Unit tests are generally a mechanical translation of the requirements into software that verifies each requirement has been met. That certainly sounds like something AI could handle. Efficiency isn't really important for unit tests. Where I struggle is the cases where I don't have clearly stated requirements to work off of. If I have to write my own requirements, I'm gonna work backwards from the results my code generates to the requirements, and that generally makes for crap software,

"OpenAI withdrew three AI-generated math preprints and revised 14 others in October 2026 after a single sign error cascaded through a chain of dependent proofs." But they were so PROUD of their baby's hallucinations!

My understanding was that AI assistants make bad programmers more productive and good programmers less productive. I believe AI should review human code, but I also wouldn't take anything the AI says at face value; it hallucinates. Human verification of any AI decision should be mandatory.

The Oscars seem very political to me. They appear to frequently hand out an Oscar to someone for one of their worst movies (e.g. Denzel Washington for Training Day) just because they have a track record of very good roles played that they didn't get Oscars for. In other words, many "Best Actor" awards are really lifetime achievement awards in disguise. I don't know of the Emmys work the same way, I don't pay that much attention to them. Especially now that most of them are handed out for shows I don't pay subscription feeds to watch. (I am debating subscribing to Apple TV+ just long enough to binge Ted Lasso though.)

Our economic system was built on the assumption of continuous growth, i.e. that there would always be a lot more young people to take care of the old people than there are old people. South Korea and Japan are somewhat worried right now as they approach a geriatric majority, they are looking to replace young people with robots. That _might_ work. Alternatively, we could just start leaving people who can no longer take care of themselves out on the ice to feed the ravens like the Eskimos did. Trump would feed a LOT of ravens!

Sure, we'll just assign "master all things x509" to engineer #78 of 205... in our four-person shop.

Everyone in this conversation seems to be assuming every company has a massive IT department with folks just standing around picking their noses waiting for real work to show up and break the monotony. Outside Silicon Valley and Fortune-500s, that's an extreme rarity.

There's also an implicit assumption we're all running major-vendor enterprise-grade software written within the last twenty years; rather than an actively automation-hostile "best of a bad breed" industry-specific solution cobbled together by the nephew of a paranoid former CEO around the time I was graduating high-school, and it's sadly still the top tool of the trade.

Those who enjoy the luxury of never needing to leave Entra to do their jobs should stop throwing stones, take a step back, and realize their world isn't representative of the real world of IT.

So is vim, but nobody ever claimed that it is worth $2e12.

Probably not.

25 cents is two bits (in auctioneer talk https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... )

You realize you don't have the power to "press charges", right? Whether or not Flock is happy with the situation, they have zero ability to compel the police to do a damned thing about it. Now... Sure, nobody can promise the feds won't investigate (though they wouldn't even have jurisdiction without abusing something like interstate commerce), but most colleges "are" their containing town, including the local PD. Remember why Cornell is currently in the spotlight for how poorly a particular investigation went down? Why would a purely external police matter reflect poorly on Cornell?

As for what I'd tell anyone who did investigate - Nothing at all, because 1) read the above, 2) absolutely nothing we ignore our fifth amendment rights to say will be used for our benefit, and 3) we'd need to be a complete moron to show our faces while cutting down a flock pole; and while I may be no genius, I'm also not a complete moron.

The poles are 20lbs of high-quality aluminum - Ironically, jokes about letting tweakers know about the gold in the e-waste Flock keeps leaving on the side of the road aside, the poles themselves are the single most valuable part of an installation (as scrap).

More importantly, a simple hacksaw will go through them like butter.

Maybe not, but this is a college campus. Simply make it known nobody's going to investigate their disappearance, and they'll be gone by morning.

I'm actually surprised this played out as long as it did - Had the same battle taken place at my alma mater, I can promise you I'd personally have cheerfully harvested them for parts the same day, and I'm by no stretch unusual in that regard.

That's an older version. The RFC has since been upgraded to owl then to raven. Maybe update your system and you'll get a response.

The current bid is $2600 USD.

I know reading the summary is hard, but it's not even a long one!

Golly, wouldn't life be awesome if we could just take a few pills per day to get all our nutritional needs like some kind of 1960s sci-fi trope? Oh, wait - No, no it wouldn't. Food is enjoyable, to the point most people like eating so much we have an obesity epidemic in the Western world.

It's also worth mentioning that countless studies have failed to find any benefit of taking supplementary vitamins on either lifespan or quality of life in otherwise well-fed individuals. Conversely, ~600 kids per year (in the US alone) need medical treatment from OD'ing on them.