Computer Related – A Deep Dive

No, AI is not going to replace developers.

The programming subreddits have been flooded with memes about AI replacing developers. Of course these posts are almost universally humor but the comments always have some worried opinions, typically from less experienced programmers such as CS undergrads concerned about their career prospects. I suppose I could imagine their alarm as AlphaCode placed above the 50th percentile in a coding competition and CS students typically practice similar problems to ace job interviews.

I’m a technical fellow in an AI program at MIT and I’m of the opinion that AIs replacing programmers is an almost laughable proposition. In a conversation about generative AI at the Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab, other colleagues agreed that AI won’t be replacing developers. Professor Solar-Lezama highlighted a few current capability limitations where AI falls short:

Scale: Commercial problems are large, complex, and interconnected. Even the best models cannot ingest codebases with tens of millions of lines of code in one shot.
Locality: Problems often require modifications to existing codebases in many different locations. This is beyond the ability of current AI on a large scale.
Abstraction: AI doesn’t organize code into logical units. Abstraction is one of the central principals of object oriented programming that supports reuse, maintainability, and understandability.

Lastly there is a common factor that won’t change even as AIs get better: project specification. I’ve often heard from friends in private industry that “AI will replace me as soon as the PM can accurately describe what he wants”, a jab at our fellow teammates and eternal enemies in project management. Once someone can create a specification understandable by a programming AI, they can replace a programmer. But of course creating a machine readable specification is called programming.

So what’s going to happen? In the 50s, the FORTRAN Automatic Coding System reduced development time by an order of magnitude allowing the humans to do more critical thinking instead of tedious tasks. Hopefully AI assistance will similarly allow us to focus on the real computer science, not rewriting basic functions or finding that unclosed parenthesis. And yes, you read that right, it was called the FORTRAN Automatic Coding System; we’ve been made “redundant” before.

Fashion Award for Metaverse Design: brilliant idea, must broaden scope

The Fashion Awards hosted by the British Fashion Council added a Metaverse Design Award to their events last year. A digital fashion award is a brilliant idea. Fashion has already crossed into the virtual realm with video games with Louis Vuitton designing for League of Legends and Fortnite collaborating Moncler and Balenciaga. The craft of building digital assets is uniquely challenging and artful, it deserves it’s own award category.

While the award itself a great idea, I feel it was severely limited in scope for its first implementation by only considering Roblox assets. The award event was held in Roblox, presented by Alessandro Michele, Creative Director of Gucci. I believe the award was given exclusively online. While I didn’t watch The Fashion Awards, I can’t find any mention of the Roblox designers sharing the stage with designers and models. The designs could have been displayed on the giant screens and projections on stage at the in person event.

In the future I hope to see asset designers accepting their awards in person but more importantly, I hope to see the category open to all digital assets with clothing involved. In the video game community, fashion is mostly seen as a subset of character design. Character designers as well as asset creators should be considered from all platforms for this award. The panel should include a combination of fashion and asset directors.

Congratulations to cSapphire on the award, I’m sure it was well deserved. The designer had previously created virtual clothing for the Gucci collaboration with Roblox. Oddly, the British Fashion Council’s article didn’t include a single picture of the designer’s work. Here’s an image from their boutique site:

[NS-PCY5BMA] Insignia – Bluetooth 4.0 USB Adapter Drivers

So you needed a quick Bluetooth adapter, went to BestBuy, and picked up an insignia adapter model NS-PCY5BMA? But now it’s not working despite its advertisement as “plug and play”? And the manual is no help at all? Then you went looking for a driver but the Insignia website has nothing? Then you find out that it uses Broadcom hardware and their website says all their drivers are part of windows updates but obviously it isn’t installed by default? Well you’re lucky you’ve found this obscure blog on the internet. Here’s how you download the driver:

Go to the Microsoft update catalog. Or attempt to use this direct download link and skip to step 4. The direct download link likely won’t work on Chrome, it also may just 404 over time.*
Search “Broadcom Corporation driver update for Micro size USB to Bluetooth Dongle”
Click the download button (I just used the top most recent result) and click on the download link from the pop up. If it’s not downloading it’s probably because Chrome recognizes the file as potentially malicious. If that’s the case then repeat these steps in another browser, I used Edge.
Extract the cabinet file you just downloaded. If you don’t see an extract button just enter the cabinet file with windows explorer by double clicking then drag/drop the files out of the window to a new folder.
Open your device manager, right click on “Bcm20702a0” and select update driver. Select “browse my computer for drivers” and select the folder with the extracted cabinet file.
The driver should download and you should see Bluetooth in your device manager.

This post is getting a lot of traffic so I’m going to move it to medium to increase its SEO and hopefully help more people. If you have helpful comments to solve this problem please post it there: https://medium.com/@andrewdpham3/ns-pcy5bma-insignia-bluetooth-4-0-usb-adapter-drivers-a516c4479572

* If neither of these options work, you can download it from my GitHub mirror here HOWEVER you really shouldn’t trust mirrors for this kind of thing, always download drivers from trusted websites, not mirror downloads put up by some random guy on the internet like me.

Review: Ducky x MK Creator Mecha Mini

I bought the “Ducky x MK Creator Mecha Mini RGB 60% Double Shot Pudding PBT Mechanical Keyboard” because I needed a 60% for FPS gaming and I loved the look of the pudding keycaps. As it says in the name, it’s a collab with mechanicalkeyboards.com and was available for a limited time. For the premium you get the aforementioned pudding keycaps, a custom purple base, and a custom creator spacebar. It also comes with the standard keycap puller and cable.

There should be more available soon; “late March 2021” they advertise. But it’s March 21st right now and it’s still not available. I didn’t find this product during the retail window so I had to get mine off ebay. After a bit of negotiating the seller and I settled for $200 with shipping, about $80 over the retail price.

This is going to be an FPS only keyboard so I went with black switches. The size is perfect, giving me the most room possible so that I don’t run into my keyboard on long flicks. I don’t like linear switches nor 60% keyboards for typing so I keep another keyboard on my desk when I need to do some work.

As with the normal one 2 mini, the base is a high quality metal and the entire keyboard has a surprising weight. Opening and closing the feet gives the most satisfying sound, like flipping a switch on a piece of heavy machinery. I’ve been using this keyboard for three months now and I’ve seen no signs of wear, the finish on every part is just as solid as when I bought it.

This is all consistent with the standard Ducky one 2 mini. The things that make this keyboard unique, I’m not impressed by. I dislike the texture of the keycaps. The plastic is semi-rough and it dirties easily. You can also feel / see bit of plastic where the mold was injected near the top of all the keycaps (I think it’s called a sprue?). That part faces away from you when you’re typing so you’d never feel or look at it with regular use but upon closer inspection it’s easily visible. The custom space bar design is a low resolution. The lines in the design are imperfect and its noticeable even when just looking down at the keyboard. They include the pudding space bar in the box but I’m likely just going to replace this with an artisan. Lastly being a custom collab for mechanical keyboard enthusiasts, I feel like it’s missing an essential item we all purchase anyways, a custom cable. I would have loved a custom purple coiled cable even if we had to pay more for it.

So would I recommend the keyboard? For a $20 premium on the regular ducky one 2 mini? Yeah, sure. The keycaps look cool and you get a purple base. For a $100 premium, like you’d get trying to buy one new off ebay right now? Nah.