Even that somewhat inflated sum is pocket change for just one of the many major corporations which rely on PHP.

I challenge you (well obviously this is impossible but you get the rhetorical point) to find one corporation in the entire world valued at over a billion that doesn't, say, use openssh. The OpenBSD foundation struggles to raise CAD 400,000 a year.

Sure they are legally allowed to be freeloaders. The point of the license is anyone can use it. It's really stupid however to contribute absolutely nothing when it's critical infrastructure you rely on day to day and you could easily afford a sponsorship. But it's the tragedy of the commons.

For a junior developer, I'd say frontier models passed their standard some time ago.

No, I disagree, and now that I'm thinking about it more, quite strongly. I think frontier models passed the mediocre programmers of all seniority levels some time ago. I've worked with so many arrogant pillocks who are convinced they are the shit and will not listen to someone with domain expertise and then get pissy when they turn out to be wrong. Or worse, get political and push through an objectively broken thing.

Good juniors can drive AI really well and do good stuff. I had a summer intern the summer just gone. 2 month placement in the middle of an engineering degree. Basically gave him a problem I didn't have time to work on: you know "here's the current solution, here's what I know, this is the problem, go nuts" kind of deal. Obviously there were regular feedback sessions, but he did all the work, and used AI heavily but not religiously. And that's now part of the product. He was obviously very very junior, but I've had seniors who were less capable and flexible.

The frontier models are hit-and-miss when it comes to writing good test suites,

I've also found the mediocre are very much monkey-see-monkey do kind of programmers who write tests because those are Bet Practices and they are the Best. But they also as I say convinced they are the shit and don't appear to actually believe their code need testing really. CI is there to put the halt on all the fools they are surrounded with, not them of course, but they know they need to model Best Practices for the unwashed.

End result, a lot of programmers are shockingly bad at writing tests and basically test useless things that are easy to test and unlikely to break but don't do what's actually hard but important. This appears to be what Claude has been trained on: basically the average, on average and it tends to write long batteries of more or less meaningless tests.

Naturally good juniors aren't very good at tests initially. They're juniors, but I find it's the attitude that matter. It's not hard to convince them they might be wrong and that there's a need for testing. Or "prove to me Claude hasn't messed it up", kind of thing. I'd much rather work with an enthusiastic junior who wants to prove me, Claude or themselves wrong than a senior programmer who I have to beg to consider the notion that their code might not be perfect.

TL;DR I broadly agree, but I think Claude makes the competent/incompetent split starker, not the junior/senior split.

Currently, based on objective data comparing similar fully completed development tasks like for like, I still outperform agentic workflows using frontier models by about 25-50% on average, and I don't have to pay anyone extra fees to do that, and subjectively I also find it more engaging to work that way. So I don't really buy the hype about AIs making us all orders of magnitude more productive unless you're happy to YOLO everything forever and take the much-discussed risks that comes with.

Yes, though as you say quite a lot of stuff can be YOLO'd.

It's amazingly good at some stuff and not at others.

It can bash out a CRUD app with a web based UI in basically no time, and really well. Think some boring internal tool like inventory management or something. Would cost a fortune to buy and also suck massively. It would from a project perspective count as long and complex, but from a pure software point of view, it's not complicated stuff. It's well documented. It's also a horrible tech stack.

It's also very good at indexing an unseen codebase and figuring out entry points for things. I've known people, or rather a person, that good, but I ain't.

But I've also seen it make a complete shitshow of threading in a small, contained task. It's also so-so if that at optimization. I set it on making thing go faster. I had the dataset, and specified tests. It found the hotspot and made it faster, which is frankly more than a lot of programmers can do. Most of them will smugly tell you everyone knows e.g. std::unordered_map is slow (and you're implicitly a moron for using it), change everything to their own implementation on a Friday night then bugger off. So yeah better than that, but I let it churn for ages with its agents and it didn't get much further. So I put some easy wins in by hand.

It is quite often wrong and i definitely worse in areas requiring domain expertise. But then again that's the case with your average programmer. It's also a bit weirdly pissy at time, but much less so that many programmers, so that's a net win. It won't flounce off if you tell it to delete a bunch of code it just wrote.

So...

Yeah I use it and quite a lot.

This isn't wrong. One of my devs is on a bit of a side quest to see how far he an get with Qwen locally (5070Ti) compared to Claude. He was basically trying to answer the GP's question. Resort so far: it's not as good as the latest frontier model feels like 4.6 instead which is pretty solid. Main thing is it's got a pretty small context, but that's due to the 16GB size of the GPU not the model per-se.

Pork barrel? Nah it'll be the green chile barrel, and I'd be OK with that.

Maybe the could fund replacement emergency spare tires for all. After all you're not really meant to put 100k miles on one.

and countries are still maneuvering to gain the best position, and that includes the US.

