It's an actual "AI" related term. It was just very short lived.

https://aws.amazon.com/what-is...
https://cloud.google.com/disco...
https://www.ibm.com/think/topi...

https://www.salesforceben.com/...

"A 2023 McKinsey Global Survey revealed that 7% of organizations adopting AI had already hired Prompt Engineers, indicating early adoption of this role across various industries, and Anthropic were advertising Prompt Engineering roles with salary offers as high as $375K â" which didnâ(TM)t require in-depth technical knowledge or even a tech degree.

It was touted as the job of 2024, and a year later, research suggests that the role is no longer attractive to companies. Per a recent survey commissioned by Microsoft, 31,000 workers across 31 countries were asked what roles their companies are prioritizing, and Prompt Engineer was ranked second to last among new roles companies are considering adding in the next 12 to 18 months."

https://ai.plainenglish.io/why...

"The Rise of Prompt Engineering 2020â"2024

When generative AI burst onto the scene, prompt engineering became an essential skill for anyone looking to leverage AI to its fullest potential.

Early on, AI models like GPT-3 and GPT-4 had limited capacity to understand vague or unstructured input, which made prompt engineering a specialized skill to ensure the AI generated the desired output.

Slight variations in wording, phrasing, or structure could result in drastically different AI responses, and organizations quickly recognized the potential of prompt engineers to maximize the power of these models.

Tech companies and startups recruited prompt engineers at a rapid pace, and soon bootcamps and certification programs emerged to cater to this new demand."

I get the feeling that many people who will be opting for AI/cybersecurity are hoping to somehow get the gold star of approval that allows them to get a paycheck for not actually doing work.

Kind of like how a lot of people wanted to get hired by the big tech companies (meta, alphabet, apple, amazon, netflix, etc.) and draw a 6 figure salary for basically doing nothing - except maybe video blogging about how they were making a 6 figure salary for basically doing nothing.

I would caution people trying to treat this as the new MBA with an observation - if there's sufficient supply of "AI" degree graduates, then the individual value of that degree drops, same as with the MBA. The people getting wealthy at this stage of the game are the ones starting their own companies, or who already have established research pedigrees that make them prime poaching material.

Anybody trying to get a degree in "AI" right now that takes them out of the workforce for 4 years is going to get an incredibly rude shock when they graduate and find that most everything that doesn't relate to fundamentals (like data science, OSI, etc.) they learned is no longer relevant. Remember how hot "prompt engineering" was at one point? Yeah...

I mean... maybe software companies will finally start to optimize code instead of expecting cheap hardware to cover for them?

The nastier alternative is people are forced to push more of their data into the "cloud" for computing and storage, ironically, because now only the datacenters can afford upgrades...

https://www.pilotmix.com/cozy-...

For context for those not familiar with experimental/homebuilt aircraft. You can pretty much use anything off the shelf or custom. 3D printed parts (either self-sourced or purchased from dedicated vendors) are probably not uncommon at this point in time, depending on what you are using them for. Certified aircraft do not have this degree of latitude in terms of part sourcing and DIY work.

Now to the question about whether the owner made/installed the part, or it was sourced through the parts chain:

https://www.bbc.com/news/artic...

"The Cozy Mk IV light aircraft was destroyed after its plastic air induction elbow, bought at an air show in North America, collapsed."

That sentence implies that the air induction elbow was purchased at an air show.

Reviewing the accident report ( https://www.gov.uk/aaib-report... ), we get the following:

"The aircraft owner who installed the modified fuel system stated that the 3D-printed induction elbow was purchased in the USA at an airshow, and he understood from the vendor that it was printed from CF-ABS (carbon fibre â" acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) filament material, with a glass transition temperature3 of 105ÂC.

An alternative construction method for the air induction elbow, shown in the Cozy Mk IV plans, is a lamination of four layers of bi-directional glassfibre cloth with epoxy resin. The epoxy resin specified for the laminate has a glass transition temperature of 84ÂC, after the finished part has been post-cured. The aircraft owner stated that as the glass transition temperature listed for the CF-ABS material was higher than the epoxy resin, he was satisfied the component was fit for use in this application when it was installed.

