Not sure I agree with all the "humans are superior, therefore x" logic. Yes they are superior except I think in being able to read tons of code without your eyeballs shriveling up. I think AI can figure out authorial intent pretty well in that situation. Also, since we now have to write much more detailed specs in order to get AI to build things to any reasonable level of quality, there are a lot more readme and technical design files in markdown nearby. If those could just be deployed it would be great. In my system you cannot deploy them, so the code goes one place and the documentation goes in to a black hole or stays on the vendor's system.

Yes! Particularly in languages with rich semantics and a tradition of meaningful identifiers, the primary focus on documentation where I've worked has been on 'why' rather than 'what.' In Ada, which separates specification/API from implementation, the comments in the spec explained what the package did (including errors/exceptions), and the comments in the body concentrated on capturing what was not obvious -to a maintainer- in the code. Ada culture strongly emphasized maintainability, and that was emphasized in code reviews.

On one project, I ended up as "the first maintainer", having to rewrite a package that was widely used throughout the large application. I had to live with that specification, although I did add comments on errors that could be signaled by the various operations. But I rewrote that package body twice, the first time for time performance, and the second time to minimize space (it was a generic package. The compiler was unable, due to the complexity, to do 'code sharing' automatically, so I ended up using a lot of compiler specific dirty tricks to manually implement shared generics. And I documented all the tricks and knowledge about what I was doing in that package body. I also delivered a 'warranty' with that, telling my successor afterI left that job, "If you get a bug report, contact me and I'll work with you to fix it." She never called, and about 10 years later we connected, and I asked: "Any bugs on that code?" "No, it worked perfectly.")

What a funny thing to say about something that is literally all text. Match up the code itself with the commit message and the ticket that caused it to happen - we work in the most documented business there is.

If you don't force/write good commit messages then you get what you deserve.

If you don't force/use good issue tracking then you get what you deserve.

In general, AI now composes my commit messages. Then I delete 2/3 of it. Sometimes I'll touch it up a bit. So it is helping our process...

For every line of code in our repo I know who wrote it, when they wrote it, what they said about writing it, and why they started to write it in the first place. If you don't know those things then you (or your organization) are doing it wrong.

For me, it was a Xerox XDS (formerly SDS) Sigma 7... And I learned a lot about programming from studying the BASIC source code of that application. I got yelled at by one of the university's system programmers when I asked her a question "why did they do it this way?" Then she answered my question.

tldr; righteous fool commits a crime, injecting data deletion code into people's workflows.
Then a raft of people on slashdot defend him. WTF?
No, it is not an elegant reversi slam that turns people's tools against them without consequence.
It's a criminal subversion of machinery.
Maybe the guy is sick of AI slop but crimes are not the answer.
Not incidentally, the etymology of the word "sabotage" is to willfully perform slow, clumsy, bungling work (like walking in clogs noisily, clumsily). Once the tech becomes useful enough (as AI is already in many cases), saboteurs will be the people who try to reduce everyone's potential efficiencies so they run as slowly as bunglers like them. Between now and then, they just have a finger in the dike.

why not due a test run using robots to build a base by a volcano, or in the antarctic?

tldr. Sounds ironic for a disconnected CEO to be told to use more AI, but on the other hand if he/she feels unable to talk to anyone else in the company then an AI actually might tell them more about their own company and AI, and urge them to talk to people, assuming it is not in a sycophantic loop. This assumes that the CEO is fair dealing. Opus might refuse to help figure out ways to use AI to justify short-term cuts/profits and other deviltry but OpenAI might happily agree..

For all we know, what looks to you like a one-day delay is actually a three-month delay, they just had a different launch scheduled the next day.

No. Launching a rocket is not like launching a plane. You have to get it to the platform and set it all up. You have to register with the feds. It's a whole thing. And here (well, at Vandenberg) there is just one SpaceX platform at the moment. I think they are talking about building another.

This was back in the 2012-2015 time frame ... so "buy them bigger drives" wasn't always a reasonable solution. A lot of them were using Macbook Airs that were great for their needs EXCEPT for the SSDs not being as big as one might prefer.

I'm sure I'm just an outlier here. But I bought a cheap big screen LCD smart TV at Best Buy 3-4 years ago. It was a Westinghouse branded set running Roku TV.

At some point, they updated the firmware to consolidate the TV guide in it so it displayed all the streaming content and your over the air TV stations in the same guide. (Used to be, you had to pick a Live TV icon/button to look at your OTA content in its own place.)

Ever since that happened, the TV forgets all my OTA stations regularly so I have to go into setup and re-scan for all of them, to get them to reappear in the guide. REALLY annoying.

It would be awesome if a total UI makeover for it results in fixing this problem.

