I have account number 13,802 here, which I've never been able to persuade the admins to recover for me. Notice how there's no activity on it. That's because when I created it and saw that user number come up I thought "huh - no point in carrying on here then, how could anyone possible read or make sense of anything with nearly fourteen thousand people on it?".

Since then, the chorus on various sites has become rather larger than merely fourteen thousand. The background noise is incredible. I'm amazed any signal gets through at all vs the constant noise to be honest.

Spirits walk among us.

Unfortunately I've found that no single search engine does a particularly good job anymore. I end up searching in Duck Duck Go, Google, and even Bing of all things because they all do a crap job of returning good results now.

I suppose if altavista.digital.com was still working I'd try it too.

It should change slightly, I think. It should now include questions to filter out idiots who believe what this Anthropic loon just stated.

I always thought that coding questions during interviews were stupid anyways even before AI: it's information that one can simply look up with a simple internet search or programming book.

If you could learn to code with one simple internet search and having one book on your shelf, then you'd be right. Also, ha it occurred to you that you've been asking the wrong questions?

The only reason to ask programming questions is to figure out if the person was "fibbing" on their resume about their skills.

Kinda. That's the point of an audition. A substantial number of programmers can't write a simple program in a language of their choice or read existing code they're not already familiar with. I know there are companies that hoover up loads of mediocre people and they just kind of grind doing tiny amounts. And I'm pretty sure some people can only code by randomly permuting code in an existing codebase and seeing what happens.

Plus it shows absolutely nothing about their interpersonal skills, which are as important to be a valued member of a development team.

Gosh it's almost lie you can ask two interview questions or even 3! You don't need to ask a single question than answer every topic.

well, their chips are coming out of a foundry after all...

Not sure about the assembly of small electronics. It looks like that's still a fairly hands-on, manual process.

One of the barriers to automating the assembly of commodity microelectronics is that the revisions iterate fairly quickly. It's difficult to build an automated assembly line that can handle those changes. It usually just ends up being easier to have a person do that assembly work if the product is going to change in a few months and it would take a couple of months to retool for the change.

A broken clock might be right a couple of times a day.

Unless of course someone rips the hands off. Or if it's a digital clock that simply doesn't display anything. Or probably for a bunch of other possible reasons.

MTBF calculations are a bit of a scam in of themselves.

...is normally preferred with a good, crisp apple.

actually they rise because lowest 20% welding jobs are done by ignorant people just sputtering snot with chinese MIG kit.

Hey that sounds like my welding!

It's amazing how few programmers are willing to use a profiler, even if you show them how and why.

Yep. I think it's flat out arrogance often. I KNOW why things are slow.

Oops, that was Google, it turn out.

Amazon (the .com version) just chopped down 250,000 trees (illegally) in Finland, so the /. headline just kinda caught me as ironic timing.

But even Trillion dollar companies like Meta essentially freeload off the likes of Php where a contribution in the low millions or tens of millions works help bend development to their liking,

Even less: clearly most of these companies don't particularly want to influence the directions (they could hire the devs if they really wanted to). They're jut content to use them. If they chucked, say, 10 grand a year at a handful of projects, the problem would be solved.

But I guess companies are now meeting their doing good quota

It's not even doing good, it ought to be pure, bloody minded self interest. The cost of things like the PHP exploit, heartbleed and so on are absolutely immense. Investing a small amount in the future i jut good business. Trouble it it needs everyone to do it to make it so cheap they don't notice.