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Comment Re: A "Citizen Scientists" model may work elsewher (Score 1) 12

Sure, it could be done. We could all volunteer to maintain roads and bridges too. Grab those shovels comrades!

If only we had some way to collectively pay for professionals to perform services for the common wealth. Not everyone would want to pay of course, so we'd need to have some sort of rules and penalties for those who try to avoid paying their fair share. I've got it: we can send them to Mar-A-Lago!

Comment Re:What we need to be doing (Score 1) 168

You're still here after all these years?

Notably though if we actually run out of work to do we have a post-scarcity utopia, and that happens when people are so rich that there's basically not a single person who, given even more money, would even be able to think of something to spend it on. That's not going to happen any time soon, so we're basically dealing with a distribution problem, which requires distribution (e.g. minimum wage, set it to 1/3 national hourly GDP, the reason for this takes a while to explain) and redistribution (negative income tax, do it as a universal dividend) policies along with monetary policy to properly increase the money supply to not fall behind productivity growth.

Submission + - Writer turns down grad school acceptance due to AI misinformation (businessinsider.com)

bluefoxlucid writes: A promising young writer rejected her invitation into the University of Sidney's creative writing program on speculation that AI will make creative writers obsolete.

In late 2023, I began noticing changes in the media landscape. Publications were laying off most of their writers, and friends in the industry lost out on great gigs and started competing with AI-generated writing.

As for the book industry, I realized AI will not spend years crafting a thrilling romance novel; it will instead churn out a thousand ebooks a month. For the commercial side of the industry, that will always be enough.

The link used for an example of AI-generated writing consuming the industry discusses cover letters and resumés, and in a great fallacy of equivocation the author decides this means creative writers like Brandon Sanderson, David Webber, and herself will be replaced by ChatGPT.

Instead of AI taking her job, the AI narrative took her job, or at least convinced her to give up on her career as a writer.

Comment Re: Don't deserve it (Score 1) 111

The average web application is ten to one hundred times slower over the Internet compared to not so very long ago, so maybe they should care. Electricity, transmission lines, power distribution, cooling, and cpu time are not the sort of things one should be gratiuitously wasting either, no matter how popular it is to do so right now.

Comment Cancer risk (Score 0, Troll) 223

I wonder if these will have academic studies in a few years showing they create a high risk of rare forms of cancer the way studies showed the mRNA based COVID "vaccines" did. If not, no thanks. It is no fun to die a painful death or to lose someone you love and see them die a painful death either.

Comment Re:Don't deserve it (Score 1) 111

I generally agree with all that, but I am still not impressed. It is partly due to rapidly declining educational standards where newly graduating programmers need to have remedial classes so they know how and are not afraid to make a phone call or write an email in complete sentences. Writing a compiler for a serious programming language? Apparently that is just short of unheard of, and when I was in school you practically couldn't graduate in computer science without taking a class like that and almost everyone did. I used to write or port video games that ran on machines (like the Amiga, the Atari ST, and the Atari 7800) with as little as 4K of RAM and 16K of ROM, and you had better believe no one wanted to ship a video game cartridge with any visible bugs in it, or something on floppy disks with serious bugs in it either. I had managers yell at me for not being able to fit a cutting edge golf game into 512K of RAM on an Amiga when I was seventeen. It would have worked fine in HAM mode with 4096 colors but the publisher (Accolade actually) insisted that it absolutely had to fit in 512K and took responsibility for the Amiga version away from me and shipped a rather less exciting 32 color version because their requirements were that demanding.

And these days programmers waste RAM like water - and in many (but certainly not all) environments they can afford to, and no one cares. If every version for twenty years is slower and uses more resources than the year before no one really cares just as long as the bottom line looks okay and they can hire the cheapest and least competent programmers possible to get a (bleep) poor job done before moving onto the next bug infested piece of software. And even the *biggest* and most reputable companies do this as a matter of course. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Adobe produce some great software but overall their software quality has either gone done hill or done nothing much for twenty years. And Internet standards are actually going backwards, especially with the introduction of ever slower versions of DNS, the ridiculous idea that we should use HTTPS everywhere, some of the most inefficient RPC protocols ever devised, the advent of resume driven development SPA web applications and on and on.

Back in the 90s software, including Internet software used to be *fast*, and if you didn't push the limits of the laws of physics you were a bad programmer. And how many companies and how many programmers do that any more? Approximately none of them, if they even know how or use a language that doesn't suffer embarassing pauses and run ten times as slow as what is reasonably possible. Electrical engineers and engineers in materials science know how to push the boundaries of the laws of physics, but on average software engineers stink and are not allowed to dedicate the time and the resources to do anything they should actually be proud of and look at themselves in the mirror in the morning with anything but barely disguised disgust. Someone or some group of people ought to do something about that. I intend to do so (to the degree I can of course) and I hope others do to. I am embarrassed to work on products and services from poorly managed software and services companies with managers, executives, CEOs, boards of directors, and shareholders that just don't care (tm).

