Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This interview features Grady Booch, a pioneer of software engineering (co-creator of UML and object-oriented design), discussing why AI is not the "end" of the profession, but rather the catalyst for its Third Golden Age. The Three Golden Ages The First Golden Age (Late 1940s – Late 1970s): Focus: Algorithmic abstraction and decoupling software from hardware. Drivers: The Cold War and military funding (e.g., SAGE missile defense) pushed the need for real-time, distributed systems. Abstraction: Moving from machine-level "plugboards" to assembly and early high-level languages like Fortran and COBOL [08:52]. The Second Golden Age (Late 1970s – Early 2000s): Focus: Object-oriented programming and design. Drivers: The "Software Crisis"—the industry couldn't produce quality code fast enough to meet demand. This era saw the rise of the PC, open source, and the internet. Abstraction: Moving from processes/functions to objects and classes (e.g., C++, Smalltal...

This Week I Learned -  *  Brain Moore  prompted nine different AI models to programmatically generate World Clocks to show how some of them struggle with the rendering. Every minute, a new clock is displayed. Each model is allowed 2000 tokens to generate its clock.  *  2025 State of AI   * India’s first sovereign LLM Sarvam AI's 30B-parameter model is pre-trained on 16 trillion tokens and supports a 32,000-token context length, enabling long conversations and agentic workflows while keeping inference costs low due to fewer activated parameters. It is a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model and has just 1 billion activated parameters, meaning that in generating every output token, it only activates 1B parameters. * Alibaba Group's Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is a new open weight multimodal model built to be faster, cheaper, and more agent capable than its predecessors. It combines text, image, and video processing in a single architecture and uses a mixture of experts design...