I never tried Twitter, just joined Mastodon late last year, puzzled that people would think it more difficult. I've had an eye on the Mastodon user counter. For a while there, Mastodon was going up by 300,000 and more new users per week, but then those staying on Twitter stuck, and it fell off over a month or so to less than 100,000/week last June 6. It ticked up, slowly at first, but about five days ago just surged, now running at 450,000/week. That's a jump of 350,000/week, or 50,000/day, presumably mostly migrating from Reddit.

Perhaps it shows how many were just waiting for the kick in the ass they needed to leave a monopoly and into a free market for services.

Well said, bravo, etc.

Just to add some highlighter: the Asian programmer threat never became acute, because programming for any workers without being among those workers, is like doing surgery blindfolded, working from verbal descriptions of what's inside the patient.

Hell, I watched the IT department move 30 people into the Waterworks department, because the buildings were miles apart, saved travel time. It still didn't help. They socialized among themselves, took only guided tours of other people working, didn't sit down beside them and see how the work really went. So there were these interminable meetings, nailing down every data type, every possible value, every bit of logic, vast volumes of specifications. Then the budget would run out, before code was written.

I often developed a stopgap measure, wrote the code in days because I *was* the customer and knew exactly what I wanted, just had to write it up; some of them were just a few hundred lines of code for a 'good enough' 80/20 solution.

Your job is never in danger from a mere coder, not if you are part of "knowing what needs to be written". If you are not, change jobs - simply because mere coding from already-exact specifications is a dull job after just a few years.

"Lack of accountability" confers power. Power corrupts.

You follow the "volts.wtf" podcasts, and there was one of a guy deeply studied in Wright's Law, and how far along that "S-shaped" curve of improvements we currently are for wind and solar. Looking at all the stuff working in labs, and going through the engineering/development process for production, his estimate was that we have 5-10 years left, of the exponential (Wright's Law) improvements in cost/benefit.

Even if it's only 5 years more, holy cow, that's some cheap solar panels - and every time I see an article about solar panel recycling, I think that a lot of panels that are "used up" for commercial payback, might still be good enough for off-grid buyers.

I was amused twice over by the article noting that a benefit is now that people can chill at night, watching TV shows on their cellphones, recharged by solar. First, that they may not have power to those people, but they do have some pretty good cell towers pretty close; and, second, that while some of these people may have trouble buying solar, there are also some villagers with some fairly good cellphones.

Whenever TV comes up, I get a backpat for my link to my Over-the-Air cord-cutter lecture for my local Unix Users Group:
http://brander.ca/cordcutcuug/

Over-the-Air now has the option of storing the 18Mbps digital stream as a standard MPG, meaning you own it, not the cable company. You can compress it with FFMPEG, save movies, keep whole seasons of TV.

Over-the-Air still carries several TV shows per year that are popular, talked-about, decent quality. And, what cord-cutters always want, is the local news. Because I control my DVR - that is to say, the purchased Digitizer product just drops a bunch of MPG files in a Unix or Windows directory every day. So, I can grab ALL the news, then delete every night with a cron bash script, and never think about it - the most recent news shows are always just there, and only today's. Or I can clip out one news article, compress it to H265 and 540x960, and save a news item for a few megabytes.

It wasn't the cost that got to me about cable, it was the shitting DVRs. The first HD DVRs, around 2000-2010, were good quality. But once we'd converted and had no choice, all my cable-company-required DVRs were just shit that rebooted in the middle of shows.

I can't even imagine buying the actual hardware from the capture-everything data-hoovers. They decided to Be Evil, and trust is lost.

I'm puzzled by these three responses. They write as if the ability to do this were in question. One thing still in some question is whether the $20/kWh, 150-hour, iron-air batteries from Form Energy will work well, long-term, reliable, etc. That they will work, and cost at most that much ,has already been proven in pilot projects.

It's not in doubt that we (meaning: human race) can build thousands of gigawatts of wind and solar, and more power lines. If the Form Energy product doesn't work, and neither do any of the redox-flow products in development, we can still build good 'ol pumped-hydro, for sure. There's no vaporware involved, save for the exact products that replace power generation and transportation.

There's no longer any doubt that heat pumps can heat buildings, even at -40C with some extra budget, more-cheaply on the whole than furnaces can: it's a matter of up-front cost versus long-term cost.

Those who doubt the transition, and are also serious industry experts, doubt only the time-scale and the cost, not the very possibility.

You'll never chase them all down, and doing things badly saves money. The whole industry just has to go.

The technologies to replace it are about here, though some need testing at scale. Once the combination of wind, solar, and Form Energy's $20/kWh grid-scale batteries can produce load-following electricity for a penny cheaper than a gas peaking plant, it's all over but the construction project.

