It holds up in some cases, not in others, and calculating an average muddles that.

Personally, I use AI coding assists for two purposes quite successfully: a) more intelligent auto-complete and b) writing a piece of code using a common, well understood algorithm (i.e. lots of sources the AI could learn from) in the specific programming language or setup that I need.

It turns out that it is much faster and almost as reliable to have the AI do that then finding a few examples on github and stackoverflow, checking which ones are actually decent, and translating them myself.

Anything more complex than that and it starts being a coin toss. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's a waste of time. So I've stopped doing that because coding it myself is faster and the result better than babysitting an AI.

And when you need to optimize for a specific parameter - speed, memory, etc. - you can just about forget AI.

Hey, industry, I've got an idea: If you need specific, recent, skills (especially in the framework-of-the-month class), how about you train people in them?

That used to be the norm. Companies would hire apprentices, train them in the exact skills needed, then at the end hire them as proper employees. These days, though, the training part is outsourced to the education system. And that's just dumb in so many ways.

Universities should not train the flavour of the moment. Because by the time people graduate, that may have already shifted elsewhere. Universities train the basics and the thinking needed to grow into nearby fields. Yes, thinking is a skill that can be trained.

Case in point: When I was in university, there was one short course on cybersecurity. And yet that's been my profession for over two decades now. There were zero courses on AI. And yet there are whitepapers on AI with me as a co-author. And of the seven programming languages I learnt in university, I haven't used even one of them ever professionally and only one privately (C, of course. You can never go wrong learning C. If you have a university diploma in computer science and they didn't teach you C, demand your money back). Ok, if you count SQL as a programming language, it's eight and I did use that professionally a few times. But I consider none of them a waste of time. Ok, Haskell maybe. The actual skill acquired was "programming", not a particular language.

Should universities teach about AI? Yes, I think so. Should they teach how to prompt engineer for ChatGPT 4? Totally not. That'll be obsolete before they even graduate.

So if your company needs people who have a specific AI-related skill (like prompt engineering) and know a specific AI tool or model - find them or train them. Don't demand that other people train them for you.

FFS, we complain about freeloaders everywhere, but the industry has become a cesspool of freeloaders these days.

The number of people isn't the problem here.

The "started every" is.

How did they not catch that during development and found a solution? I mean, the meme's where a TV ad starts Alexa and orders 10 large pizzas are a decade old now.

When you look at all of Europe, it's more like a weekly thing, and sometimes a daily thing. The ones that make the news are the bigger bombs like the thousand-pound bomb mentioned in TFS or the rare ones that cannot be made safe and have to be detonated in place, which can mean a lot of new business for window installers even with dampening.

You can't be the "baddest kick ass person on the block" without having an effective ability to fight. That means weapons, and it means training on how to use them most effectively. When going up against the Soviet Union, that means a nuclear arsenal. We made plenty of mistakes along the way, but we also helped ensure through deterrence that the Soviets never moved on Western Europe, and we helped ensure through diplomacy that World War III never broke out.

I still have my very first credit card. It's 20+ years old, sits in a lockbox, and has a thousand dollar limit, by far the lowest of my cards. It costs me $10 a year to maintain. It's there entirely because it anchors the oldest account ranking for me.

This is comparing apples and applejacks. If you only care about cost per calorie, people may as just drink canola oil and take a daily vitamin pill. What we really need to do is look at the total cost of living when eating real foods vs packaged trash "food". If we were honest about adding up the related external costs of illness, healthcare, discontent, disability, etc and look at it more holistically, I believe the "cheaper" shit food starts to lose out fast. But nobody wants to do that. Hell, we can't even get people to agree that being a fatass is unhealthy.

And the idea that it costs a lot to eat healthy is a myth that needs to die. Some things are more expensive, sure, but you can make a healthy meal with cheaper options as well. The truth is that people are lazy and addicted to the results of 50 years engineering to create the mouth porn that line most store shelves.

Easy to say when you live in or near London (which as I recall, you do).

There's nothing wrong with local time, and there are good reasons humans have used it literally for as long as we've had clocks. You are trading one mental adjustment -- "what time is it where Bob lives?" -- with a different one -- "what time is it where I am when the sun is directly overhead?" Guess which one you need to worry about more often?

