The missing pages and the return to normal

Charlotte: A pandemic era local trip

It has been five years since the pandemic was declared. Many posts are resurfacing to recall that weird period in time, the early pandemic. Hopes and fears. It took me four years to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic era. COVID-19 is a name unfair to the year 2019. Sure, the disease started in 2019. But it was not known to most of us until the last two weeks of January. The full impact of the disease was realized only in February with the travel restrictions and then March with "work from home" mandates. People eventually started to return to "normal." For me, 2024 was the first "fully normal" year. A full year with no more work from home. 2024 felt like a natural continuation of 2019. A perfect year. The stories of pandemic feel like a weird dream in the middle.

Recently, Microsoft announced it will discontinue Skype and migrate its users to Teams. No one likes Microsoft Teams. It is bundled with Windows Operating System and admins keep using it when better alternatives are available. As for Skype, its fate is sad. Skype started its journey as a peer-to-peer system. Microsoft acquired it, but still Skype was largely untouched. The pandemic time could have been a good time for Skype to pick up momentum. But somehow it lost that race to Zoom. Skype was a tool we used to communicate with family and friends. Teams was entirely for work. Merging Skype and Teams would be like merging Facebook with LinkedIn. Imagine your Facebook friends are now forced into your LinkedIn, as you have no option but to use the newly merged LinkedIn where you also have your Facebook friends. I can understand Microsoft realized there is no business potential for Skype. However, Skype will leave a gap no app can fill yet. Whatsapp and similar apps are phone-based, where Skype is available to computers across the operating systems as well as mobile phone. There are computer-based video alternatives based on computer operating systems - but they either lack mobile support or do not have the support to add friends. Having friends that you can check to see whether they are online and then calling them is a nice feature which Zoom does not have. Apps such as WhatsApp and FaceTime are also tied to the mobile phone number. Skype gives some sort of anonymity as it just needs an email address. Perhaps, that might be another reason Windows wanted to give up Skype?

Blurred memories of early 2020s

Social media keeps evolving. We had a period of "being nice" that made us all tip even the Starbucks baristas for that take out coffee order. Now, that habit sticks around, incorporating tipping in cashiers and self-checkout machines. Twitter was a refreshing part of our life during the early pandemic days. When the outside world was dark, Twitter gave us some light. Now we are back to normal. Twitter has gone dark and X. It is filled with weird people and bots. Everyone with a blue tick is focusing on engagement to get their cashback. Algorithm is skewed to incentivize arguments rather than happy memories and celebrating achievements. Most of my friends have left Twitter. I am still around although the conversations have either become boring or died down. It maybe time to quit. I am unlikely to quit while I minimize my time there to focus more on the physical world. The world has a lot to offer, and we are so back to normal.

The hope and the fear of AI

There is both panic and excitement around the AI in the tech world. Some of them, well founded. Others, exaggerated. In one side, we see celebrations how months-long efforts became an hour-long task. How a complex undertaking that would take a proper training on the topic (for example, write a modular, distributed algorithm in Erlang programming language) now can be done in the matter of minutes in ChatGPT or a similar LLM. Then, the other side, panic that AI is going to wipe off the junior software engineer roles. It is probably widening the gap. In one side, engineers paid in millions to write the tools. In the side, the fresh graduates reducing themselves into "prompt engineers." Do we even need a 4-year bachelors on computer science if all we do is becoming a prompt engineer?

When we grade the take-home assignments and open-Internet exams, it is very clear that most of the answers are ChatGPT-inspired. We do not ban the use of LLMs in assignments. We just ask the students to disclose their source and tool, and almost all of them honestly report the ChatGPT use and it is ok. We are a StackOverflow generation. When we got stuck with an error message, we would ask StackOverflow and someone from 10 years ago had the same problem and there is the solution! Then, we would copy-paste. When we did not know the answer to a question, we would ask Google and Google gave us the answers. So, Internet copy-pasta is not new. Perhaps, ChatGPT has made it easier. It still needed some serious effort and "expertise" to find the answer from Google and StackOverflow. Maybe ChatGPT has made the entire process easier by giving you the answer, entire answer, rather than bits and pieces of it. StackOverflow was a crowdsourcing human effort. ChatGPT is using that human effort second-hand. Proponents of AI would argue even the use of tools like ChatGPT need some level of expertise, what to ask. There is some truth in it. What differentiates us is the human element. Everyone has the tools. But tools are not going to give you the answer we need.