You have funny notion about 2015 and before printers. Printers had USB, ethernet and wifi in 2015 and before. Long before, 2010 the plug and play USB came out, ones with ethernet even older.

My HP multifunctional laser print/scan/copier thing is older than 2015 and going strong with usb/ethernet/wireless, in fact back then they put thousands of pages of toner in the cartridges so even the black is at 10% now. Time to think about replacing that for the first time ever but the other color are at 40%-50%

Generic postscipt often leaves behind fine control so pictures might look jagged, duplexing not working, transparency problems, color management not possible, margins cutting things off and not properly controllable.

hahaha, you are clueless and wrong. Half the people at work use macs and I have family member at home. One needs to research Mac support before buying a printer/copier//scanner, for many models if you can't airprint you might be screwed or get janky results.

Good luck with your pre-win 10 printer and support for 11; it may not be there and may not work at all. We've got the pile of dead things at work to prove it

flatpack makes a pile of bloat and has less effort at polish than what the distro maintainers do for the commonly use (thousands of them!) programs

Yes, app developers do basically just that, the distro maintainers know the quirks by now and make it work. I use openbsd for servers and Linux Mint for desktop and there is no problem for all the thousands of common wares that most use. At work SLES and that's also the case. No problems!

nonsense. the distro war has been won, by Ubuntu and things that are Ubuntu with lipstick that can run the same .deb

Plenty of people have popped in a Linux Mint (for example) install media and run with it, no tech knowledge needed if there is a network with dhcp and/or SLAAC

If you use some fringe distro and struggle with it that's on you. You're easily distracted.

never had any printing/scanning/copier issues with Linux. Just takes two minutes to research Linux support before buying something.

Familiar software? been using the office and email client on Linux for years, very familiar. On the other hand, copilot bogging down its machine watching the user's screen and popping up the new Clippy on steroids is alien

Distro maintainers do that, for good distros and wanted apps. as dev write for one major distro.

false, the distro package maintainers do that for good distros and that includes the BSD as well as GNU/Linux. There is mostly no problem.

I have exactly the same problem copying code I have found on the web and now AI. Typing it in instead of copy pasting is a huge help, especially if I change variable and function names and reformat on the fly.

the first was so abysmally bad I stopped watching midway through on relative's cable tv. I hear the 2nd was worse, just riding on the name of the first. A 3rd? who consumes this slop?

No, you're showing your overactive imagination. That they were goners is the most likely thing.

Don't know what you're talking about, me and my coworkers had the exact same work before, during and after covid and we did it. We worked on systems that weren't in the company's buildings anyway. No advantage to being present in same cube farm or using online chat & meetings. Sure once ever few months we show up in the colo and work on the gear, that also kept on going.

In short, no way to just draw pay and not do the work.

No arrogance, those of us that can do stuff can still get the remote days

Or is it "Remember the idiots who confused NCAR with NOAA and thought NOAA modeling and forecasting tools would disappear with NCAR."

Like the idiots who think the Department of Education actually educated kids, and don't seem to realize education had higher quality before Carter created that agenda driven propaganda organ in the 1970s.

The fact that you believe they HOPE to accomplish anything tells me all we need to know, you are not interested in a rational discussion of reality but only your romantic notions.

NOAA is not part of NCAR, they do forecasts of weather including hurricanes without it.

I came across some Emacs elisp code I'd written about 25 years ago, and it looked pretty useful. Emacs didn't like it. I researched the functions and variables and they apparently had been rejiggered about 5 years later. I said to myself, Self, sez I, this could be an interesting AI test. I could probably make this do what I want in a few minutes now if I did it from scratch, but that wouldn't help me understand why it was written that way 25 years ago.

So I asked Grok. I was pleasantly surprised to find it understood 25 year old elisp code just fine, explained when and how they had been rejiggered, and rewrite it for the current standards. That was more than I had expected and well worth the time invested.

One other time Grok surprised me was asking how much of FDR's New Deal legislation would have passed if it had required 2/3 passage instead of just 1/2. Not only did it name the legislation which would not have passed, it also named all the legislation which had passed by voice vote and there was no way to know if 2/3 had voted for it. The couple of bills I checked did match and were not hallucinations. The voice vote business was a nice surprise.

I program now for fun, not professionally. The idea of "offshoring" the fun to AI doesn't interest me. But trying to find 25-year-old documentation and when it changed doesn't sound like fun, and I'm glad to know I can offshore at least some of the dreary parts.

are you confused? Those predictions aren't made by NCAR. NOOA is not part of it.

There is zero benefit to the people you mention; learn how things work before making up romantic notions of what NCAR does.