Ben and Ryan explore why configuration is so complicated, the right to repair, the best programming languages for beginners, how AI is grading exams in Texas, Automattic’s $125M acquisition of Beeper, and why a major US city’s train system still relies on floppy disks. Plus: The unique challenge of keeping up with a field that’s changing as rapidly as GenAI.
Why can’t configuration be made simple?
Apple is making it easier for users to repair their iPhones with used parts.
Texas is swapping human graders for AI.
Automattic (owner of WordPress) is acquiring Beeper for $125M.
Silicon Valley or not, San Francisco’s train system still uses floppy disks. But don’t worry, an upgrade is coming—in 2030.
Shoutout to Bite code, who earned a Stellar Question badge with How do I change the URI (URL) for a remote Git repository?.
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Ben Popper Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I am your host, Ben Popper, joined as I often am by my colleague and collaborator, Ryan Donovan, Editor of our blog, maestro of our newsletter. Ryan–
Ryan Donovan Yes, sir.
BP –we have talked a lot about AI, so we're not going to start with that today. I want to hear from you about why configuration can't just be simple.
RD So this is something that comes up. It's not just your software settings. So it's allowing the software to be a little bit flexible for what the user needs, and it's being able to handle all of the settings. The metaphor that they use is, when you have a sink in your apartment, there's all sorts of configurations built into that sink design– the depth of it, where the water hits, the drain, but in use, you may have a bowl and it hits the bowl and the water shoots onto your shirt or whatever because there's a fixed faucet. So making a faucet flexible is adding extra configuration, but then you have to code that into the product, manage any changes and any changes that affect it, and it's sort of a problem that gets exponentially harder.
BP And in your example, which I can relate to as a dad with kids who just throw a bunch of stuff in the sink, one has to adapt to the situation because the sink can’t adapt for you. And I think maybe part of the point of this was that if we went from multi-user systems on some kind of local network to personal computers, to virtual hosts, to container clusters, you can now plan services and think about it bottom-up. What are the devices and behaviors that are going to be involved, and as those change, can our system adapt?
RD And it talks about the change drift, erosion, maintenance issues like garbage collection, all these things that make it so you can't just have a set static piece of code to handle some change. And this is a very deep article that goes into the Euclidean coordinates of the semantic space of changes and talks about promise theory, so if you would like to get out of your depth on change management, we'll put this link in the show notes.
BP Autonomous view– I will keep to this. Subordinate view– I will keep what you want; tell me what you want. We did have a conversation with the CEO of Netlify, which helps lots of people to build websites, interactive ones, speedy ones, and he espoused a view that I've heard tossed around here and there that we could be headed towards a world of software 2.0 where the UI and the UX are way more flexible and personalized. They can adapt on the fly to what the user is doing, learn from a user mistake, and goad them to better understand and make use of and get value out of the software. So this is a deep piece about all of that, but I've also heard people express maybe some optimism recently that some of the technologies coming on board are going to allow this.
RD And I think that sort of possibility of making changes on the fly or adapting settings. The classic text adventure game Zork has to program every possible choice. And then a couple of years ago, I think it was OpenAI that released AI Dungeon where it had GPT 1 or 2 behind it, and you could say, “I want to kiss the dragon,” and then it would send you off on a story around trying to kiss the dragon and then you're shopping clothing and it allows you to pursue the sort of interface you want.
BP That also has come up– the procedurally-generated worlds of certain video games now seem to sprawl out endlessly and people love No Man's Sky. It was a rough start, but it sort of built steam over time. And that in the future, as we've discussed, these will be not just infinitely evolving, but each of us could have our own little pocket dimension. We don't have to live in the MCU because it can adapt to us.
RD That is a promise of AI. No Man's Sky caught flack at the beginning for not actually being as procedural and as varied as it promised, and I think there have been other games that have sort of toned that down and have given you more directed experiences, and I think there's a good middle ground to be found there.
BP This was an issue that came up a lot when I worked at The Verge, and I know we've discussed it a little bit here on the podcast, but today –Thursday, April 11th, 2024, to give it a timestamp– Apple announces opening its iPhone repair process up to include used components. Starting this fall, customers at independent repair shops will be able to fix the handset using anything compatible. This has been a long, slow process of Apple's very walled garden. The walls are coming down and it remains to be seen whether the consumer will benefit or not. It is nice that you can now do this. On the other hand, it opens up the possibility of going to a shady place that promises to repair and gives you some used parts that break on you in a week.
RD That's always a risk with used stuff. And I think this is a nice step. The right to repair has been a long fought battle, but I think being able to sort of do that yourself would be the next step. I've heard that even with some of the right to repair stuff, doing the repair itself requires loaning out a $2,000 heat device to open up the battery pack.
BP Right. And there's a quote in here from John Ternus, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, “Parts pairing is used a lot outside and has this negative connotation. I think it's led people to believe that we somehow block third party parts from working, which we don't. The way we look at it is, we need to know what parts are in the device for a few reasons, and one of which, which seems reasonable to me, we need to authenticate it’s a real Apple biometric device, for example, and hasn't been spoofed or something like that.” So it is true that I trust my device to do a lot for me and I offload the mental work of passwords to my fingerprint and my FaceID. And if I took my device to a third party repair shop and they swapped in a spoof that harvested that data, it would be terrible for me.
RD But on the other hand, I have a desktop PC here that's a bit of a Frankenstein. I've had power supplies die on me and replaced those and put in new memory chips and they're all of different origins. They're all different companies. And I think that's the power of shared standards. They're not just saying, “Oh, this has to be all the same company.” It has to work together. It has to play nice, but.
BP So do you have anything biometric on your PC, or no?
