I agree completely. It's not uncommon for technology companies to have less than wonderful IT departments. They don't view IT as technology, just an expense that can be minimized. I saw this at a DoD contractor where I worked years ago. In that case they didn't even have a firewall. Before that in the early 2000s I was at Compaq when a virus infected all the storage test facilities. The entire US-wide company was on one LAN, and again, no firewall. That made it easy for labs to exchange info, test, etc, and for anyone to get inside. At the DoD contract we got annual FBI briefings about potential risks - all ignored. What bothers me more is that if the attacker was an individual, the FBI would have that person in handcuffs right now for committing a federal crime, but these AI companies are all buddies with a LOT of money and the law evidently doesn't apply to them.

As a (badly selling) author, I'm with the publishers. It's totally reprehensible for Google to steal the content for AI training. As a side-effect of this we will have even more mundane slop novels on the market, possibly suppressing sales of the original works as the slop gets promoted.

It’s the massive level of ignorance that we are fighting. They are all happy to use the technology but not to acknowledge how any of it got to be here.

Thanks for the corrections. I will try to pay closer attention before commenting in the future. Senility has a price.

That should be a good shot to the foot for Windows. The ridiculous bit is that they are replacing the OS as a part of this. With what? Oh yes, another OS of some sort, no doubt based on something someone whipped up with Claude :)

Without data there is nothing to base any decision on.

When Git started it was just a simple, distributed source code control system. It worked well enough and supported the Linux kernel work. It's a tragedy really that the Evil Empire got hold of it. I speak as a former development lead at MS. That company has a long history of acquiring other companies that it wants to squash or absorb so that they can no longer compete. MS had no need for Git as far as I could tell, unless it thought it could reduce its own costs using other source control systems. Then some feeble minded individual decides to 'improve' it with a very dubious AI add-on. You have to ask yourself if that added anything of value to the source control system itself, or if it's really just a tool that might be better applied outside of the source control. I.e used in development/build/test. And, of course, there is always someone who thinks that the company can make money out of adding features to a perfectly functional product and then charge the users for the privilege of being frustrated by the less than stellar add-on. I really wish that Git had stayed as a stand-alone free service for Linux developers.

I've been coding for well over 50 years and I am still surprised if I see a comment in code that indicates the intent of the code following the comment. The intent not the how of the implementation is what someone new to the code can really benefit from when time comes to modify it. I think it's hopeless to expect that will change, and as the article says, having AI (or a warm body) add comments based on what the code does is more or less useless.

I spent decades from 1989 onwards writing Windows apps. Since about 2016 I'm exclusively a Mac guy (and retired) but still coding in C, C++, and Python. I've been through Atom and Pulsar on the Mac, but I'm quite excited about Notepad++ now that I've given it a quick try. From a Mac point of view the initial tiny font and icons are not really Mac friendly, and neither is (minor stuff) the location of Settings in the menu. If you're writing a Mac app, stick to the Mac organization - that's why we like the Mac. I'll switch to Notepad++ for C and C++ (and especially Makefiles) and see how it goes. Still using PyCharm for Python though.

I entered "I want to take a practice SAT test" It gave me a list of places to go and said I could take it right here. I entered "right here" It then told me to type "I want to take a practice SAT test" into the chat I did that, and off we go in a loop I lost interest after entering "I want to take a practice SAT test" about five times. More fool me for trying more than twice.

When I was an electronics engineer in the 70s I had a lot of books like that which were catalogs and also very good reference material for new designs.