I for once neither like scuba diving, because I don't like the feeling of rubber on my skin, nor do I think skiing all year round is something important to do. I live in the Alps, I can go skiing whenever I feel like it anyway, but I barely do. And inhaling something from the boobs of some paid person was never a dream of mine. If that rocks your boat, why not find something who will do it because they like you, or they like the sensation of someone snorting something from their boobs? Ted Turner once said, Life was a game, and Money is how you keep score. Why in your opinion is chasing the next highscore in some computer game a worthwhile way to spend your time as a billionaire, while trying to increase your highscore in money is not?

I'm just talking about statistical patterns. I know little about Microsoft patches. I abandoned Windows in 2001, right around the time XP was released, and have never looked back.

Not remotely similar to my experience. Granted I'm writing Rust, and the Rust compiler is *really* picky, so by the time the agent gets something that compiles it's a lot closer to correct than in other languages. Particularly if you know how to use the type system to enforce correctness.

Yes, you have to know how to write tests. A few decades of experience helps a lot. I find I actually spend a lot more time focused on the details of APIs and data structures than the details of tests, though. Getting APIs or data structures wrong will cost you down the road.

Also, I suppose it helps a bit that my work is in cryptography (protocols, not algorithms). The great thing about crypto code is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all. If you screw up the business logic just a little bit, you get completely wrong answers. The terrible thing is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all and gives you no clue where your problem might be.

Of course that's just functional correctness. With cryptography, the really hard part is making sure that the implementation is actually secure. The AI can't help much with that. That requires lots of knowledge and lots of experience.

Deep experience is absolutely required. My antennas are quite good after 40 years.

You really have to know what questions to ask, and what answers not to accept. It also helps to know what kinds of errors the LLM makes. It never outright lies, but it will guess rather than look, so you have to know when and how to push it, and how to manage its context window. When stuff starts falling out of the context window the machine starts guessing, approximating, justifying. Sometimes this means you need to make it spawn a bunch of focused subagents each responsible for a small piece of the problem. There are a lot of techniques to learn to maximize the benefit and minimize the errors.

Yeah, I am definitely not doing UI work.

Speak for yourself. I wrote Android's Keymaster implementation in less than a month, and it was about that size, and then re-wrote most of it in a week when it turned out I'd made some core assumptions that Qualcomm couldn't match in their implementation. It was relatively bug-free for a decade -- even when a third-party security research lab spent a month scrutinizing it. They found a handful of things, but nothing serious. I was amazed, especially since I'd seen the reports they turned in on some other code.

That's just one example. In my nearly 40-year career I've had a half dozen crazy-productive weeks like that, and usually when working on particularly-complex bits. If you haven't had that experience, that's unfortunate. It's not something I could do frequently (or would want to), but it's a glorious feeling when you're that deep in the zone.

The point of buying Trumpcoin is to pay a bribe. You just need to remember to communicate what you want in exchange for the purchase, out of band.

It's a really good system, but making it tax-deferred would make it even better. Since the goal is for Trump to end up with all the value, a Trumpcoin's value should be 0 by the time you're required to take distributions. That way, there's effectively no tax on your bribe. Win/win for everyone.

U.S. representatives excoriated the outcome as further proof of the organization's [WTO's] irrelevance.

I hate this administration's general anti-American attitude, extreme thirst for growing national debt, and overall lawless criminality, but the above quote nevertheless excites me. I wish to subscribe to the aforementioned representatives' newsletter.

If we don't need WTO, then I bet we don't need WIPO. And if we don't need to be a signatory of the WIPO treaty anymore, then we don't need DMCA.

Hey Pedoph-- er I mean-- let me start over.

Hey glorious leader Trump, people are saying you're too chicken to tell Johnson and Thune to repeal DMCA. Surely that's not true. Are you going to let them all get away with calling you chicken?

