From a 1960s comedy:

Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"

Virgil: "Yes, I have."

Interviewer: "Where?"

Virgil: "My aunt has one."

It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.

I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?

In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.

Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.

The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.

Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).

All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.

Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.

If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.

I had a month long probationary period when I started my software engineering job in Holland. European employers are extremely paranoid about hiring people because of the strong employee protections. I had a year long contract. That meant that after my probationary period, I could have called in sick every day for the rest of that year and they would legally be bound to pay me.

Probationary periods work for software engineers. A month is plenty long to tell if an engineer can perform or not.

searches made through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search

Have you thought about disabling AI Mode and returning customers to traditional search? It'll not only make you more money, but result in happier users too. Everyone-except-Nvidia wins.

The majority of interviewers pick their favorite algorithm from the data structures class. The stereotypical question is some variation of a graph problem that damn near no one uses professionally. So, the most senior of engineers haven't dealt with it in 10-30 years unless they grind Leetcode. That gives the advantage to the junior engineer fresh out of university who studied it in depth just a couple years ago. Giving advantages to junior engineers in your hiring process isn't how you get the best people.

Further, most interviewers tend to care primarily that the candidate solves the problem in the time allotted. That used to mean writing pseudo code on a white board. Today, that means writing code that compiles, runs, and passes all the tests, including the hidden tests. If a candidate doesn't actually solve the problem, no one cares about the structure of his solution. Any time spent understanding and structuring the solution is wasted.

Secondary consideration is provided to all the traits you listed: decomposing problems, abstraction, structure. Good luck getting an accurate read on all that given the limitations of an interview. Your candidate is working in a high-pressure, high-stress, time-limited situation that's completely artificial and alien to most developers who nearly always have access to their IDE, the internet, and now AI.

You've made a completely artificial situation and think you get genuine results? The thought is laughable. Well, except that you're likely not hiring good candidates due to some BS interview process.

Let me spell it out very plainly because you don’t get it. It’s my car. It’s my battery. When I plug it into the wall, I expect the charge in my car to go up, not down. That battery is part of my car that I need to use to drive around town. At no point do I want the electric company to commandeer the power in my car to reduce my range.

MF’ers need to stop using my car, my battery, and my electricity like their own personal infrastructure they can control as they prefer.

I plug my car into the wall in order to charge it and increase range. At no point do I want to supply power back to the house and decrease my car's range. That defeats the purpose of having a car: to be able to drive around.

Cars are not meant to be temporary batteries to supplement the power from the electric company.

Remember when we were all techno-optimists who thought we would end up with 401Ms and even 401Gs? We're as dumb as the flying-car believers.

He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.

I put off going to Star Trek conventions for years. I always assumed I could go in the future and see all these people who played my favorite characters. The death of Nichelle Nichols finally made me realize that if I ever wanted to see these people while they were alive, I needed to finally do it. I finally went to my first convention in 2024. I saw Koenig, Shatner, and the crews of the other shows. It was fantastic.

I am sad I didn't go earlier when I could have also seen Nichols, Nimoy, Kelley, and Doohan. I wish I realized much earlier that they had a limited time left for me to see them myself.

Point being: if you want to see these folks who played characters you loved, don't wait! We all have a limited amount of time on Earth. If it's important to you to sit in the same room, breathe the same air, and listen to their stories in person, then do it now. Don't put it off to later.

Sort work by priority. With or without AI, the high priority, high impact work gets done. The ability to use AI and code fast means that teams can now also address the low priority work that has low impact... Big whoop. Companies are increasingly learning AI isn't worth the extraordinary cost.

The whole point of a login system is to authenticate users and enforce access controls. When someone enters valid credentials and the system grants access, that is meaningful evidence that the system recognizes their access rights. You can't simply dismiss that fact and insist that access was unauthorized without explaining what authorization was missing.

Of course, a successful login doesn't grant unlimited privileges. Systems can restrict access to specific files, databases, or functions. But there is a difference between being denied access by the system and being accused of misusing access the system actually granted.

The Supreme Court recognized this distinction in Van Buren v. United States (2021). It ruled that using authorized access for an improper purpose does not, by itself, violate the CFAA's “exceeds authorized access” provision.

The burden is to establish what access was prohibited and how the person crossed that boundary. It's not enough to assert that permission was absent despite the system accepting their credentials.

I'm sorry, I don't buy this story from the police agencies that these guys didn't have permission. If you can log into a system, then you have permission to access that system. That's the whole point of the login process: to determine who can authenticate and authorize usage of a system.

If police agencies wanted to remove permission, then they should have blocked their former users' credentials from accessing the system. This nonsense argument shifts the blame from the agencies mismanaging their users to the individual users who should have been disabled and not allowed to access this information in the first place!

This part of the story seems intended to excuse the sloppy security of police agencies.

That’s fine if they’re charging less than a hotel. Problem is that they now want to charge more than a hotel. Then they add a cleaning charge. They’ve priced themselves as more expensive than the hotels while handing guests a chore sheet. That’s ridiculous.

Yes, it’s galling to get charged a cleaning fee after washing dishes, drying them, putting them away, washing the bedding and towels, folding the towels, making the bed, taking the trash to the can, taking the can to the curb, sweeping and mopping the floor, vacuuming, etc.

The truly galling thing is that the list of chores existed for the guest in the first place.

Airbnb competes with hotels. A hotel will send a person to your room every day to replace your towels, make your bed, tidy the room, refill your toilet paper, and take out the trash. They do it automatically as part of the cost of renting the room. No extra cleaning fee involved.

Airbnb charges you the same or more than a hotel. And, that comes with a list of chores.

Yes, they may also charge you a cleaning fee on top of the list of chores, which is extra insulting. But, the real problem was the owners expecting the renters to perform chores when they’re supposed to be a guest.

A hotel cleans up after its guests. They happily come to your room every day and make the bed, take out the trash, and tidy up the place. Airbnb competes against hotels. Airbnb units are just as expensive as full service hotels. But, those units have also been requiring guests to wash dishes, wash bedding, remake the bed, sweep floors, take the trash to the can, take the can to the curb, etc. Hotels take care of you while you get a list of chores at Airbnb. It’s clear that hotels offer a better experience today. Airbnb isn’t worth the money and hassle.

That’s all true outside the US as it is inside. There’s nothing uniquely terrible about America or Americans regarding this topic.