I think he was probably correct when he asserted "AI will be a part of the way all games are made".

IIRC, he was using that idea (which is speculation) as a starting-point from-which to develop the more general idea 'it does not make sense' - logic fail FTW.

I'm more concerned with the bizarre attempt to cover-up the use of AI than I am with the use of AI. What do they know which we might want to?

They do. Some people don't use them; and (if disciplined) use one or more worksheets to store data and refer to it purely internally and (otherwise) just sort of ad-hoc mix data and formulas.

In some cases a database connection is where the data comes from; but the number of cells grows because it's conceptually easier(and in practice often less opaque, given the ugliness of displaying very large cell contents) to munge on the data step by step rather than trying to ram everything into one transformation.

Coming from the IT side; and having to field questions from the perpetrators of some absolutely hideous excel sheets from time to time(no, I didn't even know that there was a way of creating a type of embedded image that actually quietly triggers the print spooler subsystem to do something that generates a new image based on the contents of another region of the spreadsheet, still don't know how they did that; but it's objectively depraved) I understand the hate; but I do have to admit that spreadsheets are pretty good for napkin-math thinking-it-through type processes.

Like when you work it out on paper; you've got your input, then you have a cell with the contents of the first transformation you wanted to make, then the second, then the third, and so on, and at each step you can think "does this value make sense?"

It rapidly gets out of hand in quantity; but as a rapid sketchpad for thinking something through you could do a whole lot worse. It's also tempting(again, tempting down the path of darkness in quantity) for dealing with jobs that need both a bit of string munging and a pretty-printed output.

You send the intern down to storage with a barcode scanner and have them start snagging SNs and MACs and stuff from the shipment of new gear. Turns out various vendors use different prefixes on different barcode values to inform their own ERP/inventory system/warehouse people which of the 5 closely spaced barcodes their scanner hit. And each vendor uses a different set of conventions, and while obvious enough they aren't documented. Ok, no problem; intern comes back with raw list; all the Lenovo SNs get a 'last x characters' substring; all the Cisco MACs get another transform, whatever.

Obviously if it were your inventory/warehouse system you wouldn't be treating the barcode scanner as a raw HID device and doing ad-hoc transformations, there would be a program that automatically uses the prefixes to populate the correct parts of the form; but you want to stick your head into ERP project hell rather than come up with maybe a dozen lightweight string manipulations? Obviously, you could also do it in your choice of scripting language and iterate through one CSV to create another; but that mostly just conceals what you did from anyone who doesn't use that scripting language; while you can walk basically anyone employable through the logic of the spreadsheet prettifying.

Any DNS service can return any IP address for a lookup, this is not an AWS specific feature.

Some services are managed through us-east-1 especially when the service itself is global, things like route53 and cloudfront.

This story is specifically about the UK, and their only open land border is between north and south Ireland, so it would be relatively easy for the two governments to work something out.
The only other routes to take vehicles in/out of the UK are by (or under) sea and include passport control checkpoints, so they know exactly what vehicles are transiting and it wouldnt be a huge effort to record mileage as vehicles enter or exit.

It's only for EVs because regular ICE vehicles already pay taxes on the fuel, whereas electricity is not taxed.

Electricity has too many other uses to make a tax on it practical, whereas gasoline and diesel are generally only used for transportation with very occasional lawnmower/generator use.

Taxing out of state vehicles is difficult, but if the other states have a similar system then it would balance out as those vehicles would still be paying the tax in their home state even for miles driven in another state, and vehicles would be going in both directions unless the tax rates are radically different.

The fuel tax system also addressed this quite conveniently as your driving in another state would be limited by the capacity of your fuel tank to make it there and back before you'd have to fill up in the state you were driving in and thus pay their local taxes.

I find the various LLMs are helpful as a form of search engine, enabling me to drill down to potentially useful information more quickly. However at the same time they are far worse than a search engine because they aren't able to actually give you the sources to check. When ChatGPT generates a chunk of code, if you ask it where it got it from, it will say it didn't get it from a specific site, it just knows this stuff. Which of course ends up wrong half the time. So you end up with wrong stuff confidently passed off as accurate, which is ultimately stolen from real human sources. When I was in uni it was drilled into me to list my sources. Why should LLMs be held to any different standard? Google's AI summary does show sources, at least few, which is good. I always check them.

Even Claude AI which is supposed to be geared towards coding suffers from these same problems. I am trying to do some esoteric Qt 6 programming involving OpenGL, and all the AIs really struggle here because there's a limited amount of source material to steal from. It's certainly not capable of digesting the API documents and synthesizing code to do something without first seeing someone else's code. Claude AI seems to work best if you use a popular library or framework with lots of online discussion and github code for it. The popular languages and frameworks of the day.

Also, if they know something is going to damage sales if revealed, does it make sense to do it?

Why does anyone do anything? Complex reasons.

Require domestic supplies to be at cost, only allow making a profit on foreign sales. Also require that domestic be prioritised so they have to supply the local military first before chasing profits.

Will the official contractors even be willing to carry out repairs in a warzone where they could come under attack at any moment? Probably not...

Absolutely, this could well end up being a life and death situation on the battlefield.

Look at the ad hoc repairs and mode both ukraine and russia are doing on a daily basis. A good proportion of the weapons in use on both sides were manufactured by the other side during soviet times so it's not like they can count on the manufacturer for support.

Any military should be demanding full specifications and manuals for any equipment they purchase.

Every time I see this advice, I can't help but think the person giving the advice hasn't worked with very many junior developers.

The same untrained office worker can open a web interface in the same way...
With excel that untrained office worker can mess with the calculations and get invalid results, with a well designed web interface they cannot.

You don't want the untrained workers actually setting up the system, you want someone competent and experienced doing that to ensure that the calculations are accurate.

Auditors check exactly what you ask them to check, no more no less. They can see all kinds of problems, but if you didn't ask them to check that, then they won't mention it. They don't get paid to do that, and won't be thanked for doing it.