Software development is changing. I started coding in BASIC in the 1980's and have been coding now for over 40 years, over 30 years professionally. I'm good at what I do, but the AI is faster. Claude can churn out code faster than I can, and it's often better, catching some conditions I would have missed. That said, it often messes up, misses the mark, or goes in directions that aren't right for the larger context in which the code exists.

Today, professional software development is best done by AI with skilled human guidance and review.

Rejecting AI generated code in today's environment is trying to turn back time. On the other hand, rejecting a submission where there is no human who can "understand, own, and be able to fix the code they submit" makes perfect sense. There is a big difference between asking an AI to generate a fix and blindly submitting the first thing it spits out, versus having an extended session with an AI, correcting it where it goes wrong, vetting and testing the patch with human review and testing, then submitting the PR.

I haven't been in one of the new ones, but I own two Bolts (2020 and 2021) and my dad has a 2023 Bolt EUV. They don't have "dumb buttons for hot, cold, and fan", they have a thermostat where you set the desired temperature and then it controls the heat based on that. The computer makes some counter intuitive choices at times, turning on the AC when it's already cold or the heat when it's hot. You can override it, but it's not the direct dumb buttons and knobs my older cars had where you directly controlled the air flow with mechanical levers.

Still great cars for not too much money.

It really doesn't, though. Even without FTL, given enough time any technological species should eventually spread to all space.

Cool Worlds on You Tube covered this recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

With sublight speeds it takes millions of years to spread, but we've had those millions.

> some critics... safe to fly.

That includes me. A random internet nerd.

For columbia, they knew a piece of ice hit the wing, not that it had damaged the wing. What everybody tries to ignore is that during the two weeks in space, there was talk about an unplanned spacewalk to "have a look". They decided "not to have a look" and paid with 7 lives.

What if MicroSoft would this week decide: "ok. As per your request: Throttle it is, no more windows OS for Russa based IPs!" ?

In Altered Carbon they grow human bodies without a consciousness and then rather than harvesting the organs for another person, they move the other person's consciousness into the body.

I've been using GitHub Copilot for a few months now and I can say that it definitely saves a little bit of time. I've seen reports that it makes developers 33% faster and it really does not come anywhere close to that. Where it shines is being able to fill in some boilerplate code faster than I can type it. When what I'm writing is something where the next few lines are something that an undergraduate student could easily predict, it can fill it in and I can tab complete it faster than I can type it. (Even when it's wrong, it's often faster to accept the close-but wrong answer and fix it than to type it all out manually.)

Expecting it to write whole routines or do any sort of serious architecting is going to be a let down.

But here's the thing: Copilot for Business is $19/month. Compared to a typical developer salary, how much time does it need to save per month to justify that cost? If it saves minutes per month, you're probably still coming out ahead. If anyone really believed it made developers 33% faster, they'd be charging a lot more.

But it definitely requires some skill to use it well. It comes up with some truly monumentally bad suggestions sometimes, and often suggests things that superficially appear correct but aren't. You need to be able to know the difference. If you don't, I could easily see it making things worse.

So of 11600 MW of newly installed renewables, 10000 or 86% is in those batteries. That's absurd.

Why the F*** when a scientist says he's found a nearly complete bellusaurus skeleton, the reporter says: "A what-o-saurus??, let me get my pencil and write this down". But when it is about batteries and energy, they simply get it wrong. There is probably about 2000 MW, 10000 MWh of battery capacity installed.

There are two supermarkets on my commute to work. Both of them started with a few self checkout booths.

Then one did a big "redesign of the layout", now there are 8 or 10 self checkout points and one or two old-fashioned cashiers. The other one went back to all cashiers at about the same time. I guess they had different experiences.

In the one where the manager found it successful, they have one "self checkout" employee and one cashier most of the time. While before there would be 3 or 4 sometimes 5 working the registers. And for me: The last year or so, there have been two instances when there was a queue of 1 or 2 people for self-checkout (for 8 stations = quick!). To me it is a success and for the shop, as they expanded the self-checkout too I guess.

Apparently experiences differ. Apparently quonset has had a different experience. Or agenda.

So if you run this plant for 2.5 years, you can fly a 747 across the ocean!

Why did the masks work in Kansas? It could be that the masks prevented people from getting infected as you would think.

But maybe there is another mechanism. Maybe the awareness of "an issue with a contagious disease" makes people more careful, and the continuous reminders by seeing people with masks and having one on yourself creates that awareness.... That's what the non RCT studies cannot tell you.

My doctor prescribes me something for "high blood pressure". I call it the "zero F***s were given" medicine. It is possible that the effect is completely psychological. Work not done? No stress, go home. Doctors require RCT tests to prove effectiveness before they will prescribe a medicine. This could pass the tests that way....

The definition of temperature makes for some "weird" corner cases. Apparently the environment in LEO has a very high temperature: The few molecules that there are are moving a blistering speeds.

If they claim that 30k temperature, I'm guessing they do some form of vacuum deposition where due to an oddity in the definition of temperature you can state that the temperature is indeed 30k.

Apparently the American plan is: Sue first, educate yourself later.

When you're a full-time sysadmin, maintaining a "high volume" site, then it is reasonable to replace the hardware and upgrade the OS every one or two years. But if you're "johnson & johnson hardware" who paid a nephew $1000 for a webserver and website a while back, then upgrading every 6 years is not even obvious.

Ehh.... I hava 2.4.32 system still "in production". (Yes, its on the internet, No it doesn't have any ports exposed to the internet, no it doesn't have user accounts).

I'm working to replace it the coming weeks.