I really wanted the Linux/Qt/Jolla phone to happen. They still haven’t refunded the other half of my deposit…

My son was in kindergarten in 2005 - when touchscreens were still pretty rare - they gave him one to work with at school and were so jazzed about what he was doing they encouraged us to get one at home. I set him up with a keyboard instead, and he kicked butt with the keyboard just as well, if not better than, he did on the touch screen. Of course, iPod / iPads followed soon after - anybody can use a touch screen, it doesn’t hurt to know how to use the keys too.

It’s not just the software industry. Fully 1/2 of CEOs I have worked under get their hands on some money and an idea that they’re going to grow the business - really fast - poised for growth - ready to capitalize on the opportunities when they arise - and 6-18 months later their idea doesn’t pan out and they’ve got all these people who are costing more than the company is bringing in in sales revenue, so…

There’s a small difference, the imploded CEO was “boldly going where no man had gone before, on such an accelerated timetable and tight budget” - the screen door guy was a couple of orders of magnitude more foolish.

My question: what percentage of those failures to deliver were led by people who had no idea what they were doing and expected AI to “do it for them”?

COVID excuse not required. CEOs overhiring is like birds flying south for the winter, the sun rising in the east, water being wet - it’s just what they do. 80% is a bit extreme, but he had the AI excuse, so…

Privacy is a myth everywhere that you use social media, cellular connected GPS trackers (aka phones), drive around with unique number plates while OCR capable video cameras take continuous records of which plates passed by them and when. Yes, it’s bad in the US. Is it better anywhere else?

Pro and Home is where they test-market the worst of the garbage… some of it does make it into Enterprise - a surprising amount has gotten into Office 365 - but, yeah, not enough to make it completely dysfunctional.

Unobtanium…

Making things that can only be made in 0G, then bringing them back to Earth to sell.

I suspect the manned ISS isn’t too keen to add a continuously operating 1000C furnace component to their collection of modules.

That people keep buying into… so the cycle continues.

More’s the shame. Our last console was a PS3, it was such a non-fun waste of time that we never bought into the 4 or 5. I used to buy a new PC title a year or so before than, really none new since StarCraft II.

The question the optimizer can’t really answer is: will Random.nextInt() ever return 10? If that’s a 64 bit integer it could be a LOOOOOONG time before 10 ever shows up.

4 is used for non-deterministic delay - - - is Random.nextInt() also cryptographically secure?

Anyone who thinks it’s about the prompts (or the programming language du-jour) is missing the real questions.

A.I. is taking (atleast some) junior dev jobs.

I think this is likely to be a temporary-transient effect, until they figure out that they still need thinking people to work with the LLMs to get what they need. Some of this transition period is going to involve discovery that they didn’t need some of those junior devs in the first place, and eventual discovery that they need more junior devs for new things.

I think it’s IBM that told a story of downsizing 15,000 people in various areas, and re-hiring 20,000 people in other areas - including people tasked with running the AI/LLM interfaces.

I love the: lack of exposure to toxic chemicals (usually), the lack of harsh loud work environments (usually), the comfy chair and peaceful office space (eventually), and the fact that the money is good enough pretty much seals the deal. I like working with my hands, making things, wearing ear and eye protection, cutting down trees with chainsaws, replacing engines in cars: on my own terms, not as something I have to do 250 days a year to avoid homelessness.

Material can be anything.

And, if you’re trying to authorize law enforcement to arrest and prosecute, you want the broadest definitions possible.

Google doesn’t ban for hate or feels, they ban by algorithm. The algorithms address legal responsibilities and concerns. Are the algorithms perfect? No. Are they good? Debatable. Is it possible to replace those algorithms with “thinking human beings” that do a better job? Also debatable, from a legal standpoint they’re probably much better off arguing from a position of algorithm vs human training.

if the debate is even possible then the writing is awful.

Awfully well compensated in terms of advertising views as compared with “good” writing.

Capitalism in the “free content market” at work.

can be easily interpreted as something…

This is pretty much the art of sensational journalism, popular song lyric writing and every other “writing for the masses” job out there.

Factual / accurate journalism? More noble, but less compensated.

Google’s only failure here was to not unban on his first or second appeal.

My experience of Google and the unban process is: it doesn’t exist, never works, doesn’t even escalate to a human evaluator in a 3rd world sweatshop - the algorithm simply ignores appeals inscrutably.