Sooner or later, we'll run out of consultants. People eventually retire or quit the industry in disgust and the new crop of vibe coders certainly aren't going to fill those roles.

That matches my (limited) experience. Just for giggles, I let copilot (on Github) have a crack at a function in some of my code. Its suggested improvement made some sense in a vacuum, but in context it read more like someone who feels they must 'contribute' something and that's all they could find. It didn't seem to understand that the function would always be called in the context of a transaction and raising an exception will roll it back.

There is a difference. If you learned Pascal as the wave of the future, you could always do FORTRAN or with a little re-training, C (pointers always left Pascal programmers a bit befuddled at first). If you bet on Java, you could always migrate to C or Python. Some of the IDEs do leave people a bit brain dead, but not so much they can't make the jump to a simple text editor and command line compiler. Even BASIC was OK though you'd have to un-learn a few bad habits.

But if you learn 'vibe coding', you are dead in the water without the AI. No amount of typing "Make a game like Wolfenstein 3D but in a shopping mall with perfume ladies that take half of your health points.." into the compiler will get you anywhere at all.

It certainly sounds like they lowered the standards if they are now allowing software with entirely undefined behavior to be used.

That's one take on the situation - and granted I do agree that many people fall into that camp.

But as someone who actually enjoys having kids, and who has been a stay at home parent for the last few years (due to wife out earning me), there are other pressures involved. The biggest one is that, basically, by having kids we went from having ZERO money issues, to suddenly living on the edge. It's almost comically absurd how bad the situation has been.

We went from two very decent incomes and having the world as our oyster, to suddenly having all these insane costs forced upon us. We were quite happy before in a CBD studio flat to reduce our commute time, and because we wanted to save money. But you can't live in a studio flat with kids, so we had to get a bigger flat, which was fine, except that then those became insanely expensive post COVID while our incomes didn't grow. So we had to chase the 'commuting cost vs rent' equation along with the hordes of other workers (hint, you can't really win). Then suddenly you have to think about schools as well, so not only do you need to get another bedroom, you have to get one within the catchment of a decent school.

The whole process is insanity and extremely expensive. I have always thought people who just pissed away money on pointless things to be idiots, but now I'm the idiot who just hands over my credit card to anyone who wants to clip the ticket when Im trying to get my tired kid home to see their grandparents for Christmas, or trying to get a campsite to stay in during a school holiday.

We can barely afford to do anything fun now, we are shoved back into a precipitous housing situation, and the cost of living crisis is squeezing us like never before. I then look at our friends who didn't have kids and for whom the 'cost of living crisis' is having to cut back on premium economy flights so they can continue to eat out four times a week and I feel a bit dumb.

Ultimately we really do enjoy having kids, but it is not compatible with our short term precariate economy where you are expected to bounce around and continually reinvent yourself in pursuit of 'market forces'. What hacks me off with all this as well, is the whole 'shouldn't have had kids if you can't afford them' - well, yeah, we could afford them when we had them, but the COVID stupidity now means we barely can. How am I supposed to know that my situation will be stable for the next 20 years at the point I have kids. It's just idiot ivory tower thinking from the people who, sadly, are in charge of our economic system.

It does orbit Earth on occasion before returning to orbit the Sun. TFS isn't very clear about that fact.

Maybe you just suck at it. Coding with AI assistance is a learned skill, and if you don't know how to do it you may very well get bad results.

It's possible, but the problem is the AI writes buggy code, and invents APIs which don't exist. Tose are fairly widely reported problems.

not easy without a job and the high cost of housing & childcare.
the only way most would be able to do it would be to go back to rural living

I don't know many but I do know a Russophile who's a fluent speaker and knows some very well-connected people over there including a former Putin aide with whom he was photographed on one of his trips.
He assures me that while many are conflicted, a great many also fervently believe in "Glory to Stalin" and that Putin has put a lot of effort into sanitizing Stalin's reputation

They will accept higher costs due to delays and the like with offshoring, if those costs are less than paying the visa fees.

They will abandon paying Americans to do some of the work, and outsource all of it.

The reason this kind of scheme doesn't work is because the costs are different for every company. Some will pay it, some will do more offshoring, and a small number will employ more Americans. The only question is what the proportions will be, and which option your employer chooses. Hope you are in the last group.

Having used machine translation for years, I am well aware that it screws up. Even so, it's very useful and you get used to the mistakes it makes and learn to interpret them.

That said Google's English transcription is better than a human now, and IME is close to flawless. Meta's is probably a lot worse, but the potential is there.

Drones don't need air superiority to operate, they rely on numbers to overwhelm. At a recent arms show there was a company offering cardboard drones. Cost in monetary and material terms is getting so low that the challenge becomes mass producing them fast enough to swarm the enemy. Low flying, disposable, and very difficult to stop.

The important part is that they are talking about dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC), not the typical solar panels you put on your house.

DSSCs are attractive because they are very easy and cheap to manufacture, and flexible. But they degrade fast with UV light, and the expected gains in protecting them have not been made. If their life could be extended to a usable amount they would offer an even lower cost option than already extremely cheap conventional solar cells, and open up some new applications.

These days, though, the training part is outsourced to the education system. And that's just dumb in so many ways.

Never mind apprentices, even just normal on-the-job training. Personally, I've always been a fan, and if I can do it in a tiny startup, then bigger companies certainly can.

It holds up in some cases, not in others, and calculating an average muddles that.

Personally, I use AI coding assists for two purposes quite successfully: a) more intelligent auto-complete and b) writing a piece of code using a common, well understood algorithm (i.e. lots of sources the AI could learn from) in the specific programming language or setup that I need.

It turns out that it is much faster and almost as reliable to have the AI do that then finding a few examples on github and stackoverflow, checking which ones are actually decent, and translating them myself.

Anything more complex than that and it starts being a coin toss. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's a waste of time. So I've stopped doing that because coding it myself is faster and the result better than babysitting an AI.

And when you need to optimize for a specific parameter - speed, memory, etc. - you can just about forget AI.