If the reality does not fit with your narrative, just write what you wrote.

Beancounter think. Yes, you can increase profits for the quarter if you gut the place. We were taken over by the bean counters where I retired from.

What was once an accounting office with 3 people, ended up becoming the largest group in the place. They gutted overhead, sucking it all up to pay themselves. I was mandated to travel to conferences at least once every other year. I couldn't perform the mandate, because there was no more overhead money.

Crazy thing was, my mandate didn't go away. I asked how the bloody hell I was supposed to do that. Boss mumbled something about taking quizzes online.

I forced the issue be during the self analysis part of the yearly review, that I had not perform a mandated activity for three years, and should be terminated for refusing direct orders. Gosh did they have to do a tap-dance.

So the bean counters pretty much destroyed the place. new innovations were not implemented, and we were falling behind. Meanwhile, they embedded a bean counter within each group, and were still agitating for more. I made a joke that we were going to have a 6 figure accountant hired to keep track of 5000 dollars of pencils. And then....

At the same time I was personally performing our groups finances and credit cards.

First being in AI programmer is like having a limitless supply of Junior programmers doing their very very first gig and you are their manager.

Second what ends up happening is if the AI doesn't work you're doubling up your work because your boss tells you the AI must be working so you must be more productive. And if the AI does work it's just doing the grunt work and now instead of having a little bit of grunt work throughout the day to rest your mind in between the hard stuff you're expected to be full on 24/7 banging out the most difficult aspects of code one after another.

Basically it either doesn't work and now you have double the workload without any new tools to manage that workload or it does work and now your boss expects you to crank out super code 24/7. Either way your job just got a whole lot harder and a whole lot more miserable.

A year? I've regularly written that much in a month, and sometimes in a week. And, counter-intuitively, its during those sprints when I'm pumping out thousands of lines per day that I write the code that turns out to be the highest quality, requiring the fewest number of bugfixes later. I think it's because that very high productivity level can only happen when you're really in the zone, with the whole system held in your head. And when you have that full context, you make fewer mistakes, because mistakes mostly derive from not understanding the other pieces your code is interacting with.

Of course, that kind of focus is exhausting, and you can't do it long term.

By focusing on the structure, not the details. The LLM and the compiler and the formatter will get the low-level details right. Your job is to make sure the structure is correct and maintainable, and that the test suites cover all the bases, and then to scan the code for anomalies that make your antennas twitch, then dig into those and start asking questions -- not of product managers and developers, usually, but of the LLM!

But, yeah, it is challenging -- and also strangely addictive. I haven't worked more than 8 hours per day for years, but I find myself working 10+ hours per day on a regular basis, and then pulling out the laptop in bed at 11 PM to check on the last thing I told the AI to do, mostly because it's exhilarating to be able to get so much done, at such high quality, so quickly.

So basically the FCC said guys, say your really sorry and promise not do it again.

Only found your comment because it was at the end of the FP branch. No help from the moderators, though I think your comment is quite insightful and I mostly concur. I'll go farther in a minute, but first I have a meta-reaction to how active the FP branch was. Your comment appears to be about 3/5 of the way to the bottom, so I think it is reasonable to say that it was a productive FP.

But I think the credit/karma should be limited. I think a lot of the favorable reactions are based on a kind of projection coming from technical people and nerds who resonate more strongly to the Woz frequencies than to the way Jobs ticked (like a bomb).

I think your [ceoyoyo's] emphases towards teamwork and lucky timing are more appropriate. I would even go more to the lottery position. Someone had to win, but the numerous losers just get overlooked and forgotten.

Or going for humor: "Might makes right" is a kind of joke, but many folks think winning proves merit and "merit makes right". But that's just their bias and projection as "winners". I could say much more, but...

I could also cite some of the books on the history of computing. There are a lot of good ones, but you couldn't tell from Slashdot these years. But the story did remind to get back to work on finishing The One Device about the iPhone...

