No part of that was a lie.

If you disagree, post a citation instead of modding me down with a sock puppet account.

SpaceX can probably accelerate their flight schedule to accommodate Russian crew needs. There's the question of if Russia is able/willing to pay nearly $100m per seat. Their flights on Crew Dragon are currently paid through NASA in a seat exchange program where they provide flights from this site on Soyuz for US astronauts. They don't actually pony up the cash.

This launch site is also essential to attitude control of ISS. To refuel the ISS stabilizer thrusters and hold it steady while the gyroscopes are relieved periodically requires Progress modules launched from there. There isn't currently a backup plan for those services.

This is true of everything. If you want to ban kids from social media because of this then it's no less logical to ban them from everything else. A parent's job is to teach children to successfully navigate a world in which "everyone" (statistically, nearly) is trying to take advantage of them, not to keep them locked in a box.

And Russia can't build tanks like they used to either because lots of the tank parts were made in Ukraine, too.

Yes, it was supposed to be a joke. Meta-humor, specifically. I was denying that the article applied to me while clearly exemplifying exactly what the article was talking about, thematically linked to a common attribute of the Slashdot user base (arrogance about one's own intelligence).

Oh well. There is a reason I don't work as a professional comedian.

I already know for a fact that I am smarter than most of the human population.

It's just nice to have a conversation with someone smart enough to recognize that. Even if it is an AI.

I thought that what Oracle was really good at was trapping customers into oppressive contracts and using legal action to extract money.

This question comes up quite a lot, in this context and in other contexts. We like it because it makes us feel like industry leadership is being irrational and short-sited, and boy will they get theirs!

In reality, this isn't as much of a conundrum as it seems. As it stands right now, AI can't actually eliminate entry level programmers, despite the marketing hype. It might reduce the raw number of entry level positions in the industry, but not down to zero. So, the problem doesn't actually exist yet.

But hypothetically speaking, even if we did completely eliminate the need for entry level programmers industry-wide, here is the most likely way that would shake out:

First, the jobs go poof, people are laid off, unemployment rises, career transitions start happening, college enrollment in compsci drops significantly etc. Everyone thinks these are pre-shocks of a coming earthquake, but they are not.

After experienced programmers start retiring and demand for experienced programmers is on the rise:

1. the experienced programmers will be paid a lot to come out of retirement, even on short term contracts. And many of them will do this out of sheer boredom, since retirees universally learn that retirement ain't all it's cracked up to be.
2. businesses start looking to hire people with alternative experience, mainly open source contributions.
3. businesses apply significant political pressure to get more H1B visas for these positions, and succeed.
4. businesses can start hiring inexperienced programmers into experienced roles, almost always pairing them up with experienced mentors. THere is a productivity and quality loss due to this, but it also winds up producing enough experienced developers to keep things going.

And done.

Economic conditions change all the time, and people just adapt to them. Usually any kind of gloom-and-doom economic prediction is based on the belief that one specific thing will change while everything else in the economy is held constant. This assumption is never true.

"Google AI Studio" has a free tier that allows API access to the latest Gemini models for code generation. There are no ads when you use them through an API. Of course, you have to code or otherwise obtain a front-end that can do that.

The free tier is only good for an individual developer, and the use restrictions might be a bit too tight for devoted professional code development work. But if you are using it for professional work, then you can spring for a paid tier anyway.

He's probably like one of those people who knows that Africa has been fucked over by other nations as long as there have been other nations to fuck them over. Everyone's had a turn abusing Africa.

Your first full paragraph is 100% opinion. Run along now.

While drunk driving happens in Dubai, as a Muslim nation they have exactly zero humor about it.
I figure the rate of bad driving from other things like just being an absurdly entitled citizen or part of the royalty is more common.

I've actually been in Dubai, deployed there once. Visited the city a few times. It's "interesting".

It's easy to have unique keys in your spreadsheet so that you can easily relate information on different sheets to one another. The problem is, actually doing the processing that a SQL server would do trivially is irritating, and then it will be processed slowly every time. Whatever Excel does or doesn't cache, it isn't enough. You can do big complicated things, but they work slowly, and maintaining it is irritating at best. When you do complicated things either your formulas get long, or you wind up having to write code, or in fact often it's both. At that point you're way better off IMO doing it in something else so that at least performance is good when you're done, and you never have to screw with editing a long formula.

That's exactly why it should be in a database and not a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are best when you have a reasonably limited number of columns. It's also a horrible PITA to use them as a relational database (it's more or less possible, but you don't want to do it) so hiding pieces of that complexity in other sheets in order to limit the data the user interfaces with on the main sheet is just a lot of extra work you wouldn't have to do if you used another solution.

It doesn't really matter where it fails, if Excel can do it and Sheets can't then Google has to admit inferiority to Microsoft which is never a good look.

Biden went around congress to fund a different genocide. Pretty words, but living up to them is another matter.