to laugh.

[Kyle Leinen @kleinen]

@github The combination of Tooling + Documentation + Platforms + Learning that help to increase confidence and decrease cognitive load for a developer.

[Kyle Leinen @kleinen]

@testingrequired I feel seen.

[GitHub @github]

Listen to @klintron on the value of non-code contributions, Kyler Middleton on the challenges of regulated environments, and a bonus clip from @kelseyhightower on scaling OS projects. https://t.co/CfK5QfEdcM

[Kyle Leinen @kleinen]

@testingrequired For me, more like reminders of past lessons learned...

[Kyle Leinen @kleinen]

@testingrequired @zaphodikus So many times have I found that devs have object permanence issues in relation to what's in their default branch of their repo. Others aren't aware that you can actually go look at the history...

[Kyle Leinen @kleinen]

@testingrequired Sounds like you had a good yak-shaving session!

[Kyle Leinen @kleinen]

@testingrequired @ministryoftest That's deep on many levels.

[Peter Nixey @peternixey]

I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again.

Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge.

A canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way.

StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day.

It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. Or vice-versa. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views.

But since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen; at least for me. Which will be bad for StackOverflow. But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans.

What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on?

When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. GPT4 will have answered them in private. So while GPT4 was trained on all of the questions asked before 2021 what will GPT6 train on?

This raises a more profound question. If this pattern replicates elsewhere & the direction of our collective knowledge alters from outward to humanity to inward into the machine then we are dependent on it in a way that supercedes all of our prior machine-dependencies.

Whether or not it "wants" to take over, the change in the nature of where information goes will mean that it takes over by default.

Like a fast-growing Covid variant, AI will become the dominant source of knowledge simply by virtue of growth. If we take the example of StackOverflow, that pool of human knowledge that used to belong to us - may be reduced down to a mere weighting inside the transformer.

Or, perhaps even more alarmingly, if we trust that the current GPT doesn't learn from its inputs, it may be lost altogether. Because if it doesn't remember what we talk about & we don't share it then where does the knowledge even go?

We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. But at least we control it. We can extract it, duplicate it, go & store it in a vault in the Arctic (as Github has done).

So what happens next? I don't know, I only have questions.

None of which you'll find on StackOverflow.

(I write on AI from a technical and product perspective. If you find that interesting then please do follow me for more)

[Tom Arbuthnot @tomarbuthnot]

And it's back!

Microsoft Teams on Stream Deck is in the Elgato Stream deck store now

Tell a friend :)

#microsoftteams #Streamdeck

[Kyle Leinen @kleinen]

Who let the intern push directly to prod?

[Sam Sweeney @SweeneyABC]

BREAKING: This morning’s catastrophic FAA computer failure was likely caused by a mistake made during routine maintenance. An engineer “replaced one file with another,” not realizing the mistake was being made. @JoshMargolin

[Dave Price @idaveprice]

This is what determination and kindness look like. Hayden and our friend Lawson Massey collected this baseball gear to benefit The Baseball Island Foundation in the Dominican Republic.I can’t put into words how thankful we are and the pride that I feel for these boys. @WHO13news

[Kyle Leinen @kleinen]

@testingrequired Time to switch to Vim. 😏

[Kyle Leinen @kleinen]

@testingrequired I've seen so many projects lately with cruft like this. My theory is the project team was told to containerize and didn't really understand what that meant.

[Technology Association of Iowa @TechnologyIowa]

A genuine and inclusive company culture is critical to success in the technology industry. Congratulations to @JohnDeere ISG for being a leading example and winning the 2022 Best Technology Company Culture of the Year Award!

#2022PrometheusAwards

[Kayla Cinnamon ☕ @cinnamon_msft]

PowerToys v0.64.0 is out now with new utilities! File Locksmith lets you see which processes are currently using selected files and Hosts File Editor lets you edit your hosts file in an editor! 🔥🔥🔥

https://t.co/AuuqCJBsJ7

[Kyle Leinen @kleinen]

@daviddeyen @McDonalds Same! My kids just got theirs today also.

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

Today is a good day for everyone to post this.

[Rob Sand @RobSandIA]

Can you spare a few dollars to get school supplies for an Iowa classroom? Find a teacher in your town, county, or search for "low income," ELL, or other issues, and help them get the supplies they need for the year! #clearthelist

https://t.co/bXGqx9KcKG