Fair, but there is also the asymmetry of forbidding employees from discussing their salaries or delving into the business' financials.

If it is labor for hire, then an efficient market demands every player access to data to determine price.

If not, the market must account for this asymmetry through regulation and law, and watch business whine like babies when the shoe is on the other foot.

Expecting any manner of consistency or (hold back the laughter) leadership (remember when that was the buzz from the management class?) is like wishing for for ponies. I'd settle for boring competency at this point, but here we are.

Annnd since no one seems to have a five point plan to improve things (or at least try something new), we'll keep on this trajectory until we go over the cliff or die waiting for cosmic justice.

Delete your account if you want to, but please don't delete posts and comments. I sympathize wanting to stick it to Reddit and not giving them free content to whore out to AI companies for training, but for the millions of normal people who might get value from comments it's really frustrating.

There are tools to mass-edit all your reddit comments and it's incredibly frustrating to see when people do it. I've thought I finally found the answer to some question or technical problem or whatever in a reddit thread, only to then see the original post replaced with something like "This comment was removed because Reddit made me angry. Lorem ipsum dolar sit amet shit." Perhaps unfair but it makes me hate that person's selfishness much more than make me dislike Reddit.

I live in Utah and get to witness this first-hand. Just yesterday it was windy enough that unpleasant dust clouds were coming off the dried parts of the lake bed. Utah snowpack is at a record low this year and peaked for the 2026 water year earlier in March. We broke several high temperature records this month (along with a bunch of other states in the west / mountain west). It's looking pretty bad.

Right now it's a lot like watching a slow-moving train derailment. Everyone knows what's coming, but 80% of the population, the majority being Mormon religious nuts, rationalizes it away or refuses to acknowledge it, but those that do see the problem won't take action to address it, preferring instead to "hopes and prayers". Brian Cox, the damned governor, has declared multiple "days of prayer for rain".

There's a sick fatalism amongst many religious groups, assuming that God won't let terrible things happen to them, but it's especially bad with Mormons. They think they're a chosen people, living in a chosen land, and that the "end times" are coming soon. All this adds up to "I don't need to do or sacrifice anything to deal with Problem because God won't let me suffer and it doesn't matter because the world is going to end soon anyway."

For any rational thinking person this is disgusting, but when 90% of the legislature, the governor, and all US congressmen are owned (mentally and financially) by the Mormon church, there's not much we can do. At best voting them out just gets a different lizard in the seat.

Tell us you don't understand how the government works without telling us you don't understand how it works.

Congress has the power to delegate it's authority to smaller expert groups. Passing a law that says "The FTC can set rules for trade and commerce in these ways..." is completely valid. Or sure, we could have Senator "series of tubes" Stevens write every single specific rule that controls Internet communications. That will work fine.

There are only two groups of people who want to eliminate regulatory authority: (1) people who are too dumb to understand the negative impact it would have on normal people, and (2) corporate hacks and simps who understand exactly that negative impact and see that as the goal.

As an aside: I find it hilarious that the same people who bitch about "we are a republic, not a democracy" and fight against, for example, eliminating the electoral college, are often the same people who bitch about "unelected bureaucrats".

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.

Abso-fucking-lutely!

The JS ecosystem (and frankly the python ecosystem too) is made of lunatics who think I have nothing better to do than patch my system every 3 month because they decided that it was more pretty to swap the order to parameters somewhere.

The number of NPM packages that are deployed widely and that just break at an upgrade is staggering. And because fucking JS, you don't get a proper error message at the upgrade recompilation. You need to rely on having a test that catches the difference. What a fucking nightmare of an ecosystem.

I am currently the maintainer of a small project but we can't break production. We did our major upgrades in summer 2024. So we used the most up to date release, v22, that came out 3 month before. This was 18 month ago, and its EoL is in about a year. Who has the ability to commit the engineering time to upgrade every single one of your services every 3 years?

These are not minor changes, these are going to be different majors. So I do expect some feature break. The last update which was also within 3 years caused a forced upgrade of database driver and abstraction layer to a new major. And they decided to rewrite their entire fucking API.

I do not understand web people. How do they not go insane because of the horrible engineering decisions they keep on making in that field? You know what, the shitty Perl webservice I wrote in 2010, it still fucking works! And no one has touched it since.

It's a question of cost really.
A 1TB NVME SSD is about $150.
A 1TB SATA SSD is about $100.
A 1TB HDD is about $40.

If you are mostly interesting in storage and not performance. HDD are hard to beat.

I'm so tired of seeing this tired old red herring trotted out during debates about daylight saving time.

Using local time versus UTC has absolutely nothing to do with DST. You can get the same effect by eliminating DST and keeping a static UTC offset for local time. There's a reason that Britain, for which GMT/UTC is local time still has British Summer Time (UTC+1) during the summer.

The problem is how the rising and setting of the sun affects schedules. Using UTC everywhere means you'll have people saying "schools need to start an hour later in winter so the babbies don't have to walk in the dark" -- the exact same argument used against permanent standard time.

(+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?

Well-stated. I can't fathom why this is modded down to zero. Wish I had points to spend.

I have to assume the majority of people have no idea what "neoliberalism" means. Seeing "liberal" in it pisses off progressives because they think you're blaming them for Reagan and his policies, and it pisses off conservatives because they think you're stealing credit for their golden-age accomplishments.

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.