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Comment Reminds me (Score 1) 162

Of every tv show where a bomb has a convenient countdown clock on it. In the old days it was an alarm clock wired to the bomb, then it was changed to a red digital timer because progress.

Anyone remember the movie V for Vendetta? Conveniently, V's bomb in the control room had a countdown clock so the guy who had no idea what he was doing knew how many seconds he had left.

Comment Re:subscribe to Amazon Prime now (Score 1, Troll) 36

You might say waiting 2 days for a free delivery is super bad inconvenient,

Only whiners living in their parent's basement would say this. For nearly everything one could buy (excluding groceries), two days is insignificant. If you're in that much of a hurry to get something, either an emergency has come up or you're too stupid to plan ahead.

Submission + - The oral tradition that built software may not survive AI (fastcompany.com)

smooth wombat writes: Writing software is not just about knowing what to code. Verbally passing on knowledge of why something is done one way or the other, how to diagnose an issue, or what changes took place after implementation because no one documented those changes has been part of programming since day one. However, with the advent of AI, that institutional knowledge may be under threat.

It’s tempting therefore to imagine that generative AI will step into the breach and solve this for us. After all, even if you don’t want to turn a large language model (LLM) loose on a legacy code base—and there are plenty of reasons that you shouldn’t—having it generate documentation on the codebase itself might sound like a solution to the absence of other written information. LLMs can certainly summarize code back to you.

But hold up with that idea. Beyond hallucinations, there’s a deeper problem: Writing documentation is itself part of the thinking process. Whether I’m writing history or software, putting an approach into words helps refine it before I sink hours into implementation. Documentation also captures intent. An LLM may be able to summarize what a codebase does, but it cannot reliably explain why a developer chose one approach over another, or what trade-offs shaped that decision.

Moreover, it’s a chance for somebody else to understand why you did what you did. If they plan to change what I wrote (especially in a few years), they might understand why I needed to write it that way and what might be lost if you take it out. An LLM can read code that I’ve written. It might even scan a large codebase and accurately summarize what it’s doing. But it can’t assess authorial intent.

Comment Re: Say what you will re: free trade or protection (Score 2) 129

nd they're raking in cash thanks to the massive increase in the price of oil from Trump's war in the Middle East.

Ukraine is seeing to it they don't by destroying oil refineries. Right now there are at least 5 big refineries out of commission for the next month or more. That doesn't include reduced loading capacity at several different terminals which have been struck or pumping stations which no longer work.

Comment Re:Oh crap (Score 1) 62

Also, weren't you one of the geniuses here on /. telling us that Trump would keep us out of wars? How is that one going?

Oh, but these are *preventative* wars. He gets a peace prize for every country he invades!

Venezuela was using fentanyl as a WMD. Iran was about to nuke us. Cuba might attack us with drones if someone provides them. Greenland might start a snowball fight, and make us look bad if we lose.

Presumably we've got all our best people on this, since they're obviously not on the UFO videos.

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