I'm 54 and started programming when I was 7 also. While I've enjoyed coding throughout my career, I'm loving this new phase of software dev, a lot of the hassle has now been removed and now you can concentrate on ACTUALLY building things without so many side tracks and hiccups from technical details. I guess I'm not as attached to coding as I thought I was, I actually really enjoy building software and now that has become a lot easier and I feel experienced devs are really well suited to working with AI to get it to build the right thing and to consider robustness, performance, approach/structure, architecture etc. I'm really enjoying myself at the moment!
I'm a year old than you. Recently, my father-in-law (an engineer in the '50s) was telling me about the transition from analog to digital electronics and how it changed his entire world.
I feel very fortunate that I was able to start out writing machine code and can now watch a machine write code on its own. I'm not even remotely claiming SOTA models can do what we do, but they are closer than ever before.
It's time to accept that the world has changed again.
lot of people complaining, but, seems like they rolled it out already in UK and Australia... no real complaints I know of, and I'm in NZ and are on NZ/Aussie discords. Also teen mode doesn't actually seem that restrictive. Seems an ok move to me. But for whatever reason people seem to froth at the mouth when it comes to discord on here.
Uk, Effective from July 25, 2025, regulated platforms must use "highly effective" methods, such as facial age estimation, credit card checks, or ID verification to prevent children from accessing harmful material, with potential fines or bans for non-compliance. (extents to any platform with user uploaded content)
Australia, as of 10 December 2025 Australia requires social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent users under 16 from accessing accounts.
No wonder there where "no real complaints" those countries are already under heavy age verification law.
> Also teen mode doesn't actually seem that restrictive.
Doesn't mean it can't get more restrictive in a few months. Ease people into it would actually be the smart move since there will be less complaints.
> But for whatever reason people seem to froth at the mouth when it comes to discord on here.
Because Discord has not handled their data well in recent memory (actually ever).
Also it is a global rollout not mandated by the countries law. This indicates that it is a business decisions and therefore probably they stand to gain from it financially.
or.... for simplicities sake, everywhere operates the same way. More countries are going to require this, this makes it pretty simple for them I'm guessing, just roll it out everywhere.
they had a breach last year...they didn't leak their core data, the 3rd party they used leaked data to do with age verification. Which was bad. What other data problems you see? Nearly everything else is unconfirmed/scraping public data.
They could make it more restrictive? sure.... but why? a core demographic for them is teens playing games and joining servers related to their games, why would they make it worse for one of their biggest target audiences? Any company who are targeting kids (Roblox did something similar) really do have to show they are doing at least something to protect that demographic. The consequence of not doing that is governments coming after you. That's their financial incentive, not to be shutdown, fined, sued etc.
I have a discord account that I use very rarely, and just tried it (from the UK) and it didn't ask me for any ID or face scan. If they do start doing that, I'll simply stop using the service.
I feel like I'm doing much nicer thinking now, I'm doing more systems thinking, not only that I'm iterating on system design a lot more because it is a lot easier to change with AI
Other than smaller SaaS companies who offer things easily replaceable, I don't think many of the bigger ones can be replaced by AI, if anything, it might make them better. For instance I can't see us replacing our ticket management/support software, hosting, manufacturing/sales/stock software, accounting software, etc but it would be great if we could leverage all those tools better via AI (some are already easy to leverage).
The interesting thing I've noticed is software library authors could take a beating though. Quite a few libs in the .NET world have gone down the monetized paths, for all of the ones I've been using, I've just got AI to remove them and implement native solutions. But none of these are large listed companies.
What I don't understand is why so few people talk about AugmentCode, it uses claude (and others) but builds context of your project and tends to understand your repos better.
wouldn't AI actually be good for filtering given it's going to be a lot better at knowing what has been published? Also seems possible that it could actually work out papers that have ideas that are novel, or at least come up with some kind of likely score.
people tend to complain more than comment on being content. A fraction of a percent of windows user base is a lot of people. ( given around 500 million.... 1 percent is 5 million people ish, it would seem to me much much less than 5 million people are generally complaining)
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