A review of the design of the laminated induction elbow in the Cozy Mk IV plans showed that it featured a section of thin-walled aluminium tube at the inlet end of the elbow, where the air filter is attached. The aluminium tube provides a degree of temperature-insensitive structural support for the inlet end of the elbow. The 3D-printed induction elbow on G-BYLZ did not include a similar section of aluminium tube at the inlet end."

So apparently purchased through a 3rd party vendor, the owner installed according to an existing design variation (and got approval from regulatory oversight to do so), but apparently the 3d printed part installed did not meet the requirements for temperature resistance as compared to the glass-fiber/epoxy part specified in the plans, possibly due to the lack of that aluminum tube.

It's simple economics.

Degrees, undergrad or grad, have to be measured in terms of:

1. Raw cost
2. Opportunity cost during the time you go for the degree
3. Time left in your working life in order to recoup #1 and #2.

Once upon a time, for the cost of a few summers working, and a part time job during the school year, you could afford to get a college degree at a public university. The cost was reasonable, and the boost in career opportunities outweighed the lost income during the 4(ish) years you spent in school. If school suited you, this was a slam dunk.

Then at a certain point you needed loans in addition to working to get through undergrad. Rather expensive ones too. However, if you were in state, you'd get a discount. The cost went up, but the boost in career opportunities outweighed the higher cost and the lost income during the time you spent in school. Again, if school suited you, it would take longer for the benefit to show in your life, but if you expected to work for a few decades, the difference in earning power and job opportunity (especially during an era where the US was hollowing out alternatives to white collar jobs), would pay off.

At some point, the raw cost and the opportunity cost reached an equilibrium point with your ability to recoup the cost over your working life... and people started noticing that the bet that they were taking - that they'd remain employed long enough post-higher education, at a rate of pay better than what they would have had without the degree, was not as solid as they would have liked.

One wonders if during this time period, if there had been a competitive alternative to higher education tracked in US schools, such as apprenticeships (normally starting at the start of high school), whether we would have hit this "crisis" of higher education. I think with viable non-college career paths, which would have paid from the onset, and provided an applied pathway for schooling (you still need an education even as a plumber or welder, it's just not credentialed as a college degree), there would have been checks against runaway college costs. The lack of competition, coupled with railroading students K-12 onto a college track, allowed colleges and universities to respond to increased demand by... raising prices.

Ugh.

Well, thanks for clearing up the question I had about people insisting that their sites outside US-East-1 being impacted during the outage.

I think this pretty much just underlines the fact that US-East-1 is basically their "test" version of prod...

paul,

“one man speaking with adafruit’s social media accounts”

lazy. limor was quoted directly in the article and you still couldn’t credit her.

your claims aren’t accurate. we were asked to step in and build arduinos during the period when the guy falsely claiming an mit phd took over. we helped stabilize the platform and stayed a reseller until demand and circumstances shifted. every board, up until the last years, was shown to arduino before release to see if they wanted to make it, support it, etc. for example we presented feather, they were not interested.

“maybe some of the points have some merit?”

the concern isn’t imagined. the open source community is vocal because the issues are real there are a lot of people in the arduino world, discords, and dev channels raising the same flags. you not being in those spaces doesn’t mean it does not exist. you’re not tuned into these conversations. but at least don’t erase limor’s words and claim it's just me or downplay the people who are doing the work.

At one point in history, people believed that all you needed to run a business was an MBA. Actual knowledge of the product, processes, people, etc. was irrelevant.

A narrow focus on "managing" a team of AI chat bots suffers from a similar narrow-mindedness. Without actual knowledge of the areas that you're relying on the chat bots to manage, you have no way of determining if the work product you are getting is of any use.

Using a team of bots to produce code without domain knowledge or even general purpose computer science knowledge can only eventually end in tears. But I guess if you can generate the kind of mess a bureaucratic consultancy staffed with MBAs, at a fraction of the price... that's progress of sorts?

Actually, it doesn't even take 5 minute of manual work on Google.

