It used to be that a photographer could make a living taking a picture in a war zone, and sending it back to HQ for printing in the evening / mornings newspaper. Now, there is no more newspaper to pay the photographer. Worse, if he sells the picture to any random site on the internet, the whole rest of the internet copies that picture. Thus, he gets paid once ($200) for taking that picture, when he used to be able to sell the same picture to hundreds of different newspapers for $200 each.

The same thing happened to many other creative disciplines. It used to be we had a journalist that wanted to go write a story because it would sell newspapers that would get him paid. Now we don't have the journalist because we don't have the newspaper. AI can copy the story.

The Music industry no longer pays its creators. There are now Youtube videos that seem like a bot created them.

AI is coming for computer programmers.

The danger is that we don't really have a model to pay the people at the start of the food-chain, the original photographers, writers, etc. We have a model where we pay for the AI generated copies, but not the original creators. In a world is drowning in "information", we have a hard time finding valid new useful information.

We are looking at a societal shift to enshittification. A dumber world for more challenging times.

Nissan is shopping for someone to buy Nissan.

They are so close to bankruptcy they are hoping to get bought out by Honda or someone else.

Wasn't COBOL written to make it such that a manager could read the code as plain English and understand what it does?

In any case, the issue isn't understanding what the old COBOL code did. It is that when the senior executive's job is on the line, can you answer the question: Does the new code work the same way as the old code? How do you know?

Your putting alot of faith in an LLM and its ability to write a plain English explanation. Not to mention that (a) the code fragment being analyzed may not actually be the code that affects a behavior, and (b) when is the last time you saw a well-written requirement specification? It is often easier to write the code than a plain English explanation of what it does.

Argh!!! ... I'm realizing my writing style looks exactly like Google's AI generated answers ...

It doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong, if it looks like AI ...

Keeping a Job

Often senior employees figure out a secret business process and don't document / tell anyone else in the company about it. This secret business process means that the person must be kept around. The business disruption caused by firing them is too high.

Other times, people just make busy work to look like they are busy. Sometimes it is at an individual level. In other cases, it can happen collectively. Carl Icahn has this crazy story about letting go 12 floors of people when he couldn't figure out what they actually did.

Young People Finding Work

Young people not being able to find new jobs is about job creation and skills mismatch. Business wise, creating new jobs is very different than trying to keep existing employees productive and motivated. Keeping an existing business running involves minimizing change and minimizing the impact of inevitable change. Expanding and creating new jobs requires finding new profitable opportunities, hiring new people, buying new equipment, and lots of other steps. It is really hard to do successfully, and magic when it happens.

Young people have historically done much of this for themselves, as they are the only people willing to work hard enough to do it. If young people's expenses are so high that they can hardly make ends meet, then they won't work on the "next big new idea". Student debt and high housing prices kills new job creation. it means that the new business leaders have no money left to create the opportunities to create job growth. Nothing kills off job growth as effectively as too much debt. The founding fathers prioritized free public education for good reasons.

My best and worst experiences learning English were with an Oxford trained professor, and a high school English Teacher. From the professor, I learned:
1. Make the book easy to read.
2. Chose terminology carefully. Particularly for new concepts, short clear terms make things much easier for the reader.
3. Choose a system of punctuation, and stick to it throughout the book.

On the other hand, my high school English teacher insisted I get a special style guide / book on how to use the semicolon. From this I learned:
4. "Proper" punctuation in English is all about the style guide that the person is following.
5. Different teachers can't consistently teach a consistent "Proper" punctuation, because style guides differ.
6. Many people don't follow any particular style, or even know what is in their preferred style guide.

I recall reading a Microsoft Excel EULA that said:

Microsoft doesn't guarantee the software is fit for any particular purpose, including the one for which it was intended.

I never forgot that disclaimer. It was so true.

The current Azure license states:

THE SOFTWARE IS LICENSED “AS IS.” YOU BEAR THE RISK OF USING IT. MICROSOFT GIVES NO EXPRESS WARRANTIES, GUARANTEES, OR CONDITIONS. TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED UNDER APPLICABLE LAWS, MICROSOFT EXCLUDES ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

Which is likely worse. They don't even guarantee that Microsoft wrote the software and it does not violate patents.

All industrial equipment over a certain dollar value now comes with some type of remote access equipment, often with the option of specifying different variants. It costs almost nothing for the equipment. It costs something like $3,000 dollars to send someone to a random destination and fix something. If the person needs to go to site, determine the cause of the problem, return home, and then fly back with the spare part, it costs $6,000.

A cell modem remote communication device pays for itself on the first trouble call. The vendor may simply want it to ensure there are no problems before the sale is complete. Post-sale support, like warrantee or service contracts, usually specify the presence of a remote access device as a cell modem receiver or a land-line variant. The modem can be disabled if the customer doesn't want it after the commissioning / warrantee / end of service contract. Often the device remains, as it is not cost effective to remove it.

Depending on the contract details and until the final 5% payment is made, the vendor owns part of the equipment and gets a say in whether the remote access device is present. If a bank or lease company has an interest in the item, then they may want a tracker to know where the equipment is and how much it is being used.

I spent a bunch of time on this a number of years ago. The case insensitive filenames are fundamentally problematic. The best that can do done is to have an authoritative file name, and one or more user facing file name(s). Trying to compare file names in a case insensitive manner runs afoul of these issues:

1. Character sets. Even the Windows Unicode character set gets expanded, so there is no invariant character set. This pretty much ends any concept of having a fixed set of rules.

2. File systems cross computers. This means that a file system that is valid on Ted's US computer with a US ASCII character set will show different filenames on Francois' French computer running a European / French character set. Modern globe-spanning networks mean both computers may be accessing the same file system. Some of this can be resolved by running Unicode or UTF-8. However, those aren't a static target either, see point (1).

