The real world is more complicated than that. For example, we still have a Windows 7 machine in my office. It has some very expensive but still very useful software locked to it that has no direct replacement available on either Linux or Windows 11. Obviously we have to be careful about security and controlling access to a legacy OS like that.

Blunt statements about "forcing an upgrade" are worthless in this kind of situation. Chances are anyone who is still using a system like that has a good reason for it, at least if it's in use professionally. We buy these assets because they solve problems. Those problems might or might not have a useful and cost-effective solution available on a different platform. If there is no modern solution available and the original still works, your statement that "the old ways are obsolete" is by definition false.

What you do need to do is rationally assess the risks and the threats you face and provide other ways of mitigating the risks and protecting against the threats if you can't rely on, for example, a legacy OS that no longer gets security updates to be secure by itself. But then ideally you shouldn't be relying on any single device or piece of software being secure as your only line of defence anyway, and assuming you already have some degree of defence in depth, accommodating unusual requirements is more a redistribution of security responsibilities than a fundamental change of approach.

Yes, it does look like we broadly agree here.

I suppose the main thing I'd have said very differently is the terminology, in that I wouldn't regard the kind of incompetent senior as a senior in the first place. But then I'm pretty old school about this: to me, a junior developer needs quite close supervision to produce useful results, a regular/mid developer can perform routine tasks with minimal supervision but might need more help with larger or more complex tasks, while a senior is someone you can give more or less any task on your project to and they'll figure it out, and senior is also the level of someone who would be capable of supervising and training a junior.

We've had a wave of people, particularly since the tech boom during COVID, who have obviously been over-promoted due to the employee's market and title inflation. They might now have titles like "senior" or even "lead" or "staff", but they don't have the skills and experience to operate successfully at those levels. I agree the acceleration of everything due to increasing AI use tends to show these people up and I agree that a good mid-level developer using AI might well outperform them. But then I suspect in reality a good mid-level developer was probably outperforming them before AI as well, it just wasn't so obvious.

That is wildly optimistic IME. Frontier models do a great job of sounding authoritative on any given subject. This is not the same as actually having expert-level knowledge and understanding, and the choices the models make when you ask them to implement something can and often do reflect that. There are several domains I've worked in over the past few years where AIs lack even basic knowledge an expert practitioner would have, probably because these fields are too specialised to have a lot of books available or papers published, so presumably there hasn't been much subject-specific content to train the models on.

I don't think it's usually about what AI "did really badly on" at this point. It's more about whether the overheads of adding all the guard rails and then reviewing and correcting all the output end up costing at least a similar amount to just writing the code yourself.

For a junior developer, I'd say frontier models passed their standard some time ago. Today's LLMs routinely write code at the level of a competent junior-mid but with the advantage of an inhumanly broad knowledge base.

For a good senior, I'm much less convinced. The frontier models are hit-and-miss when it comes to writing good test suites, which matters a lot when they rely on tests so heavily to reach acceptable quality. IME, they are still mostly miss when it comes to the business insight that seniors will take into account and design/architecture decisions that keep the code manageable as it evolves. While they have become much better at recognising existing patterns in the code, and I would say they follow them reasonably well the majority of the time now, there are still bizarre anomalies that creep in, and they aren't very good at extending those patterns when necessary.

I think AI advocates also tend to underestimate just how much time it takes to properly review what they are doing. Take a half-day Claude session to implement some new feature. It might take half an hour to give it the initial brief and then review its plan. Make a few edits and it'll propose a new plan that is also long and detailed and has no edit markings to show what it changed so you have to review the whole thing, carefully and in detail, again to pick up the minor changes it also made for no obvious reason. Then you let it start doing its thing. You can't really leave it unattended for long because it'll stop to ask questions. Some of those questions might be whether it can run a screenful of ad-hoc Bash script to make some edits to your source files, because for some reason it decided not to show the actual edits as it usually would, so now you have to figure out what all the sed incantations are actually going to do while looking at those files in another editor or just trust it and then review all the changes properly later anyway. Sometimes it decides to change its plan mid-flight, but not always in a good way, and if you interrupt it to apply corrections or redirect, you break the neat plan flow it was in. Then you get to the end and you can finally see how everything it has done fits together, and you still need to review everything with the same care as you would with a junior developer's code and probably apply a few fixes where it's come up with weird names or not quite followed a pattern or imagined some instructions that were never there and made other changes in other parts of the system that should be out of scope.