Just checking to see if a given citation exists, nevermind the actual content, is a simple matching query. If I were a lawyer, the very first thing I would do would be to dump every public listing of caselaw I could get my hands on as a local searchable case index, in parallel with having access to a tool like lexis-nexis or PACER (with recap) for more in-depth research. It honestly should be one of the intermediate steps in an AI bot workflow - validate that the citations exist... and then verify that the citation actually bolsters the argument.

Suggested tools:

https://free.law/recap
https://case.law/
https://www.courtlistener.com/...

If you're going to turn an AI bot loose to generate arguments for you, the very least you can do is check its homework, same as you would do for any supervised clerk, paralegal, or lawyer in training working for you. That it can generate bullshit faster than you can is no excuse for shutting off your brain and signing off on it without even doing the bare minimum of due diligence.

The next level of work would be having an AI bot analyze each case and the citations used for the arguments in each, to generate a tree of citations that can be used to argue in one direction or another. Then depending on what arguments you want to bolster, you can selectively cite the cases that give more weight to your case, and prepare counterarguments in case the opposition has prepared an equivalent set of trees that will cherry pick case citations against your argument.

But forget robot lawyers generating bullshit cases. What I want to see is the robot trial judge (and the robot red team lawyer playing the part of the opposition) that can audit your case beforehand and pick it apart so you can be better prepared before you go to trial.

I wonder about that. But there's definitely a seeming drive for puffery on individual resumes, and a collective drive for puffery on the entire platform in order to drive mindshare. The same kind of short-term thinking that has people ripping out existing features to "improve" a product, so they can claim that they actually did something in their tenure there.

Instead of doing something to fix a hard problem, say the obscene memory consumption of tabs as part of the base browser, they do things to make Firefox more attractive to say... advertisers who want placement on Firefox's default home page.

This is my impression as a user - I have no window into the workings of the Mozilla team aside from depressing news bits like this one featured on Slashdot...

Easiest solution is to issue employees a corporate credit card that they are responsible for. All reimbursable expenses have to be correlated against the copy of the statement issued by the credit card company to the corporation.

But what about cash expenses, you ask? Issue a per-diem for travel, and a periodic "here's your budget for IT refresh, whatever you don't spend, you get to keep."

My question is, what kind of receipt fraud are we looking at? Invented expenses that they're using to defraud the company, or real expenses that normally wouldn't be reimbursed that they're disguising as reimbursable ones?

Also, wouldn't invoice fraud be a bigger threat? Fake suppliers sending you real looking invoices in the same of actual suppliers, but with the bank details modified to point to the scammer's accounts instead? Instead of hundreds of dollars in fraud perpetrated by dozens, maybe hundreds of insiders (employees), you get tens, if not hundreds of thousands dollars of fraud perpetrated by outsiders trying to pretend that they're trusted suppliers. Or worse... an insider at your supplier deciding to doctor the outgoing invoice so they can skim money off the top...

Learning COBOL is relatively easy (although there are some dialect differences between say, gnuCobol and the COBOL used on IBM mainframes). Learning Z/OS and JCL on the other hand...

There are resources, though... for example the Open Mainframe Project:

https://openmainframeproject.o...

As they say, if you want a job for the rest of your life, learn to work on mainframes...

You're assuming the remaining old dude (or dudette) is maintaining the code at this point. They could just be serving the role of whacking people with sticks to keep them from accidentally pulling on the thread that is keeping the whole system working, and making loud noises if some new boneheaded manager tries to kill the system without realizing that doing so would cripple the entire company.

Being the last person who understands what all the components are supposed to do and why they are important is not the same as knowing how to modify and maintain said components.

With that said... there's still going to be a crisis when this person announces their retirement...

A mainframe system that has survived multiple waves of "this is the new thing" has one of two things going for it:

1. It works fine and isn't broken, and handles way more thoughput than any alternative proposed without having to spend a stupid amount of money.

2. Nobody understands how the code and logic work, and nobody wants to touch it for fear of breaking it, and all the prior migration projects failed miserably, so much so that there's no money or will to try again. So even if they want to change how things work, they can't.

The two are not mutually exclusive, but #2 tends to be more the case for a system that desperately needs an upgrade, which I'm assuming all these unemployment systems are.

With that said... systems tend to reflect processes and culture, so I don't have high hopes for replacing just the mainframe, to fix the problems that they had/are having.