3. Operating System. Some applications, thinking SolidWorks and AutoDesk Products, use interesting symbols in the file names that are interpreted differently on different operating systems. Think double quote can mean a quotation or Inches. Single quote can mean feet or a quotation. Period can mean the decimal separator (America), the thousands separator (Europe), or the separator between the filename (readme) and file type (txt). Slash and Backslash are not reserved characters in all operating systems. This means that a filename valid in one operating system may not be valid in another operating system.

4. Versions of Operating System. (1) and (3) conspire in convoluted ways when Francois and Ted may be running differing versions of Windows or Linux written many years apart.

5. Differing Languages, Time, Security Concerns - Mean the definition of a case-insensitive comparison varies with time and place. The security issue is important. Sometimes you want a flag to say "vvest" is same as "west" (think scams). Most times saying "vvest" and "west" is the same is a really big bug.

6. Corrupt file system. How do you handle the case where two file names exist in the file system, differing in only case sensitivity? If identical filenames exist, then that is obviously a problem. However, if identical case insensitive file names exist, then that might be valid depending on where and when the file was written. And you don't want to fix it, because some applications (SolidWorks and AutoDesk) depend on the filename not changing.

In all, the Linux (and Unix) approach of having a filename be a sequence of characters is pretty good. It is at least logically consistent. Adding case insensitivity and internationalized character support is a bit of a nightmare. If you need to be able to compare filenames in a case-insensitive manner, it is likely a good idea to do it at the UI level. At the UI level, there is some support for handling all of the language issues involved. The file system, being at the base of the operating system and the first module loaded, almost by definition cannot handle these issues.

The rule of thumb in electronics circles is that any energy source generating less than 1.5 VAC is not worth pursuing, even for battery powered applications. I spent some time on this when I was a kid. I was trying to figure out if radio waves could be harvested to power something fun (like an LED.)

The basic passive energy conversion circuit is a bridge rectifier. It uses two silicon diodes with 2*0.7VDC = 1.4 VDC voltage drop in series for each half-cycle. There are other circuits, some involving transformers, others using different types of diodes, and some with transistors. However, even using the fanciest diodes on the smallest ICs, there is some voltage drop involved. It is very difficult to get the mV or uV level signals to power anything useful because (a) the voltages are too small relative to losses, and (b) the currents and power levels involved are extremely small too.

It is possible to make active diode "mixer" circuits that work on small signals, like in the transistor radio. These circuits depend on an external power source, and almost always an amplifier of some sort. In a radio the battery is that power source. For power generation, the circuit must capture enough energy to replace the battery. That is really hard in passive RF power scavenging applications where the input signal level is in the small microvolt to millivolt range.

Wireless Phone charges work by increasing the amplitude of the wireless signal to 100 (VAC) or so (depending on the system). A typical Wireless phone charger puts out something like 100 trillion times the energy developed by this device.

The summary mentions that they can't be certain the device actually works because of the micro-volt level signals involved. If the signal is too small to measure within experimental error, then it is likely too small for useful power generation too.

Please, let it work on useless system tasks too.

I'm dying in despair, and computing in disrepair ...

Please, someone give me an operating system with kill -9 !!!

The stated goal of DEI is to increase profits. For cost-conscious employers, DEI is implemented by hiring workers from vastly different backgrounds and life experiences. This diminishes commonality and makes it much tougher to unionize. This is also why Amazon often tries to encourage workers to not talk amongst themselves, and discourages social events. This makes for a dysfunctional workplace, low wages, and high staff turnover.

Costs can be further reduced by not experienced workers, and not valuing previous work experience in new hires.

Good luck on getting HR or senior executives to say the dystopian vision out loud ...

Theregister suggested these movie ideas:
License To Kill -9
For Your iPhone Only
AI Another Day
The name's Bezos, Jeff Bezos
etc ...

Many of the ideas actually sound better than the future movie ...

IBM killed it when they announced Windows 3.1 would be the last version of Windows supported for compatibility with OS/2. This announcement was made when 32-bit Windows NT was out, and talk existed an awesome new version of 32-bit Windows. The chronology was this:
1993: 32-bit Windows NT 3.1 launched
1994: Warp launched
1995: 32-bit Windows 95 launched
1996: Windows 4.0 launched
It was obvious at the Windows 95 launch that 16-bit Windows development was dead and the future was 32-bit. Windows 95 was going to be the largest target market. Warp had no plans on supporting 32-bit Windows applications, and that was the end of Warp.

IBM made some really bad decisions during the project. There were rumors that some of IBM's product managers were taking bribes from Microsoft. It was mentioned in passing in some magazine articles at the time, but I never saw a solid story. Additionally, there were also rumors from Microsoft that they thought IBM didn't know how to deliver an operating system, and deliberately developed Windows NT as the alternative. The existence of a better 32-bit operating system at Microsoft would have done nothing to help relations either.

All of this happened when Bill Gates and crew were at their most competitive and deliberately trying to dominate the market. Office 1995 was launched with Windows 95. Microsoft Office took over quickly outsold the previously dominant WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Novell eventually filed a unfair competition lawsuit about Microsoft's conduct at the time.

The business plan is:
1. Create a bunch of companies to distribute private data, and charge money for it.
2. Create a company to remove the private data from those companies, and charge money for it.
3. If someone wants to compete against (2), ignore them. Just don't do anything.
4. For extra security, move some companies overseas.
5. To be extra threatening, get some Russian gangsters to distribute real and deep-fake pictures of famous people. Make an example of the First Lady.

Now, even if someone wants to "escape the monopoly" at step (2), they can't.

Mozilla would like to offer this as a service without involving a sleaze-ball. However, they can't. That's the "trap" Mozilla is in.