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Comment Re: Here's What Happens To Me (Score 1) 124

What I do not like about AI coding: the intellectual and memory challenges fade away. There is no more brainwork that I have liked about coding. Copy-pasting and especially auto-coding become boring quite fast, and I have no deep knowledge of the code. I do not have problems with it to think about: solutions to feel accomplished for. Those only come when I catch an AI doing something stupid.

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.

Comment It helped research some 25-year-old code (Score 5, Insightful) 124

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.

Comment Bloat Industrial Complex (Score 3) 124

AI seems to be feeding the bloat habit instead of trimming it. It's becoming an auto-bloater.

Very few in the industry are interested in parsimony. Devs would rather collect buzzwords for their resume rather than try to trim out layers and eye-candy toys. It's kind of like letting surgeons also be your general doctor, they'd recommend surgery more often than you really need it.

The principles of typical biz/admin CRUD haven't really changed much since client/server came on the scene in the early 90's. Yet the layers and verbosity seem to keep growing. An ever smaller portion of time is spent on domain issues and ever more on the tech layers and parts to support the domain. Something is wrong but nobody is motivated to do anything about it because bloat is job security.

YAGNI and KISS are still important, but is dismissed because it reduces one's resume buzzword count. The obsession with scaling for normal apps is an example of such insanity: there's only like a 1 in 50k chance your app or company will ever become FANG-sized, yet too many devs want to use a "webscale" stack. You're almost as likely to get struck by lightning while coding it. They patients are running the asylum.

Humans, you are doing CRUD wrong!

Comment Re:Defensive maneuvering is a requirement now (Score 2) 15

Only micro-movements are necessary to avoid most space junk*, using tiny "cold" thrusters which are not enough to serve as a rapid-response spy-probe. High-end spy probes probably have lots of fuel and big nozzles.

Don's spy-probe: "Hey Xi, look, my nozzle's bigger than yours!"

* If they have short notice to swerve, then small engines are probably not good enough, but that situation is probably not (yet) common enough to justify carrying large thruster systems.

Comment Re:No More HP (Score 1) 122

There's like a dozen different ink cartridge gimmicks HP uses to fuck over consumers. In my case one had to press a "confirm" prompt every time one printed if the color cartridge was past an alleged expiration date even if I was only printing in black-and-white.

HP used to have a good reputation, then seemed to turn evil on a dime. Was there a board meeting where they had a "let's be evil" vote and it passed?

Comment Spacecraft been maneuvering for decades (Score 2) 15

...Hydrazine nozzles are probably the simplest technique, being it doesn't need ignition, but are not as powerful as ignition-based path adjustment mini-rockets.

Maybe the speed and degree with which military satellites maneuver has increased of late? They probably can't tells us without having to kill us. You ask first!

Comment Re:Meta (Score 1) 22

To be honest, if I had that much money I too would chase pie-in-sky ideas.

But this VR chase is stupid. Meta should purchase the Second Life or Roblox franchise, get a web-based world working well with FaceBook, and THEN gradually add 3D and reach stuff. He has it backward.

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