We all want that relaxed, let the "personal agent" do it for you lifestyle when it comes to things like vacation plans, buy the next book as you see i've finished the current one, coordinate my business meetings, and order flowers for the wife's birthday - all that "and the company that will bring it to you stuff" predicted back in the early 90s.

Now finaly that the tech is here that can do it...none of us (and rightly so) trust the corporations operating them, or the rest of the network, to let them actually do it.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.or... pretty much covered my thought about job satisfaction. If all you're doing each day, hour after hour, is "code reviews", that seems to me a really shitty job.

One reason vibe-coding is catching on with smaller firms is that, well, AI is "free" to them right now. I can go download Visual Studio Code, and get CoPilot for free...or maybe I ditch that and put Claude on it. Doesn't matter. I could still use it to generate code and hey, I'm not paying a thing.

They're getting "inexperienced junior developers" for free.

But 2 problems with that. The obvious one is noted above several times: how do you get senior, experienced developers when you haven't trained any junior developers (and don't think you're REALLY training the AI on your business model and real use cases - at any moment the engine host can just toss out a bunch of institutionalized memory for cost reasons and you're fake junior developers are as dumb as when you first started.

At some point, unless they just want the job and that's that, a code *editor* is going to get sick of editing. Maybe they won't, I don't know for sure...but I sure as hell know *I* would get sick of editing junk code day after day after day. There's no joy in it. There's no satisfaction. It is just the job, nothing more.

Now the second problem: when will they stop making it free?

This crap is expensive (as anybody following news headlines goes). And small firms and individual developers aren't paying for it. The big companies are by taking out loans against their stock values (case in point, Oracle, which took a huge 1/3rd of a drop in value for doing so).

So at some point, like with every free service that gets enshitified so that it can be somehow paid for, AI code generation will be no different. They're going to have to do SOMETHING to turn this free service into something that makes money. Licenses for improvements, a limit on number of prompts per day, advertisements showing up in the comments that the code generator generates, maybe even they'll start creating code that requires you to have a commercial library license and they won't generate 'clean' (zero derivative) code unless you pay separately, and then throw in all the vendor lock-in that goes with that.

All those things that already happen for "free" AI services online like photo cleanups. They'll have to start doing it here to recoup the huge investments.

We'll see how that changes the way this stuff is seen.

At every level of speech expression, there's a corporation involved. Nobody exists on the internet without any at some point.

So maybe I leave the 'big' social media and news sites (including youtube) and just host a blog as an ISP on a dedicated domain and VM? Nope, now my hosting provider is liable. So instead I just self-host my publishing on docker containers? Nope, because then my domain name provider and/or dyn-dns could be held liable.

They'll always have some corporation to threaten at some point to take my words off the 'net, by twisting what the word 'publishing' means...and I'm not paying any of these companies enough for them to be willing to defend me.

Yes, that's a slippery slope argument. Of course it is. And we've seen it over and over that conservative overlords will follow the slippery slope. The entire set of ideas in Project 2026 is exactly that - having achieved so much of P2025 they want to slide the slope into the next steps into pure fascism.

note, that was a napkin calculation - i didn't know they started dividends as late as 2011, and I don't know the dividend per share. i just put some numbers in to give the impression, but unlike certain politicians, I'm not trying to prove a point to influence policy decisions. Thought experiment, nothing more. :)

yeah, i just did a check. Adjusting for inflation, the stock price would need to be around $154 to be comparable in value. (Assuming total volume has remained relatively constant in that time).

that is, at $80 now, that means the stock is really worth only $42 in 2000 dollars.

So it is a number that's the same, but the value of $80 if you held onto it this entire time is still far less than you had when you started. Dividends won't quite add up to that gap - if 50c per share per quarter, and you kept the cash, that's $50 per share...but that's been spread out across inflation, so you'd have to curve the value down for what the more recent 50c means vs 50c 25 years ago. I'm not in the mood to run the calculus, but i'm gonna wager it still falls a little short.

The irony of the NYTimes complaining on copyrights given their history of reporters found guilt of or complicit in plagiarism is not lost to me.

It was probably invented by the mail-clerks at Exact Sciences. They were tired of the mishaps when receiving Cologuard return-samples whose patients didn't understand the packaging instructions.

I wonder if anyone's going to revive that old hacking tool, "back orifice".

Cheech and Chong could have benefitted from this technology.

Thanks. Now you tell me...

If the camera is poorly aimed, it puts a whole new meaning to end.

If one changes how electricity is billed, ie, the more one buys the more expensive it gets, that would help a lot. Particularly when those huge-demand customers would end up paying for the development of the very power plants that they require in the process.

Demand-surge pricing is already common in many places. I see no reason why it shouldn't be applied to industry.

At work I could've bought a fiber Ethernet tester, a copper Ethernet tester, and a Wifi tester. I would've spent around $8000 for all three for the degree of testing I was buying.

Instead I bought a $12,000 tool that can test fiber, copper, and wifi. Because carrying around three tools and using three tools if up troubleshooting a streetlight-mounted terragraph backhaul device or AP is really cumbersome.

It's cumbersome to have to carry multiple devices if one device can do the job. I can think of lots of applications where this would be useful if it's durable enough, and they all boil-down to neither having to carry multiple devices nor having to carry a large, rigid tablet.

I'm still flabbergasted of the claim that the original pad that Gagarin launched from is supposedly being set aside as a museum. That simply doesn't make economic sense. First reason, pads are not free to build. They're quite expensive. Second, the facility is not in Russia, so its utility as a museum for Russian propaganda purposes is questionable.

It would make a lot more sense if they simply chose to do upkeep on only one pad, and for whatever reasoning they chose the pad with the now-broken equipment, and the the other pad at the site is so hopelessly out of date due to a series of refreshes to the in-service pad that the costs to refurbish it into usable condition are quite high. That at least would be logical, and frankly isn't a sign of decay in a program either. It makes sense to not spend money on something disused when budgets are finite. But to claim that it's reserved as a museum? Bizarre, to say the least.