Comment Don't deserve it (Score 4, Informative) 111

Very very few software developers deserve the title "engineer" at all, and not just because they haven't or couldn't pass the FE exam. Software quality has been in free fall for a couple of decades now for a variety of reasons. That is not all the software developers fault of course, but if you can't write code in some serious high performing programming language that could be put in ROM and perform according to spec without any serious bugs for at least a century you are basically incompetent compared to video game programmers who used to count cycles on 8 and 16/32 bit machines and produce reliable, nearly bug free software that was often burned into ROM and still works in emulation today or write code that could control safety critical embedded equipment where failure means death or injury, human spaceflight controls with similar consequences, or any kind of software where a major failure means a financial or other catastrophe that results in human suffering, major loss of life, disclosure of massive amounts of information like that you *definitely* do not deserve the title "software engineer" at all.

Ask a real engineer sometime, someone that deserves the title - they operate under such constraints as a matter of course, if they fail to do their jobs bad things like I described happen, and the professional ones bear personal and professional liability if a design for something like a bridge or a building catastrophically fails. There was a time when if an architect or engineer designed a structure that failed and killed someone, the consequence was the death penalty or at least permanent revocation of their professional license.

It would be nice to bring that level of seriousness and quality, reliability, and performance back instead of cutting and pasting random bits of (possibly low quality "AI' generated) code and tweaking it until it pretends to work like someone with a seventh grade education and then shipping the abysmally low quality result every couple of weeks and planning to fix the bugs sometime in the next decade if you or someone who works there or who calls the shots ever gets around to it at *all*. Some who claims to be a software developer (or worse a "software engineer") should act like they are smarter or at least more responsible than a fifth grader.

Comment Re:A recent experience (Score 4, Insightful) 179

Credit and debit cards are great until there is a power outage, a natural disaster, a war, or a (local and hopefully temporary) collapse of the Internet. Then people just stare at each other and can't even buy gasoline or groceries if they do not have any emergency cash on hand. Hey buddy can you spare a twenty? I need to get to work or my grandmother needs to get to the hospital in the next town over, etc. It would turn panhandling into an art form, not that it isn't one already. And perish the thought that one of those conditions prevails for *months* in which case everyone in the area affected might really be in trouble, especially when the ATMs (which may not work either) and local bank branches (which may not be able to tell what your balance is) run out of cash.

Comment UV-C not shortest (Score 0, Offtopic) 41

It is embarrassing when a reputable science website makes ridiculous claims like UV-C is the shortest wavelength radiation the sun produces. Perhaps the editors have never heard of x-rays or gamma-rays. And it goes on from there. On the other hand maybe they don't have editors over there anymore, just poorly educated interns supervising AIs making things up. Either way that is kind of sad though.

Comment Re:The bottle was leaking for years (Score 1) 128

Unless their parents own the company, anyone in hiring has been on both sides. And within the past 10 years (at least), job seekers have had to pack their resumes with keywords in order to get through HR. Yes, people should ideally take the time to tailor their resume to the position to which they're applying, but it's a lot less effort (and usually pays off) to just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks so you can get at least a phone interview.

Also, in the time it takes to customize a resume, the position might be closed, and nobody wants to spend hours mentally reviewing their past experience to highlight parallels with the position they're applying to, especially when there's no guarantee they'll even get to submit that resume, let alone that anyone important will look at it. There's risk involved. If there's a job I really want, I'll tailor my resume. If it's a job that would be lucky to have me.... not so much.

Also, (and I can't believe I'm arguing in favor of Java devs here) if a Java dev is applying, it's likely because they're willing to do the work, not because they don't understand the difference. Many devs avoid JS because they *do* understand it, not because they don't. "I'm willing to pay you a half-million dollars to stab yourself in the eye, but it says here you've never stabbed yourself in the eye before. What makes you think you can do this job?! Idiot!"

Also worth noting that Java and JS are not mutually exclusive, and many Java projects include JS these days, so unless JS is absent from their resume, being a Java dev is probably a point in favor. Plus you mentioned C#, which is basically "Microsoft Java."

Finally, it's ironic because any dev who's been working longer than, say, 5 years has experience in technologies, frameworks, or even just parts of an API a language that are obsolete today. Everyone has had to transition to new technologies and methods, even if they stay in the same role at the same company using the same tools. Being able to pivot isn't the exception; it's the rule.

Point being, a keyword mismatch is an HR-level problem. IMO, nobody doing hiring should toss a good resume just because the experience doesn't match the requirements.

In theory, I agree that a polished resume is a good sign, and I try to present myself well on paper... but as a counterpoint, my good friend of over 30 years never put his resume in anything but plaintext format, uses keyword salad at the end, and he's also one of the best devs I know, and has always had more work than he has time for. I would be interested to learn how well a polished resume correlates with workplace success though, because I might be wasting my time.

Comment "More valuable for code than words"... riiiiiight (Score 2) 128

Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words.

I see zero evidence of this. I HEAR it all the time in articles like this, but as far as people I work with or code I experiment with myself using AI, AI has proven to be maybe break-even for very simple, limited-domain things (basically the rough equiv of looking up an answer on stackexchange), and far worse than nothing when doing complex system design (during which I spend so much time shaking out the plausible-sounding but ultimately-bullshit answers that I net lose time).

I know I'm just an anecdote and a small sample base, but I do this for a living, and I don't see anything approaching the benefit that such articles spin.

Ask yourself: if it's so easy to use, where are all the apps written by your neighbors, and the local firemen, and the grocery store folks, and so on?

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