"overstating the degree to which genAI helped them"

You actually legitimately believe this, don't you?

I literally linked a map of where pistachios are grown in California. They are overwhelmingly in the Tulare Basin lowlands (not merely "the San Juaquin Valley" as a whole - specifically the Tulare Basin (the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley). Bakersfield to Merced, mostly Bakersfield to Fresno, is where almost all California pistachio cultivation is located. We're not talking e.g. Stockton.

The southern end of the San Joaquin valley - the Tulare Basin - gets 5-8 inches per year in the lowlands. Bakersfield gets 7 (same as Phoenix and Reno). That's desert (defined less than 10 inches per year). Fresno is borderline-desert (10-11 inches per year). Merced is 12. Stockton gets 14-18 inches per year, but that's not relevant because that's not where the concentration of pistachio cultivation is.

7 inches of rain per year is NOT Mediterranean. Even the northern end of the San Joaquin Valley (where only a very small % of California's pistachio cultivation is conducted) is at best marginally Mediterreanean. Compare Stockton's 14-18 inches to famously "Mediterranean" cities:

Athens: 15.7 in
Tunis: 18.7 in
Málaga: 19.7 in
Marseille: 20.7 in
Tel Aviv: 21.5 in
Barcelona: 24 in
Algiers: 23.6 in
Nice: 31.1 in
Beirut: 32.3 in
Naples: 39.6 in
Antalya: 41.3 in
Dubrovnik: 41.7 in

Stockton, the NORTHERN end, is up there with the absolute driest of famous Mediterranean cities. The San Joaquin Valley is not Mediterreanean. It ranges from desert in the south, borderline desert in the middle, and arid in the north. It is coastal California that is famously Mediterranean.

Specifically, Mediterrean climates are Köppen classification (Cs). Coastal California, from Los Angeles through San Francisco, is clasified as "Hot-summer Mediterranean" (Csa) to "Warm-summer Mediterreanean" (Csb). But southern San Joaquin Valley lowlands are a mix of BWh (Hot desert climate) and CWh (Cold desert climate). Most of the rest is BSk (Cold semi-arid). The northern end around Stockton just barely qualifies as Csb (Warm-summer Mediterranean). The coasts are solidly in Csa and Csb.

These are the facts, and you need to come to accept them. California's pistachio cultivation is overwhemingly in the SOUTHERN San Joaquin Valley, which is desert and borderline desert, NOT in the north, which is arid to borderline Mediterranean.

By the way, do you even know where pistachios are native to? They're native to Iran. Specifically, the high deserts and arid steppes of northeastern Iran (the Iranian Plateau, not the Caspian coast), extending into western Afghanistan. Typical rainfall in their native range is 6-16 inches per year. Their native summers are hot (~38C / 100F), highly dry and they cannot tolerate significant rainfall during the growing season. They develop a very long taproot to search for deep sources of water, so despite being adapted to dry climates, they thrive on access to water. They have high salt tolerance because they're commonly found around the edges of endorheic basins. Their native terrain looks like this. They are not a mediterranean tree.

You can always tell a conservative because they can’t go a day without talking about transgender people.

Quite strange how the company remained profitable with years of people working from home. Not like I can't spend an entire day in the office looking busy while accomplishing nothing.

California pistachios grown overwhelmingly in the Tulare Basin lowlands. The Tulare Basin lowlands get only 5-8 inches of precipitation per year (for comparison, Phoenix and Reno both get about 7 inches). As a desert is a region with less than 10 inches of rain per year, yes, pistachios are grown in the desert. Without irrigation projects the pistachio lands would be barren desert scrub. They get the water from deep wells (causing land subsidence, because they're not getting replenished), mountain rivers (which are overdrawn and under seasonal threat from diminishing winter snowpack accumulation), and water channeled all the way from the Oregon border. So much water has been channeled from rivers in the region that Tulare Lake, once the largest US lake west of the Mississippi, is usually largely dry.

Outside the San Joaquin valley, the other main ag centures are the Imperial Valley, Palo Verde Valley, Coachella Valley, and the Yuma Project, which are fed via Colorado River water which was overallocated by the Colorado River Compact. These are in the Colorado Desert, part off the Sonora Desert system.

and using AI to create fake driver's licenses to get accomplices hired as delivery drivers.

And in-person voting is fraud proof? Ha ha.

Perhaps you should be asking why the trucking company failed to file the proper I-9 employment forms?

We can't blame all this on the Clowntator, but he has had the FBI take a lot of focus off of real crimes to chase alleged illegal immigrants with "crimes" such a parking tickets, alleged voter fraud, and political opponents. Plus, a lot of experienced people left the FBI who didn't want to be part of the Gasstapo.