RD No.
BP Do you live in a Faraday cage, or no?
RD No, not yet, but my kitchen does have a little bit of a Faraday cage going on.
BP So I mentioned The Verge where I used to work and our friend Eira shared a good link here. I've been having a debate with a friend of mine– is Gen AI really changing the world or not? Is it more just hype than substance? This story says Texas plans to replace 4,000 people and save $15-20 million a year by having a large language model do the grading of its state assessment tests. So all the kids every year will have to write these exams and these essays and the system has been trained on 3,000 exam responses that already got two rounds of human grading and they will be spitting out the pass or fail.
RD I think that's interesting. I definitely appreciate the workload it’s taking off of teachers. Teachers are underpaid and overworked and it allows for more than just a Scantron test where you can guess and get it right a quarter of the time. But on the other hand, I think as we've talked about a lot of these, AI systems just sort of converge on a mean. It's going to just be a specific writing style. There's going to be ways to game it. You're just writing for the AI like old school SEO stuff.
BP All the great old things with Bart Simpson or PCU where somebody gets their hand on the exam questions beforehand. Now somebody will get their hands on what essay was preferred by the AI and you'll have to imitate that style.
RD Right. What's the training data?
BP Yeah, exactly.
RD So we ran across some interesting discussions on Stack Overflow. This one is about what's the best beginner programmer language, and I think that's something everybody's looking for– what's the one to start. And I think when I started in college, we did C++ briefly and then Java, and Java was the newest hotness at the time. But I know a lot of places have moved to Python because it is sort of that easier readable one.
BP I think also academically things have shifted and so it's kind of a chicken and an egg thing. Academia sees industry shifting, then academia switches to teaching Python more often than they would teach C or Java, and then students come out with those skills and so startups tend to gravitate towards them. I guess Python also seems to be a good fit in the world of data science and machine learning, and since that's the hotness these days, it has more applicability to a lot more different careers.
RD And I think this discussion is interesting because most of the top answers are saying C, C++, Java, but it takes a while to get down to JavaScript and JavaScript is used everywhere. And I know there's a lot of frustration with JavaScript as a language so maybe there's a reason not to start with JavaScript.
BP Also maybe people are asking this in terms of what's going to get me a high-paying job. JavaScript seems like the kind of thing where a lot of people learn it on their own or through a bootcamp and maybe there's more competition, but I don't know.
RD And I think those are actually two different questions. What's the best to learn programming and what's going to get me the best results in the field? Because I think you can get a programming language that conveys a lot of interesting programming concepts in a really good way, or you can get one that is useful in the real world, and maybe the two shall meet.
BP Ryan–
RD Yes, sir.
BP –I think we talked about this company, Beeper, once before. It was a company that was trying to integrate iOS and Android messages, and they were having a back and forth with Apple about it. They were just recently acquired by Automatic, the company behind WordPress. And I think this is to our earlier point, a bet that a regulatory shift is underway, that as the walled garden comes down and people look to build these bridges, there will be a big business here. So I thought that was an interesting one. Also not sure exactly what Automatic has to do with this.
RD I think they are maybe just guessing. They are invested in open platforms. I think WordPress is a pretty open platform. But if these messaging platforms are going to stop fighting apps on top of them, I think that's a win for everybody, but is that a trend or are we going to see Facebook syndicating on the Fediverse?
BP I'm not holding my breath, but you never know. One chat to rule them all.
RD There you go.
BP I guess I wouldn't mind.
RD And I think if that does happen, there's going to be a fight to create the best platform with the best features. And I think that's something where the user is going to win. Down with vendor lock-in.
BP This is an important public service announcement from tech debt will never die– San Francisco, the city most associated with Silicon Valley and the heart of technology and innovation in the United States, has a public transit system called the Muni and it runs on 5.25-inch floppy disks. And it will until 2030, because it will take that long to shift over.
RD It's definitely tough to move off of legacy systems when you need to be running it in production. I've heard that airplane scheduling systems ran on ancient mainframes for years after that was reasonable. I don't know if they do anymore, but if something is mission critical all the time, you can't switch it over to a sleek cloud system while the buses are in motion.
BP The buses are part of the Muni's Metro Automatic Train Control System which are tied into things like propulsion and braking. So literally in motion, as you would say. “If it ain't broke, don't fix it,” says one floppy disk defender. Floppy disk apologist.
RD Why do you need the latest, greatest technology? Buses run on time. That's fun.
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BP All right, everyone. It is that time of the show. We want to shout out a user who came on Stack Overflow and contributed a little knowledge. As you may know, Stack Overflow has done some licensing deals to have this data help train AI, and we think an ethical approach to AI is to recognize the humans in the loop to make sure some of the value from whatever the AI does comes back into the community. So, Hobbs, awarded March 31st, a Stellar Answer Badge. This answer was so good that it was saved by 100 users. “How do I change the URI (URL) for a remote Git repository?” A great answer that has helped– you want to take a guess? This might be the most I've ever seen.
RD Really? A hundred thousand?
BP 4.1 million times this question has been used, so that's a lot of people that have been reached with a good answer. Congratulations, Hobbs, for providing one and for your badge. All right, everybody. As always, I am Ben Popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. Thanks so much for listening. Reach out to me on X @BenPopper. Email us with questions or suggestions for the show: podcast@stackoverflow.com. And if you enjoyed yourself, leave us a rating and a review, because it really helps.
RD I'm Ryan Donovan. I edit the blog here at Stack Overflow. You can find it at stackoverflow.blog. And if you want to reach out to me on X, you can find me @RThorDonovan.
BP Thanks for listening, and we will talk to you soon.
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