Yep. And this just means that F-Droid has to have one person sign up and submit all of the apps for signature, as I said.

Nonsense. There's no reason to expect that mandatory developer certificates will kill F-Droid, at all. F-Droid will need one guy to pay the $25 fee and identify himself. Unless they can use the open source developer exception that Google has talked about (but hasn't announced any details, AFAIK).

That's a bigger issue, because Google's announced policy is to require that apps respect intellectual property, which would include not distributing apps that blatantly violate terms of service. Most likely F-Droid will have to stop distributing NewPipe if they want to be in Google Play. If dropping NewPipe is enough to kill F-Droid, then I guess that'll do it.

Those in the north will complain because the portion of the winter they go to work in darkness will increase, and it will be darker. Those in the center will also complain louder because they'll start going to work/school in the dark.

Those in the south will be confused about why everyone else is complaining, but they'll lose.

Well, they do say the Universe is expanding... now we know why - Galactic Sugar is everywhere.

It's really not. 20 years ago, yes, but they've grown up and wised up. I know lots of excellent engineers at Microsoft, and I know they do good work, and they report that their colleagues do, too.

And note that I'm no MS fanboy. I hated them with a purple passion in the late 80s and early 90s, and swore off Windows entirely in 2001. I did finally break down and buy a Windows laptop a couple of years ago because I bought a CNC milling machine and the good software is Windows only, but that's the only thing I use it for.

More precisely, "Everyone does".

Microsoft's code isn't especially shoddy, all large codebases that are getting AI review right now are experiencing the same thing.

We can bust on Microsoft all day and all night, and they deserve it, but the fact that their ability to find and fix these problems has greatly increased is a good thing. Software is incredibly complex, and no software more complicated than "10 GOTO 10" is free from the potential of security problems. Microsoft's QA has gone downhill in recent years, but now it's getting better apparently (even if it's after the fact). They are not going away, so this makes all our lives better.

Merit should always consider strictly value.

That would be funny... but also foolish. Iran is thrilled to have Trump right where he is, doing all the dumb things he's doing.

Valid! (Including the gray and the beard, though my hair is still mostly black. Mostly.)

The point, though is that there are lots of grandmas with varying levels of computer knowledge, many of whom can and should be moved to a Linux system that is harder to screw up. Or, honestly even better, a good Chromebook.

On that topic, I did that for my father-in-law around 2010. I got tired of cleaning up the mess he made on his Windows laptop, so (with his permission) I upgraded him to Debian. It was hugely lower-maintenance for me.

The really funny thing about that particular case is that my father-in-law was a retired Full Professor of Computer Science! His problem wasn't that he didn't have the background or ability to manage a system himself, it was that he didn't want to. At his life-stage, the computer was a tool that he used, mostly as a web browser to buy parts for the farming and antique furniture refinishing that were his passions. Also, he had very thick fingers and constantly fat-fingered stuff, literally. What he really needed was a Chromebook with a full-sized laptop keyboard (a bigger-than-normal keyboard would have been even better), but Chromebooks didn't exist yet.

I'm a grandpa and I'm using a computer. My wife is a grandma and she's using a computer, too.

I wrote a file searching utility in C++ about 30 years ago. About 15 years ago I ported it to Python and found it to be faster than using the Windows directory enumeration APIs, and I've been using that ever since. It just searches filenames, but that's all I need.

"NOTE: Experiences vary by region." says to me that Microsoft doesn't even know what their changes will do.

So, $22.50 per day, or $113 per week. How much does one of your people cost, all-in, including benefits? It's unlikely that it's less than $100k per year, and very likely at least double or triple that, if not five times or more. At $200k/year for 50 weeks, that's $4k/week. At the current token price, the AI makes a $200k engineer 3% more productive, the company is breaking even. If it makes them 1.5X or 2X as productive it's a clear and unquestionable win, even with higher token prices.

As for me, think AI makes me about 5X more productive than I would be without it, and that's just considering volume of work. Honestly, I think the quality is a little higher than I'd do myself -- not because the AI writes better code than I do (it definitely does not), but because I'm able to be pickier and do more and larger refactors than I would if I had to do the grunt work myself. Also because I have Claude write documentation that, frankly, I just wouldn't get around to if it were me. The documentation is not nearly as good as if you gave me a dedicated technical writer... but the $2500 I spend per month in tokens would come nowhere close to paying a writer, even if we ignored the coding productivity.

Somewhat, yes (and this most definitely includes the federal government!). On the other hand, small organizations don't have the same opportunities for economies of scale. This is what drives consolidation in most markets; the bigger players can outcompete the small ones because they have efficiency opportunities the small ones just don't, and greater consolidation increases that... up until it gets balanced and then exceeded by bloat, which lets smaller players back in.

That's what happens in competitive markets, anyway. The healthcare market is so heavily regulated that it may not work the same way.