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Joined 3 years ago
Aquileo | cake
Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • I think the use of the term junior and senior is a bit confusing because it conflates age and skill. I would say most people use it to talk about skill, because we’re talking job titles here.

    While age and skill are certainly linked, I have known several junior engineers well over 50 (don’t hire these people!), and also some extremely skilled engineers in their very early 20s. The latter hadn’t yet earned the “senior” job title but that’s just because they didn’t know they deserved it yet.

    So yeah I do think junior (skill) programmers are pretty screwed - AI is already at least on par with the junior skill level people I’ve worked with. But I don’t think that means young people are screwed, as long as you are good at your job.

    For now anyway. Who knows how good AI will be in 5 years. We might all be out of a job.



  • FreeCAD

    FreeCAD is actually pretty good finally to be fair. Still not as good as Solidworks, but definitely usable. I dunno about its CAM capabilities though.

    OpenSCAD

    Yeah useful if you are making gears, pulleys, fasteners, art etc. Otherwise no. You’re not going to design a fork lift or motorcycle with OpenSCAD.

    For simulation there is Octave, scilab, sympy, einsteinpy and other python projects.

    I meant SystemVerilog simulation - Questa, Xcelium, VCS, Verilator. Verilator is the only open source option and while it is useful it is very far behind the commercial offerings in many ways.

    openshot

    Unusuable last time I tried. Blender’s VSE is still better even though it is buggy.

    Opensource software have no budget and no money … With opensource you can … You can’t kill it

    I wasn’t arguing the merits or flaws of open source. Also just because you can always take the source code and fork it blah blah blah doesn’t mean that actually happens. There are plenty of great open source projects that died because nobody did that. I’m saddest about Dia, which was a really great diagramming tool that is long dead. The modern replacement is Draw.io but that’s no longer open source and has some annoying flaws (e.g. you can’t export rich text to SVG).

    Maybe I should use AI to modernise Dia or something. It’s not too bad at that sort of thing.




  • Nonsense. I am an open source fan, but I also call it like it is. There are plenty of domains where closed source is still state of the art and open source options are at best inferior, sometimes laughably so. For example

    • CAD/CAM
    • Hardware design: simulation, formal verification, etc.
    • Video editing (Blender’s video sequence editor is so close to being good, but still has basic bugs unfortunately - hopefully in a few years I can take this off the list)
    • Audio production, like Fruity Loops.
    • Office software. Sorry but OpenOffice is still not a patch on MS Office. Last time I tried to use it for a presentation it literally reordered my bullet points. Absolutely bizarre bug.

    And there’s a whole host of highly domain specific software that open source will never replace because it’s too niche, e.g. Simulink. I once worked on commercial software that solved for elastic wave modes in pipes. Good luck finding open source software to do that.