If you read to the end of that last paragraph, you know how I typically feel at the end of a half day working with an agentic UI. And the thing is, I do those sessions as experiments fairly often to keep up with progress, but a lot of what I do is still written by hand, which gives me simple, objective data to compare the two ways of working and see whether the AI tools are really making me more productive once you take everything into account.

Currently, based on objective data comparing similar fully completed development tasks like for like, I still outperform agentic workflows using frontier models by about 25-50% on average, and I don't have to pay anyone extra fees to do that, and subjectively I also find it more engaging to work that way. So I don't really buy the hype about AIs making us all orders of magnitude more productive unless you're happy to YOLO everything forever and take the much-discussed risks that comes with.

Personally, I think the optimum use of LLMs right now is probably not to use them for the whole coding workflow like that or rely on agentic tools, but to use them for tasks like answering quick questions about the existing code, doing research like a fancy search engine, writing a first draft of some boilerplate, and writing quick and dirty throwaway code for experiments, one-shot tools and the like, where you don't really care about the quality as long as it gets the job done and you will see immediately if it has in fact got the job done. For these things, the LLM can read and type faster than me, and that's useful.

Sure there are alternative energy like solar, wind, and a few others for local source (geothermal, and river dams). But the main one solar and wind are not considered base load. Until battery tech is better and/or widespread, nuclear is pretty much the only non fossil base load energy generation.

I now am dependent in part for my livelihood on paypal. Going to check my contact info there now.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Finformationr.us%2F

You misspelt "Republitards" (that's right - the rest of the world can rename things too!)

Meta Ordered to Pay New Mexico $25 Billion for Deceiving Users About Privacy On Facebook

"Privacy Rapists Meta[stasize] Ordered to Pay New Mexico $25 Billion for Raping Users' Privacy On Facebook"

There FTFY.

I've recently noticed an uptick in retro gaming (& computing), which I think will be the main growth in the industry for a while.... unless you're part of the 1% with the funds to finance the pedolf-supporters.

Honestly, the employers were the first to start racing for the bottom there. For years they have relied on employees having an outdated sense of loyalty to the company that hasn't reciprocated in decades.

Much of the criticism of GenZ in the workplace is really just them giving to the employer what the employer offers them. Perhaps it's time for government to re-take its essential role in leveling the playing field so new players can enter the market and push the dinosaurs into their richly deserved tar pits.

Id doesn't NECESSARILY debase the social fabric. But if it does things like buying crooked inspectors to overlook sub-standard materials, buying off a zoning board to basically take over a residential area (*cough* datacenters *cough*), pays sub-standard wages under the table to people who 'need' to keep a low profile, and then when something goes wrong, scampers off leaving an impoverished shell behind to go bankrupt so the public has to pay for the clean-up, yes it debases the social fabric.

Only because legal enforcement of corporate charters seems to be dead.

There's lots of VERY profitable drug cartels as well, but I don't think we should celebrate them.

By separating the decision making from the execution, the corporation is the perfect psychopath. The structure not only allows all parties to rationalize their own guilt away, it also protects those who make unconscionable decisions from the legal consequences of their actions. That combination can only ever produce a monster. The LAST thing we need running them is someone educated to break the rules (law) when 'necessary'.

Even from the very beginnings of Capitalism, Smith admonished that corporate charters must be handed out exceedingly sparingly and they must be held strictly to their charters. Also note that all corporate charters are in legal theory supposed to be for the public good. Not just as a nice idea but as one of the mandates. A company acting against the public interest is supposed to be dissolved for violating it's charter. Clearly we have failed in that. Let's not double down on the failure by educating people in the image of the incorporated monster and putting them in charge.

There may be some use to something like the LLC, but there seems to be little economic use for corporate personhood. The only public value of a corporation (if/when it has any) is economic.

Rubbish. Most of them have a ratty couch with the least stained side of the cushions turned up (if they can decide which is least stained).

In fact, they need a warrant in spite of the courts bending over backwards to claim they don't. The Constitution doesn't have geographic limits, it applies to the U.S. government and it's agents wherever they may be.