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Comment Re:who cares how it feels? (Score 1, Informative) 75

I work in IT at a hospital. Dell Latitude 3420 and 3430 laptops have to be held carefully to avoid having the plastic crack simply because of the weight of the laptop. We have had to replace multiple top and bottom panels because of this. If you pick it up while its open, with two hands towards the front of the laptop, and then so much as move it a little in the air, the plastic shell noticeably flexes. We have been trying to train users to close the laptop before moving it, and to always hold it more towards the middle to avoid this.

Yes, I know the user is ultimately at fault here, but this can be an expensive issue for organizations with lots of laptops and lots of users, so it is often worth it to look for better build quality. Fortunately, the newer models have been a bit better in this regard, but it's always an up and down cycle with how they constantly try to see just how much cheapening they can get away with.

Comment Reminds me (Score 1) 145

Of every tv show where a bomb has a convenient countdown clock on it. In the old days it was an alarm clock wired to the bomb, then it was changed to a red digital timer because progress.

Anyone remember the movie V for Vendetta? Conveniently, V's bomb in the control room had a countdown clock so the guy who had no idea what he was doing knew how many seconds he had left.

Comment Re:subscribe to Amazon Prime now (Score 1, Troll) 34

You might say waiting 2 days for a free delivery is super bad inconvenient,

Only whiners living in their parent's basement would say this. For nearly everything one could buy (excluding groceries), two days is insignificant. If you're in that much of a hurry to get something, either an emergency has come up or you're too stupid to plan ahead.

Comment States should use settlements to teach ad-blocking (Score 1) 71

Each state that gets money in a judgement or settlement, should use that money to make sure their public education system teaches kids how to block ads.

By 2030, I don't think anyone should be able to graduate high school in America, unless they've learned how to be ad-free (on screens under their control; obviously they won't gain superpowers to blank out billboards or the sides of buses).

Submission + - The oral tradition that built software may not survive AI (fastcompany.com)

smooth wombat writes: Writing software is not just about knowing what to code. Verbally passing on knowledge of why something is done one way or the other, how to diagnose an issue, or what changes took place after implementation because no one documented those changes has been part of programming since day one. However, with the advent of AI, that institutional knowledge may be under threat.

It’s tempting therefore to imagine that generative AI will step into the breach and solve this for us. After all, even if you don’t want to turn a large language model (LLM) loose on a legacy code base—and there are plenty of reasons that you shouldn’t—having it generate documentation on the codebase itself might sound like a solution to the absence of other written information. LLMs can certainly summarize code back to you.

But hold up with that idea. Beyond hallucinations, there’s a deeper problem: Writing documentation is itself part of the thinking process. Whether I’m writing history or software, putting an approach into words helps refine it before I sink hours into implementation. Documentation also captures intent. An LLM may be able to summarize what a codebase does, but it cannot reliably explain why a developer chose one approach over another, or what trade-offs shaped that decision.

Moreover, it’s a chance for somebody else to understand why you did what you did. If they plan to change what I wrote (especially in a few years), they might understand why I needed to write it that way and what might be lost if you take it out. An LLM can read code that I’ve written. It might even scan a large codebase and accurately summarize what it’s doing. But it can’t assess authorial intent.

Comment Re: This should not be acceptble... (Score 1) 124

That was equally true for previous generations, and all those generations had exceptions -- kids that were excited about it, despite the other kids not being interested. (I figure the majority of Slashdot may have been such exceptions.)

Do we have reason to suspect the current generation is a unique special case, the one generation where somehow all of them make an effort to never learn about computers?

I bet some of them are like some of us, a 2026 minority that we would have recognized 40 years ago.

Comment Re: Say what you will re: free trade or protection (Score 2) 129

nd they're raking in cash thanks to the massive increase in the price of oil from Trump's war in the Middle East.

Ukraine is seeing to it they don't by destroying oil refineries. Right now there are at least 5 big refineries out of commission for the next month or more. That doesn't include reduced loading capacity at several different terminals which have been struck or pumping stations which no longer work.

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