And the auction (with bids starting at $100K) should have only earned the company's H1B hire an interview to prove his worthiness for the position.

It's the exact same transformation as placing a book on the surface of a copying machine and pressing Copy. That is the only transformation done by LLMs. It's a copy, and the judge is entirely wrong. Sometimes he gets it (like he did in the Oracle case), and sometimes the bullshit machine runs him over (like it does with LLMs).

It is a certainty that this sane judge's ruling will be overturned, as the U.S. Supreme Taliban has already ruled this particular law to be Constitutional. That's why this insanity is spreading throughout the Taliban-controlled U.S.

I'm going to piss off a lot of people, but I don't care. The first steps are:

1) Get rid of RPM. Red Hat created it because they saw Debian and wondered how they could fuck it up. RPM was the result. Standardize on the Debian format.
2) Get rid of GNOME. GNOME was created because someone didn't think the QPL was Free enough. The result was possibly the worst desktop in existence.
3) Improve the deb format to be per-user friendly. Developers currently can't automate the installation of a desktop icon on a user's desktop because all packages are installed as root. This is a fairly simple problem with large repercussions.
4) Abandon SNAPS, AppImage, etc. They don't work as advertised, and can only work if they package an entire operating system in each application.

That should solve many of the problems with minimal pain.

AppImage has proven itself to be a huge disappointment, and I suspect the same holds true for the others as well. I was running Kdenlive on Kubuntu 20.04, and there were must-have features in a newer Kdenlive that required a newer Kubuntu, so I downloaded the last AppImage of the Kdenlive I needed.

When I tried to run the AppImage, it failed with a GLIBC dependency error. That, for me, completely killed the whole notion of AppImage, SNAP, and all the others. They need the entire dependency chain (essentially the entire operating) included in each package, or something will fail.

We can thank Red Hat for this entire packaging clusterfuck, naturally. If they had just adopted the Debian format, 99% of current packaging issues would never have existed. But they saw a good think and thought, "I wonder how we can destroy this awesome user-centric advance. Ooh! I know!" Hence, RPM was born, and the Linux world became a decidedly worse place.

Or if, despite due diligence, what you buy has this crap, return it for a refund.

How do they send the screenshots if you don't hook up the TV to your Internet?

Absolutely correct. I have an example just from today. I told an AI today that I couldn't launch Steam from one of my son's Linux Mint desktop when I double-clicked on the desktop icon. It had several possibilities for me to try, with each suggestion having a footnote pointing to where it got the potential answer. That was kind of cool, in a bizarre kind of search-engine way.

After reading a bunch of them, most of which involved doing things that had zero chance of working (but which the AI picked up from various help sites across the Internet), I had a flash of insight that it may be a simple configuration error. I looked at the system settings, and saw the double-click interval was at its minimum. My son increased the interval, and Steam launched on double-click.

Statistical matching, which is all AI does, is 100% incapable of thinking outside the math that drives it. More accurately, AI is 100% incapable of thinking. End of story.

Repeatability is a fundamental requirement of maintainability. A code generator that can't generate the same code over successively iterations over time is a useless, dangerous code generator.

Wants change over time, and code has to be extendable without breaking what's already there. Just because you got what you want now doesn't mean that what you want will stay the same over time. Without repeatability, your new wants will likely destroy the code that satisfied your prior wants. Replacing working code] with new LLM-generated code is a guarantee of breaking existing features.

If necessary, then yes. I don't see that as a problem. I will also make it know to the sales people that lack of DisplayPort is why I am refusing to buy their stuff.

I will be actively seeking out DisplayPort-compatible devices for all future A/V purchases, and will recommend the same for anyone who asks. I have just become a DisplayPort evangelist.

I've only ever had one COBOL class, and that was in the late 1990s. I was sure I was going to hate the language before ever setting foot into the classroom. After setting foot into the classroom for a couple days, my concerns turned out to be unfounded. COBOL was much worse than I could have anticipated.

That aside, isn't COBOL's ability to process vast amounts of data quickly due to the massive I/O abilities of the mainframes it tends to run on? I have been told over the decades that a mainframe's I/O abilities dwarf those of even high-end Intel/AMD server. If that's true, then COBOL isn't fast due to any inherent strength of the language, but rather is fast because of the I/O abilities of the hardware.

Your analysis is absolute correct. It's funny how many people in this conversation have been affected by the very thing they are raging about.

We've had such a system for thousands of years: parents.

If you want those things, you will stay as far away from the public school system as you can manage. The public school system hampered my education and employment prospects, and nearly shut them down entirely. My mom taught me all the useful stuff at home, before the public school system started undoing it all.

I was semi-proficient in the three R's by the time I was 5. My learning pace slowed as I proceeded through the grades, and my desire to learn was all but dead by the time I graduated from High School. The public school system killed it.

My major learning interests focused around computer programming, which I had to learn completely on my own. Even the programming classes in High School (which were experimental at the time) discouraged exploring programming beyond the course's tiny box, and taught students NOTHING. I had to teach the programming teacher how to program. It was ridiculous, and was par for the public school course.

Homeschooling can hardly do any worse than public schooling.