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.

I mean it's obvious that Whiskey Pete has been letting Claude write his speeches and make his decisions this whole time, right?

It's even obvious that Claude is sourcing Colin Jost's "Weekend Update" performances for some of it.

It's probably why he wanted Anthropic to take off all the guard rails so that he can use it to commit more and better war crimes.

My Audi has this indirect system too.

One downside for me is that while it will alert me to an abnormal leak, it won't (hasn't, in 4 years) alerted me to uniform low pressure across all four, such as during a cold snap in the fall.

But the culvert at the end of my driveway is basically a speed bump, and it *will feel wrong if the pressure is low.

Anthropic: We know our AI is not reliable enough to be used in military action.
Trump/Hegseth: What should we say?
Altman: Tell they you're smarter than they are, and you know it will work.
Trump/Hegseth: Hey, Anthropic, we're smarter than you are. Trust us!

There are a lot of people here posting that the Ribbon is a bad design, and I agree with them 110%. But that's not the only thing that's wrong with Word: it also distributes controls all around the edges, and unless you use it day in and day out, and use those distributed controls, it's a pain finding them.
Unfortunately, LibreOffice has copied this bad UI from Microsoft. I'm looking at LO Writer now, and in addition to the menu at the top, there's a sidebar on the right with eight or ten indecipherable icons (one of which looks like a hamburger menu, except it isn't). There's a Find box near the bottom with its controls. And on the status bar, there's a zoom (I think) gizmo on the right, something that looks like pages with folded-over corners next to that, a few more boxes or something, a page style chooser(?), and an image of a 3 1/2" floppy diskette on the left. I think I can get rid of all this cruft, but why is it there in the first place? I certainly don't use most of those things very often (except search, for which ^F works fine, thank you!), and they just waste space.

The traditional menu *could* be made context sensitive. So that's missing the point. The point (for me, and I think for a lot of other ribbon-haters) is that icons are mostly indecipherable, you have to look at the text label (or worse, mouse-over) to know what they do. Whereas we all understand words. (If we didn't, we wouldn't be using *Word*.)

Egypt gave up hieroglyphics after the mostly alphabetic Hieratic (and later Demotic) writing system came into use. Two millennia later, it took the Rosetta stone to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.
We grew up with an alphabetic writing system, why on earth would Microsoft want to replace that with indecipherable icons?

The Ribbon is *exactly* why I switched from MsOffice to LibreOffice as soon as I retired. (I had to use Ms for my employer.)

(+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?

Dad was never one to assign long papers.

Used to tell his students that if they can't say what they need to say in 3 pages (single-sided), they don't understand the subject.

Older generations have always said that younger generations are weak, but the other day i saw someone complaining that it's unrealistic to expect people to write a 600-word essay without help from an LLM.

I wrote 10-page papers in freakin high school. Granted it was a private school, but i could get past 600 words in the summary.

i come at this from a weird angle because my father was a professor of creative writing and american lit for 39 years, and he has always been outspoken on the point that it is absurd to suggest that everyone should have a university education, let alone a university education that means that people who have no interest in writing have to do their damnedest to get a D in his class.

FWIW he was also famous for telling lazy students that he can enter their final grade as an F right now and they can stop coming to his class for the rest of the semester.

He retired before the rise of LLMs but says he never had any use for the plagiarism checking websites because he can tell in the first paragraph whether his student wrote it or not. Because he pays attention, knows what their speech patterns and vocabulary are like, so he can recognize their voice on the page.

He also took time to explain to his students the importance of paraphrasing, and the appropriate use of bullshit. Writing with absolutely no BS in it tends to read like an owner's manual for a microwave, so you need a little, but you do need to know how much is too much.

My employer's client has recently been quite firm on the point that we should be "leveraging AI", and more specifically that we should be using "copilot in github".

We're several years into automating regression testing of a large complex web application with UFT aka Unified Functional Testing. This application was built using the oldschool mainframe business model where the customer has to become captive by way of you owning all of their data.

The functional code we author is VB-ish, doesn't do shit outside of UFT, and frankly UFT is a kit to allow you to build a test harness so without the functional code it is just like a box of spirograph toys with no plan.

When you are inside the UFT system and click 'save' after making a one-line change, 8 or 10 encrypted binary files are updated in the filesystem.

"copilot in github", whatever that is, can't read our code.

Oh yeah - I'm a geezer and every time i have thought, "the git commandline is confusing, this must be easier in the gui" the gui was not easier. I use git bash exclusively, and since i know how to use "git stash" i am the git expert on the team. I'm embarrassed for all of us, honestly.

America has about a billion acres of farmland.

40k is 0.004%.

But the 40k is not all in America, and is not all farmland.

GnuCobol works fine.