Yeah, but I don't really blame people. LLMs work so incredibly well and produce amazing results. Even AI experts are impressed by the results and non-AI experts are often seduced by the results. Well, except for the anti-AI folks who, as usual, see all of the warts and none of the benefits, and are thus exactly as idiotic as the all-AI-all-the-time folks, just in the opposite way.

In truth, AI does mostly-great work and will replace many jobs over the next decade; translation jobs are very high on that list. But they need systems to double-check them, some computer and some human, because the mistakes AI makes are often hilariously bad (hallucinating relevant cases in legal filings) and often subtle and hard to detect. People want to replace people but expect AI to not need validation, even though most all-human systems have (and need) validation.

I'll admit that "good enough to get the point across" is often not good enough for support pages, especially for non-experts.

Linux phones have been available in the past; I assume you can still get them. The question is: are they better, or just more ideologically pure? Because ideology makes you feel all warm and special, but is kinda shitty at paying the bills. Or actually working.

You were doing quite well, but tripped just before the goal line. The government action you are talking about was "You need to stop redlining", which was a way to deny mortgages to minorities without saying you are denying mortgages to minorities. That was not a major cause of the crisis, though people who want to redirect blame have talked about it so much that gullible folk have started to believe it. The cause was the banks offering large mortgages to people who could not afford them (falsifying the documents so it looked good to govt watchdogs) and then splitting the mortgages into tranches, which was the banks choice not the government. Blaming the government for this is basically assuming that corporate greed and corruption does not exist, they are all angels who are forced into poor action by the EVIL GOVERNMENT. No, corporations screw up without the government, and lobby their paid-for (mostly but not always conservative) congresscritters to remove important regulations that get the way of "money today, market crash later but who cares".

The problem with crashes is that the crashes help the wealthy and help people in a few specific cases (like you), but they hurt pretty much everyone else. If you believe in Jesus's holy words "blessed are the rich, fuck those idiots who chose to be born poor" then we need more crashes. Otherwise, we can do better.

Texas is slowly moving in the right direction. Imagine how much farther it could have moved if conservatives didn't have a jihad against reality.

In the 90s I inherited a make/awk monstrosity where top-level make created a top-level awk script, which ran and created Makefiles in each subdirectory and ran make in each one, which generated awk scripts in each directory, which then ran each awk script, and each result was gathered by the top awk script.. I dealt with it for a year until it was fully in my control, when I quickly replaced it with a single perl script which mere humans could understand. (Generating DNS files for named, if anyone cares, one domain per subdir),

Oh, very nice. I'm surprised (but happily so) that anyone was that structured in the 80s, though if anyone was, the military seems likely. But anyone that structured probably already replaced most/all of their COBOL with something newer, so the remaining COBOL systems are the OTHER sort...

it's not financially viable (and probably logically impossible) to write fantastic software. But coding theory has advanced enough that "well designed code" is not much more expensive than "fuck it, we'll ship it and pray" and it's far cheaper if you assume the company will still exist in five years.

Note that we don't assume we know what we are doing nowadays either. But the intelligent among us know that we are idiots, so we add structure and unit tests such that in 50 years, those new young idiots will have some breadcrumb trails and unit tests to make their life less terrible.

If problems occur, it's hard to follow the logic since modern systems try to encapsulate business logic in different classes than message passing and database validation.

If you want to add functionality, you have too many options (all with unknown side effects), rather than one class with defined sided effects.

If you need to change one specific rule, you don't have the unit tests to (hopefully) prove that you didn't break ten things while fixing two.

So it is perfectly stable as long as the underlying system, inputs, business environment, and logic never changes. So, if we assume a spherical cow...

Fixed that for you.

An important fact about the expansion of EV infrastructure is that most of it is happening separate from EVs. Our electric infrastructure was aging and terrible but is being made more reliable every year. As parts of the country (and world) gain population, it turns out that we need to add better grid infrastructure for the new residences as well as for the EV charging stations. While Texans may think that region-wide outages every year or two are fine, most of us expect more from power to our cities.

So the powerline capital expenses cannot be completely or even mostly charged to EVs. 80% of it was going to happen even if we only had internal combustion engines. We're moving to HVDC connections because we want a reliable grid, home solar panels feeding the grid, and more power for homes, factories, and data centers. And, after all that, some public EV chargers too.

You make an excellent point. If most people can plug in to a private outlet at home each night, we should need a lot fewer public chargers than public nozzles.

These are not really comparable. Fueling via electric is slower, but many people have home chargers so rarely need public chargers. But I'm glad that the idiots who used to complain "we'll never duplicate our gas infrastructure so electric is bad" will now shut up. Yeah, yeah, of course they'll just whine about something else, but I can dream.

"Mature technology" can mean different things. Batteries hold a LOT of energy which can usually be released very quickly if the battery is damaged. We want batteries with more energy and less volume, so pack that energy tighter. And as time goes on, we get companies which... don't follow every single safety precaution (because that's expensive) in design and manufacture of the batteries, especially because the components of the batteries are made by many companies, then assembled by other companies, then sold to other companies for use in products which were ordered by Apple, Samsung, etc for sale to us. A few battery issues are hard to track back, and companies which ignore safety are usually happy to fold and reform with a different name when lawsuits appear.