How we underestimate the effect of generative AI — Like every online human being, you’ve learned to be an effective citizen of the web. You know how to recognize scammers. Steer around clickbait. Participate in online discussions without feeding the trolls. These web survival skills are about to be severely compromised — maybe even invalidated completely — by a…

Still in preview, it’s a mishmash of good, bad, and boring — In recent years, Microsoft’s gone from strength to strength with developer-pleasing features. They built the world’s most popular code editor from scratch, took their programming platform open source, and patched the gaps in the Windows operating system with a first-rate terminal, a new package manager, and some serious support for…

What stays in? What gets cut? Let the speculation begin! — Today, it’s called C# Next. It’s still just a bundle of ideas struggling to make it out into the world. But in a few more months, parts of C# Next will become the official C# 12. (Side note: That’s a relatively solid deadline, because the evolution of C# is tied…

Here’s which one did the best job introducing the language — Life’s never too short to learn another programming language, and I’ve had Rust — winner of Stack Overflow’s most loved language for the past eight years — on my list for quite some time. I like its profile as the sensible person’s low-level language. And I’ve watched it stack up…

And WSL makes it easy — If you’re currently running and loving WSL on your Windows box, you can stop here. You already know about the most significant developer feature that’s come to Windows in the past decade. Don’t get me wrong — Microsoft has done great work building tools like VS Code and TypeScript. …

It’s easier to own the infrastructure than control the community — It’s a tale as old as time. A wildly popular but terminally unprofitable company decides to make big changes to improve its financial position, even though the changes risk undermining what made it so popular in the first place. …

AI’s greatest skill is feeding you convincing misinformation, from literary analysis to programming advice — It’s hard to believe that we’ve only been living with ChatGPT for a matter of months. …

It was supposed to replace Windows Forms. Now it will be lucky to live as long. — Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF, has a special place in my heart. In the distant past, when there was nothing I liked better than a nicely put-together desktop application, WPF was ahead of its time. It had forward-thinking features like reflowable layouts and vector-based rendering. It adopted modern ideas like…

The promise is any art you want… if you can ask the right question — As a programmer and general tech tinkerer, I’ve seen plenty of AI projects. Some were impressive (GitHub Copilot). Others much less so (like the AI bot that digested all the world’s Christmas music, then wrote this). …