The Guardian turning on Labour for being unelectable under Jeremy Corbyn is an honesty. He was an antisemite who let antisemitsim grow and fester in the Labour party. Besides, his policies and lack of leadership made him unelectable and unappealing to the majority of voters, so Labour were better without him. If you want to make a difference, you have to be able to form a government, and the Corbyn fans never understood that. It's been very entertaining watching him try to form a new party and seeing the kind of people it's attracting as its candidates and just how unelectable it is too.

But again that's backwards. I let my AI coding assistant write tests exactly so that I have a reproducible, deterministic ground truth that I can inspect for logic errors. If you let the AI do the testing directly, it's a toss-up if today it feels like it or it decides that your desired result is "everything green" so it'll just give you that answer without actually testing anything.

LLMs obviously aren't human. But that's not the point. The point is that you don't need to know a programming language to program a computer.

For example: Especially in the early days of smartphones, there were mountains of small tools that did something that's essentially a simple script. Egg timers, remind-me-tomorrow apps, tons of stuff that's basically a wrapper around a web search, and so on. Almost all of those are today something ChatGPT can do, and are easy enough to describe.

I've actually outsourced the first iteration of that to AI. :-)

At the end of coding sessions, I generall ask it to spin up an adversial agent whose task it is to find flaws, inconsistencies, mistakes, bugs, etc.

I'd still strongly recommend to anyone shipping AI-generated code to have a thorough human code review, but for a first pass at surface level, the AI can check itself if it has some kind of separation between the generator and the reviewer.

Personally, after some experimenting, I've concluded that:

• AI is good at implementing known algorithms.
• AI is good in creating code that flows straightforward from a design document.
• AI is good at code reviews and finding bugs.
• AI (unlike me) doesn't mind writing a few hundred tests.
• But, it tends to over-engineering simple tasks to the point of "why does Hello World need enterprise-software levels of abstraction?"
• It struggles with code that doesn't have a known solution.
• It's difficult to get it into a different lane once it started going down the wrong way.

What I use it for these days is rapid prototyping. Using AI I can make a functioning prototype of an idea I have in a few days instead of a few weeks. I can quickly test out an idea for a feature or change in my existing codebase.

What I also have been using it for a while is as a code-reviewer and for someone like me who is mostly working solo, that's an insanely valuable thing. Not just the bugs themselves, but also the ability to discuss code with someone. Basically, AI is a rubber ducky that replies.

Mickeysoft lost the plot again.

The game-changing element of LLMs and agents is that they have a non-computer-language interface - you can talk to them in plain English (or Chinese or whatever). This makes complex computer interactions available to a much wider audience than any previous computing invention. Adapting humans to the AI is getting that backwards. It's a sign you don't understand the first thing about why AI is so widely successful.

I predict this will be an abject failure and a year from now will quietly be pushed to the very back of the bottom-most drawer, never to be spoken off again (though it is getting crowded in there for M$).

Meanwhile, in the real world, everyone I've talked to about these things already has a skills file to teach the AI about their personal coding style. This is what actual humans came up with, independently several times, and it works: Adapt the AI to you. Plus we've been writing coding style guides for humans for a long time now, we've got plenty of experience doing that at least somewhat right.

Yeah, and their whole argument is irrational. $1500/$30 = 50 months. A four-year ROI isnâ(TM)t irrational. Whatâ(TM)s irrational is companies expecting to make back their costs in a year, and expecting that because their service sucks so much that people wonâ(TM)t stay past the promotional period.

I'm glad I understood you correctly. There are some serious parallels between Putin and Hitler and both of their penchant for threatening and annexing places all in the name of Ein Volk! Putin and his clique have an amazing skill at keeping a straight face when they talk about de-nazifying Ukraine.

In my experience, most sufficiently advanced use of PHP involves rendering the HTML. You can do it either way.

And most sufficiently complex PHP uses PHP as a full-fledged language, complete with classes, etc., and to the extent templates are used, the code in them consists of tiny partial-line-long fragments of code that call some method in some other file that is basically just code.

In other words, very fragmented code isn't caused by PHP; it's caused by the way that the developer chose to use PHP.

We stayed somewhere eight years ago where the host complained and that they were disappointed we didn't put the recycling in some bins somewhere or put the rubbish out (we didn't know where nor whether the locality had rules about these), that we didn't do the dishes (we left them air drying), that we left the place dirty (we tidied up, swept the kitchen floor, but we had a toddler too). There was an enormous cleaning fee for that place too. Never mind I had to clean the ashes from the choked fireplace before I could use it, despite it being one of the big selling points of the cottage. We did far more than we needed to in cleaning. Years later, that host is no longer on AirBnB and other hosts tell us we're great guests and they don't understand that one bad review. It's annoying, we can't even see that review or know what was actually written about us.

Yepp, as I said: The system is built first and foremost to defend itself.

Personally, I don't think that police should have any right whatsoever to enter your digital devices. Yes, including for terrorism and kiddie porn. And I am 100% for us nerds developing defenses against this overreach. This case is a lesson that teaches us distress PINs are a good thing, but we need to improve on them, make it less obvious they were used, etc.

It's not a question of "Germany for the Germans". It's a matter of allowing people who are openly opposed to your culture to become a sizeable minority, while at the same time putting pressure on society in every way in order to extract wealth for the "elites", while at the same time replacing everyone among the "elites" who is actually capable of something with incompetent, corrupt egomaniacs.

If one of these factors were absent, we might yet manage. Competent leaders might be able to keep things together. Not maximizing profit for the few while returning the populations' lives back to peasantry would give ordinary people breathing space to cope with everything and solve issues at the base. Not importing culture war would keep society more cohesive and able to fight back against the exploitation.

As a (small) shareholder of both companies, I'm against this move. Not that my opinion counts for much, but these are two companies that are strong each for their own reasons and a merger would muddle that. But maybe that's the point.

We thought the Megacorporations would emerge as vertically integrated all-consumer-products giants. Turns out that a tech bubble beats that.

That does not follow. Germany especially is an export-oriented economy that relies on cheap energy to be profitable. It competes directly with asian countries that have far lower costs. You might not grasp the magnitude: Gas was 2.5 cents per kWh a decade ago. It jumped to 30 and more after Ukraine, USA or a combination of both blew up North Stream 2. Granted, it came down again, but it's still over 6 cents today. (exact numbers depend on your market, location, yada yada )

Russia is suffering a slow-burning blow to its compound growth. I honestly don't think that the damage to Russia is worse than the damage to Europe.

Russia's army also took a beating AND would be needed to keep control of Ukraine, half of which (the western parts) are intensely anti-russian. Controlling an occupied territory can be as demanding if not more than conquering it.