Are they? The US isn't, it's bending to the whims of an angry, stupid, corrupt and senile old man bent on getting as rich as possible. Needlessly burning allies doesn't put the US in a good position.

meaning Russia and China's nuclear arsenal is effectively useless

Russia's nuclear arsenal is already very close to being effectively useless. Not a chance they've been doing good stockpile stewardship while the entire rest of the armed forces (and its tyres) rots into the ground.

And why would Trump/America care?

When America lost 3000 people on 9/11 and called for aid, Europe stood up.

The question was not why should America care, but why would America care.

There's a good chance they simply won't. America has not had a great record of being a reliable ally over the years.

Also profiting off of crime and fraud is morally questionable.

Unless all profits go to real charity, people that watch this support fraud.

That's like saying people that watch true crime shows about murder support murder.

The problem is UK energy policy. It is to build large amounts of intermittent power generation in places where there is no demand.

Not really, or rather only in as much as this is because we have other problems. The problem is a massive lack of investment in infrastructure (i.e. the grid), and absolutely zero long term planning. Sure there might be plans, but they'll change every 5 minutes anyway, just to ensure that no companies invest properly either.

The result is that the UK has to build a hugely expensive new transmission network from the wind farms off the north coast of Scotland to the Midlands and South.

It's called "investment". The reason the UK is such a shitshow in so many ways is we have the least investment of the G7. We are not going to get better by continuing to not invest in important infrastructure because it's too expensive.

the only solution is of course gas fired generation, but that is politically incorrect.

"politically correct" lol.

No, the problem is with like everything else we underinvest. We have a crappy, ageing grid which can't move electricity around the way we need. We keep trolling industries by making grand plans and cancelling them so no one can productively invest. The solution sure as shit isn't just using gas: that's why we've in the hole we're in now. Because gas is critical electricity prices are tied to the price of gas.

Having more gas isn't going to make the electricity prices less tied to gas.

The program also involves large amounts of solar. However, the UK is the second worst country in the world for solar power generation (the worst is Ireland).

Well apart from that not being 100% correct... so? Solar in a lot of places is just stupidly good. It's only a bad idea if it doesn't have sufficient ROI compared to other options.

doing what we've done for the last 30 years (that is, not investing in, well, anything and tying the price of electricity to gas) is not going to change where we are relative to the last 30 years.

What does that have to do with raspi,

Everything? This is, in case you didn't notice, an article about the raspberry pi.

where every other version they fuck up something basic like USB or power and then clearly don't do any testing before releasing it on the user base?

I mean... I've been using raspberry pis commercially for years now. Once it's been out for 10 minutes basically all the flaws and workarounds are documented and you can then just keep using the same thing until they stop making them which is usually ages. And then after, you can pick a long life stable model and keep using that for ages and it'll most likely just work.

Might have some warts, but they are a stable, known quantity.

Refurb? What are you talking about? You can buy a used dual-core NUC with 4GB/16GB for $50 any day of the week,

You're comparing a brand new device to a not even refurbished device? This is really moronic and you're being intentionally disingenuous at this point. You can buy used raspberry pis for £10. Like, yeah no shit that second hand stuff, especially random non refurbed second hand stuff that might be a lemon costs less than brand new things.

It's beyond inane to somehow make out that this is an option for a random NUC but somehow not a Pi, else why would you be comparing price wise to new pis?

You don't have to play any stupid games with bootloaders, you don't have to run special snowflake arm versions of anything, you just install and go.

I've literally never played any games with bootloaders, I have no idea what you are talking about. Dump the image to an SD card. Insert the SD card. Power on. That's it.

What's daft is your marriage to this straw man bullshit about refurbishing.

My bad I was assuming you weren't being a complete fucking tool. I am sorry and will not make that mistake next time.

You're not comparing a definitely working second hand thing to a new thing. You're comparing a random second hand thing that might not work to a new thing.

If you think a raspberry pi RAM upgrade is a basic computer upgrade, you have a better equipped home lab than I do.

Or if you don't want to fuck around with random refurbished shit and want a consistent, stable platform. Or if you want to use any of the huge number of hats available easily.

Not everyone needs the absolute maximum everything at all times and is prepared to sacrifice unlimited time to get it. In fact lot of people don't. And it doesn't even work: you an still buy pi 1's[*] for 20 quid. And the Zero 2W for 15. You won't get a refurbed PC for that, you'll get an ebay special you'll need to refurb yourself.

It's also kind of daft to compare a refurbished NUC to a new Pi. You can buy used Pi's cheaper too.

[*] But the pi 1 is sooo slooooww. See the first sentence of the paragraph.

Not sure I see the point of the pi any more. For roughly the same price you can now buy a used NUC

Bollocks you don't see the point.

You are claiming you do you really not see the point of buying predictable new $THING when random second hand refurbished $THING exists. Frankly I don't believe you.

FSF doesn't represent my interests in any serious way, I believe in open source,

OK, completely deluded then.