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Comment Re:I still get terrible results from "coding" agen (Score 1) 64

It's like visual coding or RAD all over again. Whenever suits and PHBs are told there's a magic wand that'll allow them to do without paying people for the nitty-gritty bits, they get all excited and convince each other in their echo chamber that their dream of a company of all managers and no workers is just around the corner.

Then reality says "hi", the hype dies down, a few scam artists got rich and the world continues as it was, with a couple new cool tools in the toolbox of those who know how to use them correctly - which is generally the same people that were supposedly being replaced.

Comment a free intern for everyone (Score 1) 64

That's how I see AI. I've been writing software for the better part of 40 years. What I see from AI is sometimes astonishing and sometimes pathetic. I would never, ever, ever put AI generated code into production software without carefull checking and refactoring, and I would fire anyone who does.

Code completion is mostly in the "astonishing" part. If I write a couple lines of near-identical stuff, like assigning values from an input to a structured format for processing, the AI most of the time gets right the next line I want to write. Anything more complex than that is hit-and-miss.

Mostly, I use AI the way I would use an intern. "Can you look up how to use this function correctly? What are the parameters and their defaults?" or "Write me some code that's tedious to write (like lots of transformation operations) but not rocket science by far.
Essentially, it does faster and a little bit better what previously I'd have done with Google and Stackoverflow.

I have no fear it'll replace developers anytime soon. Half of the time the code is outright wrong, most of the time it has glaring security issues or isn't half as fault-tolerant as it should be, and for any case where I know how to do it without any research, I'd be faster writing the code myself then going through several iterations with an AI to get it done.

Comment Re: Talking about the weather (Score 1) 149

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

Comment Re:Reputational damage? (Score 1) 106

Of course you design your policies and procedures to protect against rogue employees, particularly in IT and especially with admins who have greater levels of access.

Suggesting otherwise exposes your own ignorance as to how IT security operates in companies ( or how it's supposed to ). Everywhere I've worked, suspended employees were treated as terminated as far as their access to resources were concerned ( up to and including email ). Most places would ask you to tell them if you were traveling out of country, and would suspend your credentials as a precaution if you were ( predominantly in IT and finance, oftentimes HR as well ).

It's a question of minimizing risk. Admins have enough access to shutdown operations for extended periods of time, so of course you would disable their access when the situation warrants it. You wouldn't trust them not to interfere with millions of dollars of productivity/day, and as an admin I wouldn't want them to.

But hey! I'm not sure why I'm wasting so much time trying to educate you on this; the less you know and the more you spread your "knowledge", the more work I get.

Comment Re:Reputational damage? (Score 1) 106

That is how companies see suspensions, at least competent ones. And here, with this story, we see WHY.

But by all means, continue to believe otherwise in the face of contrary evidence. My contracting rates are very reasonable ( considering the alternative of course ), so it's in my best interest that more companies think as you do instead of following my advice.

Comment Re:Reputational damage? (Score 1) 106

Suspension means the employee isn't performing their job duties; hence they don't need access to the system. Same thing applies, admittedly to a lesser extent, to when admins go on vacations.

On top of that, suspensions are not done with the assumption that the employee is coming back; it's more of a "get the person out of here NOW while we build our termination case" type of thing. Suspensions are almost always for ethical reasons, which is precisely the type of person who shouldn't have access, and therefore usually lead to terminations.

As we can see here, disabling his credentials was clearly called for, so between yours and my perspectives, which would you say is more correct?

Comment Re:I live (Score 4, Interesting) 149

The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

Comment Re:This is the way. (Score 1) 127

Diminished maybe, but not all that much.

I think we can reasonably assume that if there's a huge blackout, it won't last forever. A lot of smart people will work hard on getting things up and running again. A few years ago in the USA it lasted for a bit longer, what was it, a week or two? Recently in Spain it lasted a few days. But all those power stations and power grid operators don't just shrug and go home. So getting through those days is probably all it takes for any reasonably realistic scenario.

And you can build things up piecewise. I've got my solar now. The next thing will be a battery. Once I have that, I can think about an electric car.

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