No one seriously working in Cosmology does that. Indeed, there are a lot of theories out there trying to either displace or at least amend Einstein's General Relativity, like MoND or TeVeS. The problem: No one until now has come up with a good idea how to do it, and all the proposed alternatives don't work very well either, have to assume even more unknowns, or are outright wrong in places where GR has been shown to work. Until then, we continue to use GR, because we know, where it works fine, and we know, where it fails.

It's easy to sit in an armchair and wandwave some theories in existence which superseed General Relativity. It's really hard to actually write them down.

In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.

Yes, Office is still king, although I think that crown is beginning to slip, and it may end up being Excel, with its large list of features, that may last the longest. But it isn't 1990, or even 2000 anymore. Developers have multiple ways of developing portable applications, and while MS may (for the nth time) update or swap out its toolchains, the real question is will developers really care?

Everything needs to be branded or monetised.

It's why I want large commercial organisations as far away from my data, computers and workflow as possible.

I do not care about you, I don't want to be reminded you even exist, and I certainly don't want to give you money. Go away.

I want to turn on my computer, load up the browser of my choice, and that's it. I don't need to see a single brand, no "notifications", no messages of your choosing, nothing. My boot screen is a spinner. My desktop is a flat, blank, plain colour. I have my browser pinned as a single recognisable icon (doesn't even have the name).

That is what an OS should be. That is what most services should be. We shouldn't be spending our life subject to the whims of a corporation trying to wheedle money out of us or "foster brand engagement" or whatever nonsense they class it as.

The one good thing about hitting limits on CPU clock speed, memory shortages, etc. is that they might finally have to start actually making programmes vaguely efficient again.

There's also yet-another reason that I don't use Windows, and that's that everything seems to want an app running on startup to cache what it needs to to present these shitty web UIs with any semblance of performance, to do the most worthless things.

There are far too many programmes that just don't function correctly if you have a software firewall other than Windows Defender and you deny them web access, for instance. Windows Defender just lets it all through, but if you have a "ZoneAlarm-type" firewall, you see that EVERYTHING wants to talk-home or connect to a local web service and, when denied, it hangs up and falls over itself rather than deals with it gracefully.

Not what you want to see in critical services, for example.

I don't know why I should care about limited compatibility for a subset of devices with another subset of devices. There's some of everything in my home. I found a tool called LocalSend years ago that allows me to do mildly obnoxious data transfers between arbitrary devices regardless of platform.

A year? I've regularly written that much in a month, and sometimes in a week. And, counter-intuitively, its during those sprints when I'm pumping out thousands of lines per day that I write the code that turns out to be the highest quality, requiring the fewest number of bugfixes later. I think it's because that very high productivity level can only happen when you're really in the zone, with the whole system held in your head. And when you have that full context, you make fewer mistakes, because mistakes mostly derive from not understanding the other pieces your code is interacting with.

Of course, that kind of focus is exhausting, and you can't do it long term.

By focusing on the structure, not the details. The LLM and the compiler and the formatter will get the low-level details right. Your job is to make sure the structure is correct and maintainable, and that the test suites cover all the bases, and then to scan the code for anomalies that make your antennas twitch, then dig into those and start asking questions -- not of product managers and developers, usually, but of the LLM!

But, yeah, it is challenging -- and also strangely addictive. I haven't worked more than 8 hours per day for years, but I find myself working 10+ hours per day on a regular basis, and then pulling out the laptop in bed at 11 PM to check on the last thing I told the AI to do, mostly because it's exhilarating to be able to get so much done, at such high quality, so quickly.

I think they're arguing that they are the third thing, a message parlor.

Unions are a real-life strategy because they work. Divide-and-conquer is also a real-life strategy, because it works too.

Thus, I think the truth of your statement all depends on whether you look at this conflict between government and the the people, from the point of view of the attacker, vs the point of view of the defender.

Children do not have the maturity that is required for unfiltered access to the adult world

But they used to. In the 1980s, nobody dared to say in public, that 17-year-old me should not be allowed to visit public (or even university) (or even medical) libraries. (Or if someone did, they were still very obscure and unpopular, little more than a glimmer in the left's eye.)