Challenging Assumptions for Better Software
Software development is a lonely quiet art where souls can easily be crushed into despair. Other hand, it’s also a place where an individual, or team, can rise to levels of triumph and creation that can feel earth changing at times.
As a largely solo developer, I find myself zeroing in on challenges that really don’t warrant the attention that I give them, but I just can’t let them go. Case in point, I’ve been playing with SVG parsing for the past couple of years because I’ve chosen this format as the best way to represent vector graphics in the apps that I develop.
Two Years with a GPT
My first experience with a “GPT” was copilot, integrated into Visual Studio Code. I was working inside Microsoft, and the dates seem fuzzy now, but it’s been roughly two years. What is a “GPT” anyway? Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. It says what it is right on the box. Well, at least in nerd speak. Let’s break it down though, because it’s instructive as to the state of “AI” at the moment.
A View from The Other Side
Well, it’s been a minute, as they say.
I would say that my family’s current epoch started about a year ago, around the time I purchased the Apple Vision Pro visual computing device (VR goggles…). I was recounting the last year in an email, and it was a real feature length movie of activities. The center wasn’t necessarily around technology, but there sure was a lot of it.
Back in Feb. of 2024, I purchased my AVP. Once summer hit, we ended up heading to Denver Colorado to meet up with Stewart Tucker Lundy. Stewart is an irascible quadriplegic who was doing quite fine in the world before I ever met him. We put the AVP on his head, and in his view, it’s as if a who new world opened up for him. I mean, VR goggles are great for watching movies on a giant screen 1 inch from your eyes, but when you have a tool such as this, that’s really great at eye tracking, has low latency, and gives your hours of comfort, it can actually change your view of the world, and how you can interact in it.