And if you think adjusting to time zones is annoying now when traveling, imagine needing readjust your entire mental model of the solar day - where sunrise, noon, and sunset are on the clock. But hey, I guess you didn't need to adjust your watch. Hurray?

Local time is a "human sized" solution to the problem of timekeeping while UTC is a planet-sized solution to it.

Nonsense. Every single business has a list of their operating hours posted. Some open at 6am, some at 10am. Some are open on Sunday, others closed. Some close for certain holidays, others for others (or none). Some receive deliveries earlier than customers, others don't.

Most people in the US may not be accustomed to the idea of summer hours, but it's not a complicated idea and people would catch on pretty quickly.

You can't really use a wok on any home cooking appliances, regadless of heat source. The only exception are the specialized wok-specific ones some others mentioned, and even those kind of suck because they limit how much you can move the pan around.

I had a gas stovetop for years and a wok (both round and flat-bottom) was pitiful. There's a reason that restaurants basically use a 100K BTU jet engine to cook with a wok. Can you cook food in a wok on a standard stove? Sure. Will it ever be on par with asian restaurants? No. You're better off just using a griddle or flat frying pan on home stoves.

Todd Howard loved that.

I think even the idea of dropping $250 for a video game is absolutely bonkers, and calling Skyrim "ground-breaking" is being vastly too generous. The only reason Skyrim has had the staying power it has is (1) modders and (2) Bethesda's inability to release more than 1 game every 5-6 years, leading to 10-12 years between each franchise game.

If I knew that, I'd be a tech billionaire inventing them.

The best part of innovations is that they are NOT obvious, but once they are in the world, you can't do without.

Oregon isn't a red state overall. Almost all states, whether red, blue, or purple, allow felons to vote at some point.

Democrats sure don't. They want them to vote and everything.

The following red states allow felons to vote after completing their sentences (carceral sentences in some cases, or complete sentences and fines in others):

Alaska, Arkansas, Florida (1), Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa (2), Kansas, Kentucky (3), Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.

That's the overwhelming majority of them. A couple of them have exceptions for certain crimes like rape and murder, but for the rest, if you can finish your sentence, you can probably vote.

(1) Sort of -- the state government has intentionally made a mess of the initiative that passed 65-35.

(2) While the Iowa constitution bars felons from voting unless they have applied to the governor to have voting rights reinstated, Gov. Reynolds (a Republican) has a standing executive order automatically reinstating voting rights of felons upon completing their sentences unless they were convicted of murder.

(3) Similar to (2), except that Gov. Beshear's executive order applies only to those convicted of non-violent offenses.

I think it's a symptom of streaming services. They want to offer a massively wide variety of shows to try and capture as much of the market as possible, which means a large number of titles. But money and human resources (writers, actors, directors, etc) are still finite, so now they spread those resources across twice or three times as many shows as they used to back in the 24/26 episode seasons. Then multiply this across a dozen different "platforms". So now we get 8 or 10 episodes per "season".

Add to that their desire to keep people hooked and subscribed. If they drip-feed seasons, people will be more likely to stick around because several shows they have started are still unfinished (some kind of combination of inertia and FOMO). So now we wait 2-4 years between seasons (which, to be honest, bothers me a *lot* more than the shorter seasons).

It really sucks in a bunch of ways. Aside from just making everyone spend 10 years to watch a 4 season show, huge breaks make for problems with the availability and visual appearance of aging actors. Writers and showrunners come and go more frequently, making seasons inconsistent and lacking a coherent plan, and the small number of episodes means every episode must be SUPER EXCITING AND IMPORTANT or people feel like it's a waste of precious screentime (which it kind of is). This means there should be fewer "filler" episodes (even though there are still a lot of them) and a lot less episodes that focus more on character development vs plot movement.

Oh, and episodic storytelling has completely died as an art, so every season has to be part of one HUGE IMPORTANT series arc which is almost always disappointing because none of these shows are planned more than one season ahead. Companies want to be able to cut any show at any time, so nobody is willing to commit to 3 or 4 seasons with a planned story. And it turns out JIT storytelling mostly sucks.

Streaming kinda ruined dramatic TV.