Maybe I'm out-of-date or a control freak, but I don't want my codebases to contain custom code that I need to rely on but that I didn't write myself. I barely trust my own code, much less code that an opaque AI generated that I consequently only half-understand.

With code I wrote myself, the way it works is a direct reflection of my own thought process, and by the time it's done, I've spent enough time writing and refining it that I'm intimately familiar with it and can tell you exactly what every line does, why it's there, and why I wrote it that way and not some other way.

Which isn't to say I don't use AI, but I'm using it either to review the code I wrote ("check this for any potential bugs") or to provide me with examples of some common technique, which I can then study and rewrite to my personal taste before adding it to my codebase.

My God, are there 337.8 million American homes without power today? You'd think that would have made the news or something.

There is one thing a rooftop system provides that a utility-owned system never can: control over future expenses.

If I install a solar array on my roof, I know (roughly) how much the power it generates will cost me for the next (N) years, and I don't have to worry about anyone jacking up the price on me because of AI data centers or whatnot. If I rely on the electric company's solar array, OTOH, then I'm going to have to pay whatever rates the electric company decides to charge me for that privilege. For some people, having more control over their own power budget is a not-insignificant advantage.

True, and for justifiable reasons. I imagine at some point (when batteries get cheap enough) they'll start selling these in combination with storage batteries, so that people can use them as an emergency UPS and/or to recharge their EV when it gets in, and not have to bother with interfacing with the general electrical system.

I don't think "what appliance can you run on a solar panel" is the right question to be asking, since these solar panels will never be tasked to run an appliance by themselves anyway.

The right question to ask is, "by how much will plugging in one of these reduce my electric bill?"

Once you know that, you can decide if it's worth the purchase price or not.

I don't know what makes that a sure thing. Every previous time we opened up a power-vacuum in the Middle East, ISIS-style criminal organizations stepped in to fill it. Is it going to be different this time because we don't put American boots on the ground and just trust that something good will happen in our absence? That's a remarkably optimistic view!

You might, for a short period, but if history is any guide, people start switching to electric vehicles once they no longer trust in the inevitability of cheap gas. And once they switch, they don't switch back. That's what the oil industry is likely really afraid of -- that by the time they're back in business, their customers will have already moved on.

Sure, but they'll also expect Trump to "fix it". If Trump can't fix it, will they just shrug their shoulders and accept it as the new normal that they can no longer afford to drive their land yacht? Possibly, but I wouldn't be money on it.

[2050 historical narration] So complete was Trump's strategic incompetence that in trying to guarantee the free movement of oil, he succeeded in becoming the catalyst that caused the world to finally lose its faith in oil as a reliable energy source. Trump was posthumously awarded an Ignobel Prize for his unintentional role in combatting climate change.

Hey, mine too! And yet, there's always one more bug, isn't there? People who think their code is 100% bug free are kidding themselves.

I mean, if they think it's worth exposing themselves to the health and legal risks, sure?

But I don't think asking an AI to scan the codebase of an open-source software library involves any risk at all; at best it helps you improve your codebase; at worst it comes back with nothing useful and you haven't lost anything. For closed-source code, OTOH, you'd risk your code getting exfiltrated, so I wouldn't recommend that unless you have a signed agreement with the AI vendor and you trust them to honor it.

Yes, because you learned. Like everyone else; some more quickly than others.

No need to conclude anything; try it for yourself. Take your best code, the code that you've been debugging and polishing for years, the code that you've shipped in a hundred releases already, the code that you've run through every static analyzer and runtime test-harness you could get your hands on to try and ferret out any bugs, to the point where all of them returned "no further issues found". Dump that codebase into Claude Code (or whatever AI you think it appropriate) and ask it to scan the codebase and report any bugs it might find.

I did the above, and CC came back with a dozen suspected issues, four of which were false-positives and eight of which were genuine errors in the code. They weren't coding errors as far as the programming language was concerned (because the various code-analyzers had already caught all of those); they were errors in the business-logic, the type of error that a static analyzer doesn't even attempt to diagnose (because how would it know what the programmer intended?). Nevertheless, they were valid bugs, and they are all now fixed, thanks to "the toy".

I was a shitty programmer once. So were you. So was every now-decent programmer, because being a shitty programmer and paying the price for making n00b mistakes is how one learns to becomes a good programmer. Nobody was born with the knowledge of how to apply all known best practices, and there's no shame in admitting it.

Apple IIs are all highly secure, thanks to their built-in air-gap firewall!

Do you understand that one way how people find out whether a technique is effective is by trying them it out and seeing what happens?

Can you think of a scenario where having some real-world data on how a spacecraft alters the trajectory of a projectile might be useful?

Do you think remaining ignorant and inexperienced is an effective way to save money?