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Comment Re:Why is this surprising?? (Score 1) 116

But you still somehow perceive them as coming with an agenda that just doesn't exist.

No doubt Microsoft's agenda today is different from what it was 30 years ago, but it's still Microsoft's agenda. Microsoft can be relied upon to do what is good for Microsoft, and any dependency you form on their products can and will be used as leverage to extract money from you.

Comment Re:Fear (Score 2) 69

I had to look "G Suite" up because I had no idea what it was, it turns out that the only component I've ever used is gmail and that became necessary when I bought my first Android device after the "Email of death" killed Nokia's Symbian. I don't actually use gmail, it's the hook used for Android App updates.
Charging for Gmail is unthinkable, that would have so many knock-on effects.

Comment Re:If AI is the flood (Score 1) 70

Quoting from the summary above

Which is all entirely pointless churn, and we're making it clear that AI-detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved — and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can't even see each other's reports.

My emphasis.

Comment Re:Greed and infrastructure do not mix (Score 1) 146

I'm very surprised it's legal here. I thought the electric companies were legally required to serve their customers reliably, and not solely when they found it desirable to do so -- that's the agreement they made in exchange for being a natural monopoly (natural because you can't economically run more than one set of electric lines to every household). Apparently I was wrong about that?

Comment Re:Brian Kernighan nailed this decades ago (Score 3, Interesting) 121

As astronaut Frank Borman put it, "a superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid situations which would require the use of his superior piloting skill".

The programmer's version of that would be "a superior programmer uses his superior judgement to avoid creating the bugs that would require the use of his superior debugging skill".

Comment Re:It stops the development of new knowledge too (Score 4, Insightful) 121

Could I have fixed this bug? Not even in my wildest dreams. Do I care how it was fixed? Oh no. No I don't. I just checked that the output of the LLM was reasonable.

The risk in this scenario is that after a few iterations of people applying AI-generated "black box" modifications, users start reporting that the ancient app is crashing on them now and then, and nobody has the first clue why, or how to fix it... and since the crash isn't readily reproducible, you can't even do a "git bisect" to figure out which commit introduced the regression. Now you're left with two unappetizing choices: either live with the instability forever, or roll back all of the "blind" commits to the last known-stable version and never touch the codebase again.

Comment Re:Ban on updates?! And more distinctions without (Score 1) 75

I had a TP-Link device up until around 2019 but then stopped using DSL and had to buy something new, this means I have no idea about their products nowadays.
A couple of questions: are US models different to - say - Canadian or Mexican models? If they are the same, is there going to be a "Greatest wall of MAGAland" to block updates and enforce geo-fencing?

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