The whole buy nopw pay later and the just x easy payments of $y has gotten WAY out of hand. I went to buy something online that was around $10 and the damned site offered me "4 easy payments". If I need 4 easy payments to buy a $10 item, maybe I shouldn't buy it at all.

All of this is to hide the simple fact that pay has in no way kept up with inflation or GDP over the last 50 years. Fix that and people won't need 4 easy payments.

It's several things. Nobody likes typos, misspellings, or awkward phrases but it happens. The briefs that have gotten lawyers in hot water included entirely fictional court cases and case law. That's not missing something, that's obviously rubber stamping something the lawyer has a legal duty to verify for accuracy.

Your lack of imagination is almost unimaginable.

What you're saying is similar to claiming that speech can carry no useful information unless it is translated into English.

True enough for an English monoglot, but not universally true.

Usable to who/what?

In what way is matter needed for energy to contain information? When we receive information from EM radiation that has traveled in space for thousands of years, where is the matter? We (beings of matter) need the energy to interact with matter for us to read it, but it's there if we read it or not.

It's not the size of the code. It's the tiny little parts of that code that are most used and least efficient. You might see significant performance improvements with a little custom inline assembly code which don't effectively change the size at all.

However...

"At worst this app should be written in C++/Qt or WX, and should take up about 50MB. " If you wrote this in assembly language, it would probably be under 1 MB. If you care about memory. But 1MB of assembly code is a beast.

How is that relevant at all to American companies rapacious mark-ups?

None of that addresses the issue of American companies inflating prices by hundreds of a percent over Chinese companies selling the same things made in the same place. A number of Chinese companies that sell in the U.S. actually DO warehouse products in the U.S.

Perhaps we need to offshore executive management and Wall Street instead.

Some are. I work more with smaller businesses than Big Tech and I don't think we've ever had more interest in our software development services.

There is a rational concern that technical people will understand the benefits and limitations of generative AI but management and executive leadership will fall for the hype because it was in the right Gartner quad or something and that will lead to restructuring and job losses. Businesses that get that wrong will probably be making a very expensive mistake and personally I'm quite looking forward to bumping our rates very significantly when they come crying to people who actually know what they're doing to clean up the mess later. It's not nice for anyone whose livelihood is being toyed with in the meantime, obviously, but I don't buy the arguments that this isn't fundamentally an economic inevitability as the comment I replied to was implying.

Bring back U.S. manufacturing jobs, exile management.

Consider, the same device made in China and sold by a Chinese company costs a small fraction of what the same device made in China and sold by a U.S. company does. Often the Chinese sold device has less anti-repair "features".

The problem in the U.S. ain't labor costs. Labor DOES cost more in the U.S. but with modern automation, labor costs are a fairly small part of the final price.

Historically and economically, it is far from certain that your hypothetical 20% increase in productivity would actually result in a proportionate decrease in employment. Indeed, the opposite effect is sometimes observed. Increased efficiency makes each employee more productive/valuable, which in turn makes newer and harder problems cost-effective to solve.

Personally, I question whether any AI coding experiment I have yet performed myself resulted in as much as a 20% productivity gain anyway. I have seen plenty of first-hand evidence to support the theory that seems to be shared by most of the senior+ devs I've talked with, that AI code generators are basically performing on the level of a broadly- but shallowly-experienced junior dev and not showing much qualitative improvement over time.

Whenever yet another tech CEO trots out some random stat about how AI is now writing 105% of the new code in their org, I am reminded of the observation by another former tech CEO, Bill Gates, that measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

They list any number of "grounds" to brick your device forever but the left out the key phrase "OR if we think you might have".

You don't actually have to do any of those things, you just have to be the innocent victim of a DRM malfunction of someone's typo.

The short answer is because of his faults, DJ lied to poor people constantly, and his opposition told poor people the truth.

And for a medium long answer, I would add...

And Hispanic Men and Black Men couldn't bring themselves to vote for a black female president.

And Venezuelans who fled a left wing authoritarian regime were blind to the fact that Trump was a right wing authoritarian.

And Muslims literally believed the lies that Trump was going to treat Palestine better even tho he had a history of attacking Muslims.

This is the way and what smart people will be doing

About $0.45 actually.