If you're close sourced and expect to make back trillions of investment in AI infrastructure by charging people usage fees, they're going to use your competitor's free and unencumbered product instead.

Ballots? No. Just do it.

If you do, it isn't harm. It's curating the gene pool.

Yeah, a fishing pole with a magnet would be a better option at that point. The LEOs can stand behind tall shields or around the corner.

When the tsar fell, everyone lost their jobs except the prison guards.

Europe never understood freedom, egalitarianism, meritocracy, or government by consent of the governed. They aped it. Imperfectly.

No no no. You need six years of environmental impact statements (per foot if pipeline) while tanker trucks keep driving the stuff on local roadways. Think of the children!

I bought a laptop for grad school 10 years ago. It replaced a then-10 year old laptop I bought at the end of college. I'm still using the 10 yo laptop as my daily driver for the little I need a full keyboard for. Recently maxed out the ram on. Might put in a new ssd at some point. Unless something physically breaks I expect I'll be using it for another half a decade with some kind of Linux and a win10 vm for tax filing sw.

Ewaste is just wastefulness. That is to say a personal choice.

Throw out your socks or patch them if possible.

Buy a new car when the blue book value drops below some arbitrary threshold or keep it until something actually breaks that's both important and not worth fixing in context.

Order door dash or cook your own food.

You have the power to decide.

Bro... 400? Is your stash photographed anywhere? I'd like to just simply SEE that many micros in one place. Holy shit.

I do agree completely. The code it produces isn't good enough and takes more effort to debug than my own code. However, it can get me unstuck on really small issues a lot faster than a web-search can these days. 100%

They are giant lead acid batteries and in newer sites I know some use flow batteries. They don't care about weight, more about service life.

There exist better batteries (more capacity, better charging characteristics). However, last time I was in a CO was a week ago. They still had big lucite tanks with oversized lead acid batteries. I don't think the newer battery chemistry is what you really need for a big stationary UPS like that. They don't use NMC, LIFO, LIPO, or other advanced chemistry because they have different needs (durability, service life, weight doesn't matter much).

There is one potential upside. The example I saw was my grandmother. She ended her career as a COBOL programmer in the early 1980's. She worked for Western National Gas which had just been snapped up by Diamond Shamrock. They were going to "redo all this old mainframe stuff" that was written in COBOL. The problem was that the migration to whatever "other thing" they were moving to which was probably "4GL" at the time didn't work and the migration failed. Then they had nobody who could fix some of the really urgently needed bugs/updates. So, they re-hired my grandmother. She only worked 20 hours a week but made more than she used to make full time. They hired her off and on for about 15 years.

The same kind of thing is happening to me. I've almost always been a systems engineer or just a work-a-day C programmer. Everyone since day one has been saying my job was in jeopardy and I'd better exit soon before XYZ makes me obsolete. XYZ has been half a dozen other languages which I was told were the next-big-thing, "visual" IDEs, CASE Method, India, and a zillion other "threats". In the end, all that seems to happen is more folks leave and/or get frustrated out by how dumb and unrealistic customers are. However, they always seem to have more migrations, more projects, more code, etc... It never actually shrinks or goes away. I dunno how many times I've cleaned up after some exec or management team that came in and ran everyone off, only to find out they couldn't run their business and now "Shit how do I get that capability back!"

So, I do wonder if AI won't just become another episode in a long list.

You and I generally disagree. Not in this case. Not at all.

These stock idiots definitely think AI is going to replace coders the same way Pets.com was going to replace pet stores. They aren't super interested in history.

Microsoft's been hacked and pwned a million times. People still buy from them. Then there is our government. They've been hacked a zillion times, too. Nobody cares, nobody does shit, business as usual. I'm the alien here.