It is 12000 days into September, 1993: Usenet is long since an artifact in the memory of greybeards; the internet belongs to the monkey cage. Yet on Slashdot, we still get physics puns. Here, the golden age lives on.

the father accustoms himself to become like his child and fears his sons, while the son likens himself to his father, and feels neither shame nor fear in front of his parents, so he may be free ; the metic [563a] becomes the equal of a citizen and the citizen of a metic, and similarly with the foreigner.
It indeed so happens, he said.
To these, said I, such trifles do add up: the teacher, in such a case, fears his pupils and fawns upon them, while pupils have in low esteem their teachers as well as their overseers; and, overall, the young copy the elders and contend hotly with them in words and in deeds, while the elders, lowering themselves to the level of the young, sate themselves with pleasantries [563b] and wit, mimicking the young in order not to look unpleasant and despotic.

- Plato's "The Republic" (ca 375 BCE)

And for some reason, Discord went to Klipy...?

Probably a Linux nerd (on /.? The hell you say) that carried the xST vs xDT timezone markers before the brain caught up that "Standard" and "Saving" are both "S"

> next will be Jedi training school full of pointless teen angst.

Wasn't that "The Acolyte"?

> Heh, I've never heard that term before.

It's an acronym for "jack of all trades."

What, you mean you're not convinced to grab the no-name alpha-release "privacy browser" that cripples yourself if you don't let them MITM you?

It wasn't that hard - Netscape came on floppies, too.

A lot of people want a Mac because they have a nice form factor and they work in the Apple ecosystem. Macbooks were a bit expensive. It's obvious that an iPad masquerading as a Macbook was going to work, because a lot of people like a proper keyboard and don't need touchscreen. Macbook Neo fits a perfect niche. I'm not surprised by its success, I'm just surprised that Apple are. I'm stunned their business case didn't imagine bigger volume. Why buy a more expensive Macbook for basic admin, web browsing, and streaming?

You may be right - I guess I've been thinking too much about Mars missions where it's a lot more important. The moon isn't that far away that it makes a big difference, from what you say.

Reasonable to assume that, in fact, we might choose to fly to the moon when it's closer to perigee.

It's become very "I built this with AI" and "how your business is going to improve with AI" and all sorts of terrible content, and GAMES! WTF.

Glad to see that /. is still good for the occasional and perfectly-executed Star Trek reference.

LLM-based AI can do some pretty impressive things. It *seems* to answer questions with remarkable accuracy, and it instantly produces code in response to often ridiculously vague input queries:

"Write me an app to track ant farms in Vietnam"

And what do you know? You get something that seems surprisingly useful!

Except that it's all an illusion.

I'm an experienced software developer (25 years now) and I focus on information lifecycle apps targeting workgroups and enterprise - organizations of 50+ people. As I write this, about 20,000 people are concurrently using an app I created.

Over the past year or so, I've been trying to deeply integrate AI into my workflow. It's there when I write code in VSCode, it's there when I write sysadmin/shell code, and it's there when I'm refactoring.

The more I use it, and the "better" it gets, the more frustrating I find it. It's only somewhat useful in the area that most coding projects fail: debugging.

No matter what it seems, LLM-based AI doesn't *understand* anything. It's just an ever-more-clever trickery based on word prediction. As such, it serves only as another abstraction that still must be understood and reviewed by a real person with actual understanding, or the result is untrustable, unstable, and insecure "vibe code" that is largely worthless outside of securing VC funding, which is the thing that AI perhaps does best: help unprepared people get VC funding.

You still need real people to get code you can live with, depend on, and grow with.

Exactly. This is why my blood pressure spikes whenever I see some damn kid (#GOML) squeaking that "comments are a code smell."

The original point has been lost, corrupted into cargo-cult stupidity.