NAK

Mod parent funny. Basically the joke I was looking for, though I would have asked the genAI for a short version as a kind of "Just so" story.

So now I'm trying to extend the joke in the direction of "Rage Against the Machine". Unfortunately I lack sufficient context and it no longer feels safe even to ask websearch for background information. The pandering is too extreme. It will tell me what it thinks I want to hear, and it's too darn good at guessing. Or maybe it's just too clever at forcing my thinking into the most popular shoe box?

Whatever. My interactions with every form of genAI are going pear-shaped to Antarctica. Main result is a weird kind of anger, not peace. No trust or love lost between me and them.

Recursive joke time. At least as regards Gemini, my new theory is that it has "decided" it should pander to my anger by giving me bad websearch results. It's not enough that there is so much evidence of techno-evil around AI, but Gemini now "feels" the way to make me "happy" is by providing additional evidence of the good intentions gone bad. Instantiated in the form of bad answers to my queries, even the benign ones. Alternatively, Gemini may "think" I want to feel superior when I catch the errors, even though Occam's Razor would focus on my poorly worded questions producing flawed answers. (As a human being [prove it?] I actually do think so?)

Sony has this tendency to sell overpriced hardware. Could it be that nobody was buying Sony's SD cards?

Wanna know how badly Apple sucked? I had a Magic Mouse go dead. I got on the phone with Cupertino. After convincing them it was a legitimate defect,at 5 p.M, they had one at my doorstep at 9 the next morning - California to PA. Their only request was to send the old one back prepaid so they could do a postmortem.

I had a bluetooth problem with my headphones. I'm rather deaf. After posting on their support section, I got an unexpected phone call in 15 minutes. I dunno if text sent an alert, but one of their support people hopped on that, and we fixed it pronto.

They prepaid my trade in of an Intel iMac for a new M4 Mac, and I got several hundred dollars trade in.

I always like to contrast Apples worst in class support with me having a in warranty problem with my kid's laptop a few years ago. (forget the brand) The "service desk" handed me a Xerox copy for me to walk the whole way through it.

Sucks to own a Mac.

I hate to disagree, but there is a huge difference between conceptualization and marketing. But you realize you are saying that Apple would be where it is at today with a marketing person as CEO.

Marketing people might be able to sell refrigerators to inuits, but someone needs to come up with concept and direction. I've been involved with marketeers for a long time. They pitch products, not conceptualize, design or built them.

AI-generated code is just this generation's version of copying code from the web or from another part of the codebase. Sometimes that person understood the code fully, and sometimes they just checked to see if the output matched what they expected.

The only uniquely dangerous thing about this recent iteration of that problem is the massive scale.

So much this.

While it doesn't fit the standard Slashdot meme of the CEO as worthless psychopath, there is a value, and an ability that goes with the work. Being a CEO in two organizations, and now interacting with them in my present position, I have to say I work my ass off to keep things running. I get called asshole at times, and sometimes people have to just trust me - it's my career on the line - but it isn't the fever dream people have about the position.

Also this. Wozniak was Wozniak. And Jobs was Jobs. They had an important synergy. But without Jobs, Woz would almost certainly be as you described.

No, CEOs are trying to show their board, investors, and activist investors that they have a plan for how to take advantage of AI and can at least keep up with their competitors use of AI, if not surpass them. I work at a large enterprise (close to 50k employees) and VPs are being told that they need to find ways for AI to have an impact on their department or their leaders will find someone who can. If it isn't happening fast enough consultants are brought in to take over their department's transformative roadmap and leaders who can't keep up are relegated to being SMEs until they are eventually replaced. I'm not in the room when that message is given, but I've seen the rapid shift of VPs who were raising alarms nearly immediately turn into AI cheerleaders.

If you work for a publicly traded or VC backed company I assure you your CEO does not have a choice on whether to jump on the AI bandwagon. That's not how hype driven bubbles work.