Thus, a cause, no, contributor yes.

but my violin for this is too small for even a tardigrade to hold.

Plus many countries are pushing to get off MS because Donald made them realize that US voters are f$cking idiots who put assholes in power. I doubt Donald's the first asshole. Remember Palin, and the string of war-mongers?* USA is an unreliable trade partner.

* Sounds like a 50's rock-group: "Palin and the Warmongers, with their new hit, 'Fox Jesus Told Us To Just Take It!'"

Stop blaming washing machines for water scarcity and start blaming your decision to buy, say, pistachios grown in a friggin' desert. A one pound bag of pistachios requires ~1200 gallons of water and contains the calories to feed a family of 4 for a single day. A modern front-loader washer uses about 10 gallons and said family probably runs it about once per day. That's a 120-to-1 ratio. Other desert crops are even worse - beef raised on alfalfa (a major crop in the desert southwest) is orders of magnitude worse. And the wastewater from the washing machine gets reclaimed for other purposes after treatment, while the irrigation water is completely lost to evaporation.

I'll repeat: your washing machine is a tiny blip on the radar. It's your choice to buy food grown in the desert southwest that is your actual water consumption. And it's a perverse historic water-rights system that leads to growing all those crops in the desert using unsustainable amounts of water. Without these historic granted water rights, if water were just an open market relative to how much were actually sustainably available, it would be basically limitless to households, and agriculture would shift to areas where water is more sustainably available.

trades that AI will never replace...

Never say "never". Future forecasts of the past got most things wrong, at least in terms of timing. I never thought I'd see AI comparable to the TOS Trek's monotone computers in my lifetime. I would have bet against it at about 20 to 1 odds. (It's the computer that goes, "Working...")

Perhaps one can make a reasonable guess for about one decade away, but beyond that is just too foggy. Perpetual trade school may be the future, as bots nibble away at different careers.

When I left in 2022, you unofficially had a limited amount of time to make it to the senior band. The "up or out" philosophy very much applied to junior engineers; if you didn't have the potential to make senior engineer (because you hadn't made it yet after x years), you were managed out.

I find this very stupid. Some people are good, reliable, and experienced "worker bees" who either don't want to be in management or are not qualified for it. I see no logical reason to get rid of such people, do you?

(I'm not sure if "Sr. Engineer" means quasi-management at MS, but the mentality is common in big companies regardless.)

the long tail of LLM-exclusive idiot moments persist, and the moment you wholly surrender the codebase to only ever touching it via the LLMs, they'll ruin your day more and more often as time goes on.

How shops use and react to it might indeed be a big factor. With new tech, many developers are like puppies who energetically piss all over everything to force the latest buzzwords into stuff. Many make messes that the next group has to clean up, and they end up making a catalog of anti-patterns to avoid reinventing the entropy discovered by the puppies. We saw it with overly aggressive use of GOF OOP patterns and microservices.

Going to be interesting to see how big the surprises are. The problems are often not the technology, but the humans using it.

I admit it, I never enjoyed coding in the first place.

I like defining and delivering my vision of the how to tool should work for the customer, like designing a custom car for them. But the frustrating part is having to re-re-re-invent GUI idioms that have been around since the mid 90's. I don't want to have to make side mirrors from scratch, I want to select them from a catalog and paint & trim them to fit the custom car's vision and style.

Another analogy is as an oil-painter; I want to buy my paints in tubes, NOT mix my own paint like they did in the 1400's. But because GUI kits/libaries are fokked up, largely because DOM is wrong tool for GUI job, they have to be micro-managed. Web UI needs a bigly rethink. COBOL lasted so long because it's not intended for UI's. Biz and CRUD idioms don't change much, yet we have to reinvent how we integrate them into UI engines over an over for some stupid reason. Let's hire Vulcans to clean them up, not the Ferengi's we have now.

My usage of "prompt" is maybe not the right word. Typically there is the direct prompt that the user enters, and then a "hidden prompt" or similar that the bot UI sends to the model cruncher when a user enters new prompts. Thus the cloud service gets the user's prompt as-is, and the "hidden prompt". Maybe that's what you are calling the "compacted context"? I couldn't find a consistent word for such on the InterWebs. For one, there are different kinds of "background info" an AI IDE/UI might send.

Anyhow, how far back in size and time does this "side prompt/context" go? I imagine there's an upper limit, at least unless one pays for premium. I wonder if the important context "falls of the edge" of the context buffer due to size trimming/quota, if one has to start re-explaining the wheel to the bot?