Replacing half a billion furnaces with heat pumps is the longer-term challenge, but there's no question that those who do it will save money, it's just a question of up-front spending versus long-term savings.

So, let's get past "peak gas", if we haven't already, then start shutting down (or stop buying from) gas sources in order of most-offensive, downward. These guys will be about at the top of the list.

...bust. If you can't create new power generation for under $5B/gigawatt, and get it from first loan to first loan payment in 60 months, you can't compete. Here's your rule-of-thumb that's easy to remember: at 4% interest, for every dollar per watt of plant capacity, you have to charge a penny per kWh of product, just to cover the interest on the construction. You'll want another penny to pay off the loan in decent time. Then you can start paying operation and maintenance costs, and then you can look for profit.

If Form Energy can pump out iron-air batteries from that new plant Joe Manchin dug the first shovel for the other month, opens in 2024 - for their target price of $20/kWh of storage, then we can simulate base-load power for under $150/MWh, (15 cents/kWh) for over 100 hours at a time, given $30/MWh renewables to charge them up by the gigawatt-hour.

That will tighten the race sharply. If the SMR proponents are right - basically, if that plant announced last week can indeed be built in a few years, at $1B for 300MW, then they're in the race. If they're just shitting everybody again, to get investment, they'll get investment until affordable-enough grid batteries are invented, and it'll be over.

David Roberts at volts.wtf interviews a lot of smart techies that have been in very specific fields for their whole careers, and the Smart Money is against SMRs. Basically, they've been around since nuke subs invented them, and they're too expensive, period. If there's a truly new tech that comes in at $5/watt, under-5-years, it'll be news to them.

After 40 years in IT, I'm retired, and look to a not-yet-retired buddy for guidance, since he's also the best programmer, deepest solutions, I've ever met. He, of course, jumped all over LLMs, downloaded a couple, began playing with them, and was soon working with them. One, at GitHub, helps you program, and he can stop in the IDE and just ask for "routine to filter correct dates", even adding parameters to "correct", and get a routine in seconds that he just has to scan to check, since (like us all) he has written dozens of such routines. Saves 90% of programming time on things like that.

So it helps more with basic programming, skipping the dull stuff - the danger here is to the junior programmer you might have handed that off to? He agreed - junior programmers would be using the AI the most-heavily, though, being given much more of that work.

But then came my killer question: "Is this going to affect your data-processing, get-the-job-done life...more than the invention of the spreadsheet? Remember having to stop and do all the calcs, write them down? Spreadsheets REALLY sped up a dozen common office jobs, more common jobs than programming. Even most programmers have to sort and organize piles of data, do repetitive calcs, part of every process. Would you go back from spreadsheets, if you could keep the AI helper?"

NO WAY. Firm head-shake. Spreadsheets did MORE to speed up office work. At least for programmers. Absolutely for Accounting, pay, inventory, managing customers and sales.

So: all I'm saying, is that before you start predicting a Brave New World that's Very Different, consider that our society swallowed up the efficiencies created by spreadsheets, and databases, and word processors, and internet communication instead of mailing paper, and for that matter telephones and cars. Employment and life continue.

It's not bigger than spreadsheets. Calm down.

Yeah, the people of Iraq think that it's hilarious that Gore misquotes and distortions by some of the largest media, got them a whole pointless war that killed a million people.
https://www.vanityfair.com/new...

As Cory Doctrow puts it, every corporation is a "slow AI", executing a program to make money, firing any employee-units of itself that malfunction in that regard, even disposing of a CEO that chooses morals over money.

The finance corporations that redlined Black neighbourhoods were an AI; the ones that lied about the value of "AAA" securities that were not, were executing a program to make money. Exxon was acting as a slow AI when it lied about global warming for 50 years going.

So, NOW the feds are regulating "AI"? That's new.

There was a huge push into IT in the early 80s, then it fell off by the late 80s. Another huge dip in the "dot bomb" crash of '00.

It was always good to "learn to code", but it was never good to learn only to code. Unless you absolutely love algorithms and logic twists all day long, learn something else you do like all day long, and than add "code" to that. Most programming is about subject-matter expertise, not code-expertise.

Whereas those ships could not possibly launch missiles that blow up nuclear plants, also disabling power, not to mention causing a bit of a mess? At least the windfarm takes one missile per 15MW, not one missile shutting down 1.5GW.

After that guy was kicked to death by multiple officers in Memphis, a cop posted an account that she`d been trained to then say ``Halt! Weapon down!`` at the body, because witnesses will recall hearing those words, but also flip the order of events to make the memory make sense.