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Comment Re: Doomed (Score 1) 52

A lot of my colleagues love VSCode. The thing about vim is once you are proficient with it a lot of the commands become muscle memory. If you remember the days of vi vs emacs, I tried emacs a few times but kept coming back to vi because of the learning curve.

I learned vi in my first programming class 32 years ago and have been using it ever since. There are some things which are actually faster in vim than a GUI editor, but you have to have the muscle memory.

Comment Re: Doomed (Score 1) 52

Good Lord. I feel called out. I just checked and I have 41 vim windows open, and I'm typing this comment on a mechanical keyboard. I also brushed this morning with a normal toothbrush.

Well, actually I don't have a record player or any vinyl (sold all my records in the early 1990s) so you aren't talking to me specifically.

Comment Re:Personally... (Score 4, Informative) 51

It's not the same Atari. It is the steaming remnants of Infogrames who wears the Atari skin like a zombie.

Atari first died in 1984, got resurrected immediately, then died again in 1996.

The current company likes to pretend they represent some kind of legacy of Atari, but it's bull.

Comment Re:Not a good bet (Score 1) 82

i have no idea if you actually used AI to write this reply, but it is hilarious that you use two of the "AI detector tropes" in this one sentence:

The analogy isn't comparing writing assembler on punch cards to writing python on your phone, it's having people do computing as a job to having computers as an object that replaced all those jobs - doing arithmetic quickly isn't something that businesses need dozens or hundreds of people to do now.

1. It isn't X, it's Y
2. em-dash (although in your case it's a dash).

Comment Re:Time for some Boomers (Score 4, Insightful) 149

Crypto is demonstrably NOT a ponzi scheme though. It's decentralized, has no leader, nobody to collect money at "the top", and no rug to pull.

That is why I said "analogous to a Ponzi scheme". In fact, the creation of a "distributed Ponzi scheme" may be the true innovation of crypto.

And haven't you got the memo, crypto isn't a currency anymore, hasn't been for a while. Now it's a "store of value" and an "investment".

Comment Re:Time for some Boomers (Score 5, Insightful) 149

Crypto is a trip. It generates no yield, has very little real-world use (beyond facilitating crime), and is a negative sum game.

Crypto requires real money to operate (a lot of custom chips are playing "guess the number" simultaneously), so the net amount of money coming OUT of crypto is necessarily less than the amount of money being invested in crypto.

In other words, the average return on crypto has to be less than 1. You have benefited personally, but that has come at the expense of others who came after (analogous to a Ponzi scheme). Crypto generates no value, so you just got taken out of the trade with new money.

It's all very interesting.

Comment Re:AGI is jargon for 'REAL artificial intelligence (Score 1, Troll) 61

AGI is most certainly jargon. AI first began development in the 1950s and many goals of AI have been achieved. John McCarthy (of the Stanford AI Lab, and one of the field's founders) used to joke that once something was achieved by AI, it wasn't considered AI anymore.

Beating a chess master was once thought unthinkable but it happened almost 30 years ago. Similarly, many key AI focus areas, such as natural language processing and machine translation have made enormous strides just in the last two decades. Of course LLM's are AI. They are a powerful (but clearly overhyped) application of deep convolutional neural nets.

The "AGI" phrase is *more* a marketing term than "AI" is these days. In fact, the meaning of AGI is precisely what is expedient in the moment for whatever snake oil salesman is using it at the time.

Comment Makes me a bit sad (Score 4, Insightful) 17

This makes me a bit sad, and makes me feel old.

I learned so much attending a few USENIX meetings in the mid 90s. I was late to using Linux on my own (I used HP-UX for my day job and that was enough) but heard so much about USENIX that I ended up duel booting Mandrake on my home PC and learned a ton.

I understand this has been less important as the world moves on, but I do miss the old days when Unix was king of the business and research worlds and grubby PCs and Macs were for the unwashed masses.

Now everybody uses Linux or BSD whether they know it or not.

Comment So short-sighted (Score 5, Insightful) 44

I happen to be a Senior Director and I'm constantly pushing back on my VP about turning the screws on the return to work thing.

There are undoubtedly some tasks that are better done in person, but a "one-size-fits-all" approach is just stupid.

In my own case, I got a lot MORE done when I was remote, because I mostly used my saved commute time to work. I also got more family time.

I was fitter, happier, and more productive.

No we are making people upset and lowering productivity. Managing is hard, but managing by seeing who is sitting in their chair is awful. If you can't manage people on their objectives, then we have no business being a manager.

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