Yes, I'm definitively a graybeard, so everyone under 40 is a kid. Ironically though, as a senior IT leader, I sat through my org's interns' post-internship (end of internship?) presentations just last week. One recounted her learnings as she leveraged various RSS feeds of cyber-threat intelligence news to... of course, feed an AI summarization engine that would spam said summarizations to the SecOps team. I almost asked her whether this Frankensteinian monster also plugged-into FidoNet or Usenet before I thought better of it.

It seems RSS is in more places than you'd expect in 2025, though it's certainly not in every place you might like it to be.

Agreed on both counts, and it'll be interesting to watch from here. We're long-since post-gigahertz race, and increasingly post-(semiconductor) process shrink. Even GPUs are delivering diminishing returns, with thermal dissipation, capacitance across extreme-speed multi-die interconnects, and other basic limits of physics hindering the delivery of anything more than incremental returns.

The truth is, we've been in the "fracking" stage of (classical) compute performance growth for a decade or two now. Soon enough, we'll have run out of oil-bearing shale to shatter and we'll come to realize that 400MB libraries for a file-open dialog atop seventeen layers of abstraction was more a bloated V10 SUV than a sensible hatchback.

Of course, perhaps, capable, reliable commodity quantum computing lies after the next plateau and the cycle thus continues.

I have no doubt that AI is affecting coding jobs, but the timing imagined here is off. More, weâ(TM)re seeing the tail end of the devaluation of individual contributors weâ(TM)ve watched for the last few decades. Itâ(TM)s more of the MBA fever dream that imagines a worldwide labor market with like for like candidates and 7-layer deep outsourcing that, even after all seven layers make a profit, somehow remains cheaper than just keeping talent and doing things in-house. AI will continue to make high end coders even more efficient and effective. The low end, less so⦠Thatâ(TM)s still the territory of shipping rote stuff offshore so you can tell the board youâ(TM)re limiting your biggest cost (employees). This, all while spending 3x more on contract relationships that you hide away from EBITDA by pretending the work product is a capital expenditure.

This doesn't sound so bad. Presumably, it'll play while I'm clicking-through my TV's obligatory power-on license agreement, else while I'm switching inputs because the manufacturer decided that I should only ever use their crappy inbuilt streaming apps. I'll, of course have plenty of time to spare anyway since I'll have turned everything on 15 minutes before I intended to watch because, after having previously watched from a different room, I'll need to sign-in and MFA with every streaming app. Throw in some un-skippable ads from the paid streaming service and this is sounding a lot like showing up early at the movie theater. You like movies, right?

You're on the right track, but I'm not sure you've thought it completely through. Software once evolved before moving into the stage you describe. I'm nostalgic for even that. What we have now is more akin to being bombarded by gamma rays. Yeah, the evolution might still be happening, but most of the mutations are just cancer.

No. Mandatory upgrades exist because recurring revenue, and if you aren't milking your customers on a recurring basis at an ever-increasing rate ...forever, you're businessing wrong.

PATCHES, existed before the internet and are more important than ever because of it. Unfortunately, as your comment demonstrates, most of us have been manipulated into conflating the value they once provided with the pay-forever subscription model that entails on-screen controls moving every couple months and pop-up pestering interrupting actual work just to campaign for the purported value of useless visual changes or ultra-niche added functionality.

Yeah, I'll concede that patches are a (wonderfully limited-scope) kind of upgrade that also can be distributed automatically, but it's clearly not what the article is talking about. Bits don't rot. If code you shipped has a vulnerability, it was there when you shipped it, and it should be on you to fix it without forcing me to change my way of working, all while paying you for the privilege of doing so.

By the way, eff flat "design" and get off my lawn!

It'd be all too easy to dismiss this as hysteria, given that we've known for 20 years that mobile devices can get warm when pushed. But, we're not talking just warm here... We're talking a few degrees warmer than a high fever! Seriously, have you ever touched the forehead of a sick relative? No? Good. You'd have third degree burns if you were so reckless. I have more thoughts I'd share, but I have to hop in my car that's been sitting in the post-summer sun here in the deep south. Until the A/C gets going, the black leather interior shouldn't be any warmer than, say, an iPhone 15 and half.

Huh? A judge forced Tesla to install chargers based on its half-decade old âoeself drivingâ fraud? Wow!

What a perverse incentive⦠reminds me of the time that literally every oil-guzzling auto maker was passing emissions testing by performing well during the test itself. I feel like I remember one of them being caught before the others and taking a bigger PR hit as a result. Eh, it was a long time ago⦠maybe just before the self-driving fraud started⦠around 2015, so I canâ(TM)t quite remember.

I don't think I ever saw tablets being particularly useful for tasks other than web browsing, but early-on, they were fantastic for that. I can't put my finger on all the reasons, but modern pages just don't seem to work as well on the tablet format. Part of it is that advertisers have adapted to intrusively grab your attention with slide-overs, and delayed pop-overs. Another might be a departure from columniation. Whatever the reasons, the convenience is gone, readability is down, and the whole experience just seems more cumbersome than it did in 2010.

Are you freakin' kidding me? How is a developer supposed to develop software that "requires administrator privileges" if he or she can't write to arbitrary directories and / or registry keys during normal, post-installation use? While you're at it, you might as well require your developers to use a 1080p screen, thus restricting their interfaces to actually rendering correctly on the displays of 99% of their users! What's next? Requiring the end product to run in an amount of memory likely to be supported on a single-socket motherboard and asking that code manipulating a database not be executed on the database server itself!!? Wow, just wow.

I'm with you but the problem is, that in today's world, you aren't expected to take and keep a job for any consequential length of time. In the blink of an eye, all of ITT's graduates will be subject to automated resume parsing and job application scoring. They will immediately fall prey to what the various HR software providers call "knock out" questions. If you haven't heard of these, they're essentially immediate disqualifiers that prevent your resume or application from ever bothering a busy HR admin due to running afoul of some education-tied rule, lack of an experience keyword, etc. I've been involved in a number of demos lately and have been horrified both by the ubiquity of this feature and the vendors' zeal for including them in product demos.

I imagine that someone who saw early gasoline engines spewing black smoke a century ago would have had similar thoughts about them.

If they didn't put the options in a different place and a layer deeper with each release, you wouldn't feel like you got any value when you're finally forced to upgrade.

Except I outsourced the manufacturing of the weapon to Ruger (LCP) and the "looks like a cell phone" aspect comes from keeping it in a pocket holster with an iPhone 4 back glass to reduce printing. Oh, you know what else helps its concealability? Being comfortable with it staying in my pocket. Always. ...not wanting to parade it around to find opportunities to preach about my rights or get approving nods from Bubba and Cletus. Jesus, redneck America, stop fondling your effing guns! Not only will they go unnoticed, but the people around you will be safer as well.