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Comment Re:Bad study (Score 1) 82

My day job is a (saas) app that's about 20 years old and has been worked on continuously by a team that has varied in size from about 5 to now about 15. It is complicated and connects to several external services. There are parts of the app that are too hairy for AI to reason about. But we have found, recently, that AI is surprisingly good at explaining how some rather complicated (but well written) parts of the app work.
The 2-3 really hairy parts of the app are written in an arbitrarily complicated way that I would never have used and long to rewrite - but they work. Nobody on the team is happy with it - and there is no corporate memory of anyone being happy working with these parts.
We have exceptional test coverage (>95% by lines), so it's just a matter of time before we decide to lay out an AI agent team to rewrite some of the horrible stuff in a way that is much more palatable to both human and agent. This is not something I would have suggested as possible 4-6 months ago.

Comment Re:Bad study (Score 1) 82

But how do you plan to maintain this software? That's the real effort of software engineering.

I'm not sure how to answer that question. My flip answer is "the usual way." But nothing about software is the usual anymore.

100% of the code that .. makes up this project is code that I did not write. But I absolutely told AI what I wanted and in many cases *how* I wanted it. And any code that had "interesting" design elements is code that I reviewed and in some cases told AI to change. Where interesting refers to meaningful architectural decisions.

At this point it is a very light project - somewhat less that 10K lines of code. It is in its minimal viable product phase - and I imagine it will grow to be more than 15 or even 20K LOC. Eventually becoming projects on 3 distinct platforms and becoming substantially larger.

All of which is ridiculous. Fewer than 200 prompts so far, I'm sure. Maybe fewer than 100.

Comment Re:Cost... (Score 4, Interesting) 122

Way more than cheaper rides.
* App to summon
* Automatic driver mapping to pickup
* Predictable arrival for pickup
* Predictable arrival for drop off
* No BS routing and you knew the cost before pickup/dropoff.

Back in the day I called for cabs ahead of time and had them fail to show up 25% of the time. I've never lived in a dangerous area, so that wasn't it. They just were not reliable or predictable. Uber saw a huge opening for a service and they took it. They also saw a huge opportunity for destroying the existing market solution in an anti-competitive and illegal way and took that, too - banking on the notion that government would not act fast enough to stop them. And they were right.

Comment Re:Meaningless statements? (Score 1) 219

A camera only system can only be capable of superhuman performance if object recognition is at least as good as humans are capable of. Currently, computer vision systems are nowhere near as good as humans at that and probably won't be for a very long time. .

Oh, no. I have it on good authority that computer vision is about to exceed human performance.

Wait - what year is it, again? :-p

Comment Re:It's not about dropping copper (Score 1) 65

Imagine 10,000 clusters of 20 homes. Each cluster no closer than 5 miles to.. anything. And all of them behind some mountain or in some valley or somewhere else that's really inconvenient. AI tells me you can run copper 5 miles without a booster - so that's what they did - sometime last century when they ran power. Work was cheap, copper was cheap, and someone was running power so they piggybacked. Easy peasy.

You can't run modern stuff nearly that far - except for fiber. But then you're running fiber to 10,000 hubs and each will probably need some kind of a station to do processing and splitting and further wires. I don't suppose any of this is hard - it's just expensive. And for each of these 10,000 hubs you're going to do all this work for 20 customers that only want to pay $10/month because that's their deal. You will *never* recoup those costs.

So I get why they don't wanna. But that's the deal they get for monopoly power and right of way and all that.

Comment It's not about dropping copper (Score 2) 65

This is not so much about dropping copper service as it is about dropping service. AT&T (or their predecessor) put in the copper and now they just want to drop those customers because they are expensive to maintain. I can't say I blame them - I would want to, too. The thing is they don't want to replace the copper with anything - they just want to ignore those folks.

The state would be more than happy if AT&T put in fiber and dropped copper. After all, they've secured tens of millions in California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) and Last Mile infrastructure grants

That's not what they signed up for when they were granted right of way and monopoly powers. They just want to weasel out of it.

Comment Re: Leaving. Billionaires or billionaires' money? (Score 1) 105

so a company like Apple with billions of dollars doesn't owe 5% of their holdings to the state, just the less than 300 individual billionaires that live in the state.

I feel like I need to spell out the math.

300 * 1,000,000,000 = 300,000,000,000
300,000,000 * 5% = 15,000,000,000

That's all CA will get from the one time tax "from Apple". Just 15 Billion Dollars.

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