Texas has plenty of wind and sunshine.

They should be installing wind turbines in the Panhandle and solar panels in the Trans-Pecos region.

Someone should explain supply and demand to Governor Abbott.

No matter what the humidity, at 42.5 degrees you are cooked. It's only going to get worse too.

Apple will keep jacking up prices too, due to AI taking all the RAM and flash.

But isn't this a massive upheaval and cost for you? Switching from managing Chromebooks to Macbooks, switching software suites, dealing with all the different IT problems that arise from MacOS etc?

Exactly - And there is the interesting part. The typical angry response does not allow for any deviation from the idea that people who work from home are the most competent, most productive employees who will have the world beating a path to their door.

Yes this is true. There are of course some good remote jobs, but not enough. The first part is obviously true. So why not the second part? Well it must be an army of incompetents and quislings like you and I not just standing in their way but actively fighting them.

Certainly some people do work better alone.

It's certainly true that some people can work better alone. And it's also true that some people can figure out what the right thing to work on better alone. The intersection isn't close to 100% though, and I think quite a lot of people can end up working effectively on a task that's not especially important. It's the useless interruptions which can let you know what the important problems are.

Another thing is despite what appears to be the norm on Slashdot, most people need a bit of actual humanity around them. Or perhaps most people are cowed into silence by their histrionics if some dares to disagree. But humans are by and large social creatures. Introversion is not the norm. Nothing wrong with introversion, but there seems to be a conscious effort to force on others these days.

Also introversion isn't absolute in most people.

Finally, a person who wants to slack off ie, a lazy person - will have a marked tendency to love WFH. Just sayin'!

Yeah, and not just that. I've noticed a tendency among a certain sort of programmer to also convince themselves that say upgrading from yesterday's must have web framework to today's must have web framework (while incidentally learning all about today's must have web framework) is really really really important actually so guess what gets done on the WFH days? The big boss is in an idiot you see and doesn't understand the pressing need to update a working, relatively bug free and lightly used end point. So they might be working effectively in as much as writing company code, but not usefully.

Also slackers. Slackers love WFH.

Yes, some people have the need to make shit up

This comes back to your first point about the presumed superiority. Providing counterexamples attacks their presumed superiority so it is equivalent ot a deeply personal attack. So you get the kind of response as if you've insulted their mum or whatever.

That hasn't been my experience

No one EVER replies as quickly by text (I'm guilty too). The in person-ness does some effective filtering. Person not there? Well, wait. Person busy? You may be able to judge if your needs are higher priority and they better be if you interrupt. Every text system I've had always gets a high proportion of near spam which necessitates mental filtering which stop instant responses often.

What you describe sounds a little like that.

Yeah could be. I wouldn't class myself as either introvert or extrovert. I can do and enjoy people stuff but it does completely knacker me after a while.

Observing that some people aren't responsible enough to work without someone breathing down their neck is a wildly different claim than saying the work itself couldn't be done remotely.

I don't think it's that simple. Sure, if you're talking about physical possibilities for single instances. But those aren't anything other than a bound because you have to have people to do the tasks. Once you've got low to mid skill people in a dull, dead end job, you have a problem. For certain kinds of job, I reckon it becomes more or less impossible to motivate the majority of people who will actually do the job.

At that point what does it matter if someone could in theory do it remotely?

won't happen. In the US our "representatives" are owned by the corporations.

No, I mean because I care about Slashdot and having an interesting, insightful debate here. I know, I'm expected too much, but it happens sometimes.

We are going through a transition where these tools are just becoming available and a massive number of bugs are being fixed, but in future they will be standard for software developers as part of the QA process.

I fully agree, but I do think this might actually be an improvement for customers, at least in some cases.

I've been talking to some AI chatbots for a couple of companies I have been dealing with, to get stuff sorted out. They are much better than multiple choice menus or the old dumb chatbots that just scan for keywords and then print out an FAQ entry. I don't need to guess the special magic words to make them do what I want, and if they are doing down slightly the wrong path I can correct them.

The ones I have used hand off to a human when necessary. I'm sure that will get enshittified, but at least for now I find they are more reliable at either resolving the issue for me, or at least getting the right information to the right people to get it resolved.

I don't have a side here. I use both Windows and Linux. Windows pisses me off, Linux pisses me off.

What I care about is how it's hard to have an honest conversation about any of this stuff without it becoming a Microsoft hate-fest or ridiculous assumptions about open source being somehow inherently more secure.

Yeah, I know, no EV will ever work for you, you simply must emit CO2 and dump pollution into other people's lungs, 6 minutes and saving time by not going for petrol is just something you can't abide. Give you convenience or give you death.

Yeah, I'm asking which model of Ioniq have 6 seats? I thought they were all 5, so maybe your definition of a seat is different and actually there are a lot more cars that fit your needs.

Anyway, no charging at all on a day trip... Well, 6 hours of driving and 6 minutes of charging seems reasonable to me. I'd have filled up a fossil car too, maybe the day before and again after or something, which would doubtless have cost me more than 6 minutes total time. Not that it cost me any time because I needed to pee anyway.

You have to be realistic, not just arbitrarily set the bar slightly above where you think EVs are today.

My original statement, just a statement without anything incendiary in it, has ignited a firestorm of profanity, personal insults and general anger. Because people disagree with me, their rage is somehow appropriate.

I have encountered much the same. I think on a previous thread I stated that I tried WFH, hated it and even though I was a solo contractor, paid for a desk in a co-working office so I could be out of the house and have other people to talk to, and that actually proved incredibly and let to me doing a startup (didn't work out but that's another story).

Yo wouldn't believe (well hyperbole, obviously you would) the batshit insane things people here were saying to me, such as I'm a shit manager and a worthless employee who leans on other people's work and steals credit because what other possible reason could there be to be in work?

I am honestly not sure what part of "independent contractor in a co-working space" they didn't understand.

But it's this incredibly blinkered view that WFH is GOOD and RIGHT and anyone who has any alternative experience or opinion is (a) out to get them (b) stupid and (c) evil. All for the crime of being a human with only very mild introversion (I like and need socialising, but too much is draining and I need quiet focus time too).

But maybe it's this too:

Maybe it makes them feel better living in a world where competence is inversely proportional to ones place on the food chain.

The LLM thing comes up in a lot of "switch to Linux challenge" scenarios. The issue is that a lot of the Linux community is sadly very toxic. Someone says they want to use X, and the response they get is "why? Just use Y instead". They google an error message and get an out of date Reddit thread where the copy/paste solution bricks their OS (happened to Linus of LTT a couple of years ago).

LLMs try to be helpful and sift through all the outdated forum posts for you. They make using Linux a lot more pleasant and, ironically, human.

With Windows having enshittified, while Linux isn't perfect it does at least feel like some distros are trying to do the right thing, and aren't outright hostile to the user.

but we now know virtually all white collar work can effectively be done remotely;

Do we know that? I sometimes have to interact with some particular people in a non IT white collar profession. They ain't good at replying to emails and so I phone them yet "lunch break" now seem to extend from about 11 to 3. Those fuckers need to be back in an office with someone actually watching over their shoulder so that they are actually at their desk and actually answer the phone if it rings. Oh and I only ever have to call because of paperwork that hasn't been done for too long.