How do I know you didn't really send it in utf-8?

It's a metaphor you need to guess at in everything except baseball. Sometimes the metaphor is fairly clear to the listener. Other times it's only clear to (at most) the speaker.

It didn't seem to be - two examples of its 'useless' jargon were 'intranet' and 'EFT', both very specific terms. Without getting access to the source study I can't tell if that's a bad article or a bad study of course, but certainly the linked article didn't provide the point it thought it was making.

"Let's touch base offline to align our bandwidth on this workflow." isn't jargon, it's buzzwords. It just translates to "Let's meet after this and make sure you understand how I want that to work.". Just use the ordinary English instead of the buzzwords. A lot of the "confusion" is probably the employees thinking "Just speak English, dumbass.".

Jargon has specific meanings that can't be quickly expressed in plain English. "hack" vs. "kludge" for example. Both have implications beyond the basic "solution to a problem" that take several sentences in English to state clearly but represent things you need to identify often enough that you can't readily spell it out in full every single time. Others, like "mis-bug" (as in "This is a mis-bug, clarify the code and docs so someone doesn't accidentally fix it.") are jargon but the plain English terms are simple enough you ought to use them most of the time.

The common one seems to be "I'm writing a fictional story."

And therein lies the problem: Either it will answer questions to people lying and planning self harm, or it will not answer questions from people legitimately doing research for fiction, or whatever.

The former can cause legal problems (like this), the latter will make it completely useless and unsaleable.

Which pretty much sums up the entire AI hype bubble.

Judas Priest was sued in 1990 because the parents claimed the band had planted suicidal messages in one of their songs that led to a suicide pact.

Angry grieving parents will often lash out at a convenient external cause, in part so that they don't have to face the reality that the odds are more likely they were an agent in the suicide.

I think Tesla would have been a much more profitable company under Apple. Musk certainly got it to a point - over a million cars per year, and the single most popular car model, gas or electric. But more recently with cancelling the small cheap car, and the Cybertruck, and betting the company on robotaxi... Apple wouldn't have done any of that stuff. They'd be improving successive versions and not offending their customers with politics, and making Tesla a super-valuable company.

Miller actually isn't the worst.

It will not kill off most coding jobs, it's probably going to make them more necessary over time.

All this is doing is creating an experience gap. Junior programmers don't get a chance to learn what it takes to ship something. There's a lot of on-the-job experience that's hard to replicate, which seems like a facile observation—if it weren't true, we'd just teach it—but I think it's something that gets forgotten now and then.

LLMs simply do not write good code right now. They don't. It's code that needs reviewing, often it needs refactoring. It requires a lot of supervision, and crucially, it doesn't learn from its mistakes in any meaningful way. So this sounds like a junior programmer but worse—I can never train it to be better, I have to rely on external forces to do that.

How do LLMs get better? By ingesting more GOOD code. But less good code is being written because more of it is being written by LLMs, and there are going to be fewer and fewer good programmers available as time goes on, because as we're discussing, there are fewer junior programmers learning to be good senior programmers.

The issue is that right now, AI Coding agents give the ILLUSION of productivity. They can only automate away the simplest of jobs; every large-scale analysis of whether or not they actually make people more productive shows that they absolutely do not, unless the only thing you count is 'lines of code produced'. But as any experienced programmer will tell you, that's a stupid metric; most good solutions are shorter. They're easier to debug and the maintenance burden is lower.

Anyone that says that a coding agent makes them more productive is saying that entirely based on vibes, not long-term analysis.

I'm not blind to the utility of LLMs; I think they make some things much easier. Learning programming languages is much faster with an LLM to help me. But they still consistently get things wrong and hallucinate APIs and function calls. You absolutely cannot trust anything they give you, and they will not notice that they checked in bad code and need to fix something on their own.

tl;dr Junior programmers will have a rough go of it for a while, but we'll need experienced programmers more than ever. LLMs have done nothing but kicked the can down the road and made future hiring more expensive.

Trains are an interesting one. The US has the largest freight rail system in the world, and it is very efficient. Where I live the I-40 interstate (a major east/west roadway, essentially the modern incarnation of Route 66) is paralleled by a railway. Very often you can drive along I40 through the desert and see super-long trains stacked double-high with shipping containers, and just think how much traffic that is taking off the road. And yet, there is basically 1 lane-worth of steady tractor/trailer traffic along the freeway at all hours of the day and night - almost like a virtual never-ending train.

So here is a side-by-side railway and roadway for long-haul freight in which both are evidently viable, yet neither every pushes out the other. This seems to argue against the idea that idea that trains would naturally take over except for some cultural defect in the USA. Freight rail doesn't have to worry too much about niceties like convenience or timeliness (on the order of a few hours parked here or there) like passenger rail does, and it's not because "individualism" or small penis size or whatever people who hate cars and trucks like to blame them on. Freight is almost purely about efficiency, yet they still use trucks quite a bit.

Are the jobs really there, or are they just being advertised? I've read a lot of comments about "ghost jobs".

Countries have been known to remove passengers from airplanes stopping at their landing fields for breaking local laws from their home turf. But it *is* less common. (One of those countries is the US.)

Intel could never *really* be trusted, because of "national security" and "national security letters". But this *is* worse.

Perhaps, but I think the government taking partial ownership is a way to cause it to fail...at least internationally.

When will people marry his declarations and musings with the fact that he's marching Federally-controlled troops into cities to "fight crime". What the hell does everyone think is going to happen in next year's mid-terms when armed forces loyal specifically to Trump with little or no objection from Congress or the Supreme Court starting "guarantee" a "fair vote".

Everything he and the Republicans have been working towards since the claims of Obama's ineligibility has been preparing for the moment when they move in to seize control of state voting apparatus. He'll do what he's done with everything else and claim it's a "national emergency."

And MAGA will cheer while the Democrats put on their sackcloths and roll around in the dust crying about how they were impotent. The American people have chosen, they want tyrants who rule by fiat, engineer and weaponize crises to entrench their power.

The political system the Framers came up with was always a steaming pile of crap. Bagehot pulled apart deftly in the 1860s, explaining that the only thing that made it work was the "American genius for politics". Well, that's done. The Democrats are frozen in place, the Republicans, ruled by oil barons and sociopathic billionaires, intend on building a dictatorship with the shape of the American republic, but where checks and balances once existed, will be impotent paper tigers.