It holds up in some cases, not in others, and calculating an average muddles that.

Personally, I use AI coding assists for two purposes quite successfully: a) more intelligent auto-complete and b) writing a piece of code using a common, well understood algorithm (i.e. lots of sources the AI could learn from) in the specific programming language or setup that I need.

It turns out that it is much faster and almost as reliable to have the AI do that then finding a few examples on github and stackoverflow, checking which ones are actually decent, and translating them myself.

Anything more complex than that and it starts being a coin toss. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's a waste of time. So I've stopped doing that because coding it myself is faster and the result better than babysitting an AI.

And when you need to optimize for a specific parameter - speed, memory, etc. - you can just about forget AI.

Hey, industry, I've got an idea: If you need specific, recent, skills (especially in the framework-of-the-month class), how about you train people in them?

That used to be the norm. Companies would hire apprentices, train them in the exact skills needed, then at the end hire them as proper employees. These days, though, the training part is outsourced to the education system. And that's just dumb in so many ways.

Universities should not train the flavour of the moment. Because by the time people graduate, that may have already shifted elsewhere. Universities train the basics and the thinking needed to grow into nearby fields. Yes, thinking is a skill that can be trained.

Case in point: When I was in university, there was one short course on cybersecurity. And yet that's been my profession for over two decades now. There were zero courses on AI. And yet there are whitepapers on AI with me as a co-author. And of the seven programming languages I learnt in university, I haven't used even one of them ever professionally and only one privately (C, of course. You can never go wrong learning C. If you have a university diploma in computer science and they didn't teach you C, demand your money back). Ok, if you count SQL as a programming language, it's eight and I did use that professionally a few times. But I consider none of them a waste of time. Ok, Haskell maybe. The actual skill acquired was "programming", not a particular language.

Should universities teach about AI? Yes, I think so. Should they teach how to prompt engineer for ChatGPT 4? Totally not. That'll be obsolete before they even graduate.

So if your company needs people who have a specific AI-related skill (like prompt engineering) and know a specific AI tool or model - find them or train them. Don't demand that other people train them for you.

FFS, we complain about freeloaders everywhere, but the industry has become a cesspool of freeloaders these days.

The number of people isn't the problem here.

The "started every" is.

How did they not catch that during development and found a solution? I mean, the meme's where a TV ad starts Alexa and orders 10 large pizzas are a decade old now.

That's no moon. It's a space station. :-D

Having control is very different from allowing a third-party company to send down arbitrary definitions at any time that suddenly render arbitrary software nonfunctional. The whole concept of Crowdstrike can be summarized as "McAfee Antivirus on steroids". I mean, this sums it up.

This. The "someone says 'Hey Siri/Okay Google' on TV/radio/loudspeaker" problem is a well-known failure mode, and if they don't have reasonable mitigation in place by now, they don't know what they're doing, and their product shouldn't be taken seriously. Whether that mitigation is blocking it during meetings, doing handshaking to limit commands to the nearest device when multiple nearby devices detect the hot word at exactly the same time, making it recognize your voice and not other random people's voices, or any of dozens of other strategies for coping, having some mechanism in place to handle this should be considered a base requirement for any voice-based assistant.

As a maintenance programmer for most of my career, non-reproducible builds were the bane of my existence. Object files with embedded time stamps and source paths, changes in link order, which module got done compiling first when doing multiple modules in parallel... Hell, even uninitialized padding bytes to align to word boundaries could change from build to build. We were using C and gcc, so it might be fair to say that was our problem. I'm not even sure it's possible for that toolchain to produce identical binaries every time for any non-trivial project.

Shouldn't that make Windows unacceptable? /s

It is possible for Microsoft to do both, you know.

• OEM version: Requires a higher minimum level of hardware support for a premium experience
• Retail version (more expensive): Supports a wider range of hardware to the extent that it can

Then they just have to make sure the price difference is high enough to destroy any profit benefit from cutting corners on the hardware.

Yeah, as if we needed any more reason to consider this bloated "security" software to be malware. I really don't understand why anyone in their right minds would install it or allow it to be installed on their systems. Giving some third-party company complete control over what software can run on your machines basically screams "I don't understand anything about security" better any almost anything else you could possibly do as a system administrator, IMO, short of posting the shared-across-all-machines root password on USENET.

https://www.hvk.org/2022/0422/...

too lazy to research?

....25y in the US. B.Tech from a NIT, India + M.S. from top 5 US tech/CS school.

200K is easy money in the SFO Silicon Valley. Though hard earned (oncall/DevOps).

pardon typos, need glasses

We tend to be centrist, and are used to a multiparty system. We also assimilate tend to assimilate well enough to do what (we think) is best for the country practically at the time, rather than be overly biased.

Case in point: I supported Obama back then. Postt Biden, I thought Trmp would be a better choice for the American economy.

... 25y in the USA, I support this.

A country's government exists for the benefit of its citizens.