Their bullshit may be more modern. Perhaps us ol' fogies should attend "Bullshit like a young buck" courses.

When you are interviewing with a PHB, talking the talk matters. Let's face it, the work world is largely a bullshitting game, for good or bad. It would be nice if it were about logic and planning, but humans got into the mix and mucked up that ideal.

I remember during one interview the PHB asked me if I liked to download stuff to my PC to experiment with new gizmos. I replied that I did, but that I prefer to have one "production" PC to get regular work done and a separate "experimental" PC that can be rebaselined if the experiments mess it up and/or to not cross-mix experiments. (Active-X was the "big thing" at the time, which should be enough to explain my caution.)

Anybody with experience will agree this is the rational way to do it. However, this was a start-up and they had no money for double PC's. (Maybe I should have offered to buy my own spare.) My "kind" wasn't welcome. The details of reality bothered them: they wanted to be sold cheap pie in the sky. That is, naive pioneers who don't know about the arrows yet.

That's not me. I value my experience and all the caveats I've learned over the years. I don't intend to sound grumpy or a like parade-rainer, but rather I'm just giving potential risks and estimated probabilities in a direct factual way. If you want to plow thru the asteroid field without being told the odds, then hang out with Jedi's fresh off the dust-farm and contraband runners. And off my swamp, get!

The technology has its place. But it isn't something that magically does the right thing.

It only has to be slightly less stupid than typical humans, and/or cost less than humans. It may also need more trace-ability, such as knowing why it gave an answer it did. With humans you can ask and usually get an answer such as "we always did it this way", "that way usually works for me", or "because the alternative confuses the sales team", etc.

But career-wise AI has had multiple boom/bust cycles as the usual hype-masters overdo claims and damage AI's cred. Have a Plan B if you go into AI. (No, not a Plan 9.)

It had the advantage that editing was easy and consistent across vendors. You type in the line number and it's there. You retype it with different code and it's changed. You type the number without code and it's deleted. In the teletype era this was a important.

my employers refused to sell it because they said "No one would buy software written in the UK!"

Your marketing dept. needed better liars. There never was a dBASE I because they called the first version II to give it credibility, for example.

I fed it an MS brochure, and it said the company acts 80 years old

Here's my drawing of Mohammad.

we need to cut the human population in half in the next 100 years (by breeding less, not killing people off)

Unfortunately, war is the more politically palatable solution among the two.

if you're just going down the highway the largest mammal you're likely to see is a fat guy whose having car trouble

And you didn't stop to help me, insensitive skinny clod!

Some hell of a shit to cause a 4-quake. No more chili-burgers for you.

They want you to think it's a mere bird.

Utah Jazz will win a championship before we see flying cars and Rosey-like maid robots.

scripting does not belong in documents!

Microsoft should invent Inactive-X

WANTED: Security expert to help patch the problems caused by our search for security experts.

AT&T has been dicking with our bills for years. They have added "insurance" fees and plan-change fees without asking or warning, for example. When confronted with it, they usually pull a Steve Urkel: "Oh gee, how did that little charge get on there?"

Some people just like to complain.

Is Lena by chance Hawaiian?