Night time is a thing in Cuba as well

Yes. So far, the LLM tools seem to be much more useful for general research purposes, analysing existing code, or producing example/prototype code to illustrate a specific point. I haven't found them very useful for much of my serious work writing production code yet. At best, they are hit and miss with the easy stuff, and by the time you've reviewed everything with sufficient care to have confidence in it, the potential productivity benefits have been reduced considerably. Meanwhile even the current state of the art models are worse than useless for the more research-level stuff we do. We try them out fairly regularly but they make many bad assumptions and then completely fail to generate acceptable quality code when told no, those are not acceptable and they really do need to produce a complete and robust solution of the original problem that is suitable for professional use.

But one of the common distinctions between senior and junior developers -- almost a litmus test by now -- is their attitude to new, shiny tools. The juniors are all over them. The seniors tend to value demonstrable results and as such they tend to prefer tried and tested workhorses to new shiny things with unproven potential.

That means if and when the AI code generators actually start producing professional standard code reliably, I expect most senior developers will be on board. But except for relatively simple and common scenarios ("Build the scaffolding for a user interface and database for this trivial CRUD application that's been done 74,000 times before!") we don't seem to be anywhere near that level of competence yet. It's not irrational for seniors to be risk averse when someone claims to have a silver bullet but both the senior's own experience and increasing amounts of more formal study are suggesting that Brooks remains undefeated.

(+1, Truth)

Of all the major streaming platforms, Paramount+ stands alone in how often it just doesn't work. It doesn't work reliably on state-of-the-art streaming boxes. It doesn't work reliably on desktop PCs. In fact, of all the devices we have in our household, it works reliably on a total of zero of them.

We have several of the other commercial streaming platforms plus the apps or online services for several of our main national TV channels as well and almost all of them work almost all of the time. It's bizarre how bad Paramount+ manages to be compared to literally everyone else. It must be hurting their bottom line to some degree or surely will do soon if they don't get a handle on it, because why pay for something you literally can't watch?

It helps that Norway is an immensely rich country. It's sovereign wealth fund alone is worth over £2tn/$300k per citizen. They don't have to pander to corporate interests.

It is the Microsoft way.

There's a difference between not using AI tools at all and not using code generated by AIs.

The latter involves a lot of risks that aren't well understood yet -- some technical, some legal, some ethical -- and it's entirely possibly that some of those risks are going to blow up in the face of the gung-ho adopters with existential consequences for their businesses.

I mostly work with clients in industries where quality matters. Think engineering applications where equipment going wrong destroys things or kills people and where security vulnerabilities are a proxy for equipment going wrong.

I know plenty of smart, capable people working in this part of the industry who are totally fine with blanket banning the use of AI-generated code on these jobs. A lot of that code simply isn't up to the required standards anyway, but even if it does produce something you could actually use, there are still all the same costs for review and certification that any other code incurs. That includes the need for at least one human reviewer to work out why the AI wrote what it did, which may or may not have any better answer than "statistically, it seemed like a good idea at the time".

The claims also seem a bit sus. "Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week." Is this the same statistic someone was debunking recently where anyone who had done something really basic (it might have been using the search facility?) was counted as "using Copilot"? A lot of organisations seem to be cautious about using code generated by AIs, or even imposing a blanket ban, so things must be very different in other parts of the industry if that 80% is also representative of professional developers using Copilot significantly for real work.

I'm in the same boat.

I still buy music, on bandcamp and 7digital mostly. The difference in price between digital and CD is a quid or two, but it's the shipping that's the killer. I always look to see if I can get the CD somewhere cheaper than digital, which still happens sometimes, especially for older stuff that was popular and is still floating around on eBay.

I've slowly been moving my CDs from jewel cases to DiscSox sleeves - I'm not sure why really, as it's quite pricey, but I can't yet bring myself just to sling a whole massive collection on eBay.

Assuming this is the equivalent of the task bar... I may be crazy but to me the natural position is right. In general, because I mostly do web dev and so work with code and web pages, vertical space is far more precious to me than the relatively abundant horizontal space. So I have my task bar/dock as a vertical column on the right, with the Start button at the top, rather than a mostly empty strip along the bottom.

I think there have been desktop systems that had it this way out of the box (NextStep?).

Of course on rotated monitors and vertically-oriented tablets I stick it at the bottom.

Within the next few years most European countries are having elections, and in many of those alt.right, Putin-friendly populists are in pole position (Hungary, Italy and Slovakia are already lost; the UK, France and possibly Germany are on the way). So we'll soon prove we Europeans are just as stupid. In a worst case scenario Ukraine is toast, the EU dissolves, and there's war again.

My little theory is that China will at some point go hard on industrial production of humans, possibly the old school way (enslaving women, most likely in neighbouring countries) but more likely via technology & life sciences - in vitro fertilisation and artificial wombs. I've no idea how feasible that is - probably not very - but I bet they'll give it a good try.

It never ceases to amaze me how many Germans are willing to defend their abject failure of an energy policy despite clear evidence to the contrary. That Germany has the fourth highest electricity costs in the world and still emits more CO2 than any major European economy is beyond dispute and not 'misinformation'.

Half a trillion euros could have bought nearly 40GW of clean, constant and reliable nuclear capacity.

We can argue over the number, at this very moment Germany is emitting 415g/kWh compared to France emitting 28g/kWh, but even 320g /kWh places the country as one of the highest polluters in Europe.

A quick search reveals that Germany has the fourth highest domestic electricity costs in the world, and why wouldn't you include taxes as that's what is paying for Energiewende?

A reminder that Germany has spent over half a trillion Euros on Energiewende and still has one of the filthiest grids in Europe (>400g/kWh) and has among the highest electricity costs in the world. Over 50% renewables sounds great if you ignore the significant amount of brown coal and gas that they are still burning and that they have to import heavily during low renewable output.