The problem is that you get a vastly distorted picture because of different survivorship rates of artifacts. In the Stone Age people used mostly wood tools but stone tools didn’t rot away.

Quite.

> Balance would be nice, yes

The exact numbers certainly would be different today, but you would probably still see the effect that there’s an overestimation of productivity

It’s a ISO-standard to use Gregorian dates even for dates predating its invention. If you need to support anything else (I never had to in my Eurocentric work so far), you’ll need to model calendars, similar to how temporal did for JavaScript: https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/calendars.html

Genuinely curious: Are non-ascii characters also case-insensitive. With Unicode comes different case-sensitivity rules according to Unicode version and locale.

I honestly have no idea!

I strongly suspect the systems that are uppercasing everything were not written to handle unicode in the first place though.

On the other hand talking about those believes can also lead to real changes. Slavery used to be seen widely a necessary evil, just like for instance war.

I don’t actually know a ton about the rhetoric around abolitionism. Are you saying they tried to convince people that everybody else thought slavery was evil? I guess I assumed they tried to convince people slavery was in-and-of-itself evil.

IMO, abolitionist made absolutist arguments like appeals to the common sense of inalienable rights, or Christian virtue. Their opponents would have to fight through the cognitive dissonance of arguing an unnatural or unchristian position.

That sounds a lot like saying slavey is obviously bad, and simultaneously also saying everyone else naturally already believes this.

Slavery used to be seen as a good thing by those who benefited from it (or thought they did).

Slavery itself required the belief in lesser humans to absolve its beneficiaries. Guilt is one hell of a party pooper.

But there is: https://www.meziantou.net/inline-snapshot-testing-in-dotnet....

One of the outcomes of that study is that your own productivity estimate might not match up with reality.

Maybe for the developers who weren't very productive to begin with, and got even lazier now.

It is very impressive indeed, but impressiveness is not the same as usefulness. If important further features can’t get implemented anymore The usefulness is pretty limited. And usefulness further needs to be weighed against cost.

> UX is a problem that is almost immune to money

Usability testing seems like something where you can get better UX with a lot of money: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-testing-101/

Oh I doubt it, unless you have that person with vision to interpret the results of the usability testing and turn them into a single cohesive design.

Good UX comes from someone that has deeply internalized the problems a piece of software is solving for users and the constraints on those users. Most startups do this without usability testing by doing things like sales or customer support. Anyway, IME usability testing is not the bottleneck to good UI.

I don't disagree with you that you need to have a singe cohesive design vision based on solving for users. But I think that certainly usability testing can lead to even better results and is mostly constrained by cost.

For sure. But without a cohesive vision throwing money at it can only make it worse if it does anything at all.

I don't think that the user you are responding to is anti-innovation, but rather points out that the usefulness of AI is oversold.

I'm using Copilot for Visual Studio at work. It is useful for me to speed some typing up using the auto-complete. On the other hand in agentic mode it fails to follow simple basic orders, and needs hand-holding to run. This might not be the most bleeding-edge setup, but the discrepancy between how it's sold and how much it actually helps for me is very real.

I think copilot is widely considered to be fairly rubbish, your description of agentic coding was also my experience prior to ~Q3 2025, but things have shifted meaningfully since then

Copilot has access to the latest models like Opus 4.6 in agentic mode as well. It's got certain quirks and I prefer a TUI myself but it isn't radically different.

Even at Microsoft they're using Claude Code over Copilot, so I think it's different enough.

You are so behind the curve if you think copilot is mostly rubbish. That's a 4+ month old take.

I just don't use any Microsoft software anymore, thankfully