Anyone else remember Microsoft Silverlight? When it came out, they had a C# & Silverlight published demo that was a movie library viewer similar to this -- not as nice, but good for its time (circa 2007).
I had a boss who was bought into .NET to the point where he thought maybe the future was Silverlight (instead of JavaScript, which had obviously "won" at that point) and he wanted me to make Silverlight have the features that the desktop framework had at the time. Which I told him immediately that seemed impossible, but since he was so sure about it I would be happy to try (I had just been given a contract there). So I was decompiling .NET framework or WPF libraries or something (don't remember) and trying to get them to compile in Silverlight. I don't remember how long I spent on that task. Possibly over a week.
I had another job last year where they kept asking me to fine tune an LLM to answer questions about text, but I was only allowed to feed in the raw text of a single document but not generate an actual Q&A dataset. I kept telling them that was not how it worked but they kept insisting I continue for weeks. I think in his mind he just thought I was just doing it wrong over and over and he was secretly training me by paying me to practice or something.
I guess it's kind of sad how many jobs I've had that were a waste of time. I'm weirdly used to it so looking back it doesn't bother me that much somehow.
It does irritate me in the moment though. I have a client now that wants to make an agent system for a certain platform. The previous day we had just been discussing MCP servers and what they do. But the next day he seemed to think that each MCP server was going to have an entire full custom UI and agent loop in it per agent instead of just providing tool commands. So MCP server became an agent. I think I explained how it normally worked and he seemed to maybe get it, but then I was trying to ask how we were going to allow people to use all of the existing MCP servers in their agents so they could combine them and the non-response made it seem like he thought that might not be important. Did not get an answer so far. I remain ever hopeful for our upcoming meeting though.
Is this a sign of old age? Answers to something specific just become rambling walks down memory lane? It's interesting how it seems that I am generally well adjusted to how futile my life has been.
Anyway, I'm sure it's just a coincidence that Silverlight sent me down this tangent.