I used to work for a company that used the "Dropbox for Business" product. (I think they renamed it along the way, so that may be its former or current product name?) Anyway, my memory of it is that it generally did what you paid for it to do -- but was horribly costly when existing contracts ran out and went up for renewal.

They seemed to use the business model that once you invested in using the platform and they had your data captive in it, they could crank up the prices because it was cheaper to keep it than to go through the painful process of switching.

I also recall a really frustrating detail; We kept wanting DropBox to enforce a disk quota on client PCs. Instead, it would happily keep syncing more content until it ran someone's disk space down to around 0 bytes free, causing OS crashes and a big hassle cleaning it back up again. Their only answer was, "We added the ability to only sync the actual files and folders on-demand, the first time a user clicks to view/open/edit one of them." Great, but that's not the same thing as a disk quota. We had people working with huge video files and it only took one to wipe out remaining disk space on some machines.

Launches slip *all the time*. I live about 50 miles from Vandenberg, so I keep an eye on when they go up to see if there's gonna be a good view. My guess is that about 25% of them slip - and when they do, mostly it's a 1 day slip.

So slipping to the next day can't be a big deal. Especially if you're planning it ahead of time. Unless you're pushing up against the next launch - which would be unusual.

Yes, there are windows for some satellites. But I think they are roughly daily with these.

This one's interesting on several levels. I mean, for starters? We already know most competitive sports involve people taking various drugs and supplements in an attempt to get an edge. So it's a lie and a farce when the Olympic committee or the Major League Baseball association or anyone else doing pro sports claims we're watching athletes who achieved everything they do 100% naturally.

Viewed that way, I can see how holding a "performance enhanced Olympics" challenges that and calls it out. Essentially, it's saying, "Hey... we don't just randomly catch and disqualify a few athletes, to keep up a facade that the rest of them aren't doing any of it. We let you see what people can do, period, in a world where these drugs and supplements exist and people take them."

Where it gets questionable for me is ethically, when you start asking if it's right to dangle large sums of money in front of people to encourage them to take dangerous amounts of drugs and push themselves into potential health crisis? I think most of us know that normally, athletes would limit drug usage to what they believe is relatively safe. (They're surrounded by others who have been doing the same and can make a judgement call based on what's actually worked and happened to that group.) Start changing things to huge cash prizes to win ONE event, and now people will get reckless. "I only need that $30 million this one year and I can quit the whole thing."

Historically, knowledge-workers had little interest in unionizing because they knew they possessed the ability to learn and adapt. Sure, they had useful skills and knowledge. But much of I.T. is about possessing the ability to learn new things quickly. Everything's in constant change or evolution. The software package you use today will get a new update in a matter of weeks and then it has new functions or features have been moved around to new locations in it. The programming language you use may even get deprecated, demanding you learn whatever replaces it. The hardware you troubleshoot and support changes on a regular schedule.

Unions primarily benefit people who want to retain fair compensation for doing the same specific tasks repeatedly. They want reassurance they won't be forced to do anything new that's outside the scope of what they were hired for. Such a thing requires a new job title/role and a contract specifying exactly what they agree to as part of it.

I.T. workers usually felt if they were getting a bad deal someplace, the best move was to quit and find a new job where pay/benefits and/or working conditions were better. There wasn't so much fear or concern if a place used different software or tools than what they used before. That didn't matter much as long as they could learn the differences between it and what they had previously.

I think that might be changing in recent years, though? Now, you probably have an edge if your resume shows you already worked at companies people are familiar with and impressed by. But otherwise, they mostly want newer/younger people who they can pay lower wages to and get the most out of. Most places are starting to treat anyone in I.T. as more of a necessary expense than an asset to the business, and fewer and fewer pay well for your decades of experience.

I know that's just me being a bit sarcastic or mean. I don't wish unemployment or a tough time on any of my "people" working in I.T. or with an interest in computers and technology. That's been my thing since I was a kid.

But ... I spent the majority of my career working for small businesses and even working for myself (on-site consulting and computer service). When I finally got hired on with "big tech", I lasted only a year before resigning, because I couldn't bear the constant changing demands, stress, foolishness and teams getting pushed around by middle managers in competition with each other.

I noticed a huge rift in "big tech" employment between the "chosen ones" and everyone else employed there. If you got into management in some capacity, or you were important enough in software development - you were compensated really well and made to feel like your job was fairly secure. The others doing such roles as deskside support or audio-visual support were in another world. They were just herded around by project managers who in turn would change direction on initiatives on a dime, when managers over them declared they had some new direction to go. For them, employment was a revolving door of hiring and firing (after tossing people on "performance improvement programs" to pretend they cared).

So when the big tech shakeup starts involving the middle managers and those all comfortable with lots of stock options and a high salary because they help code the site's web portals? It's hard to be THAT sympathetic. Time to learn how the rest of us in the career feel.