Is that really a bad thing? There are certainly plenty of examples of old things that suck; either because genuine improvements became available after they had already solidified or because they were always broken and are now running purely on denial-fueled risk tolerance; but, in principle, it seems like it should be a bad thing that age is seen as a bad thing. Especially when software is more like math than like civil engineering in terms of the tendency of its materials toward corrosion, embrittlement, and fatigue. (and when so many 'modernization' projects turn into expensive failures or go way behind schedule and over budget to eventually death march toward feature parity, sometimes even achieving it in time to be declared legacy themselves.)

I'm not calling for a crusade against 'fast fashion' software; if people want to bang out an app on the fast and cheap to catch the moment when people care they can do that; fine, whatever; but it seems like software built on real long term service timescales should get a lot more credit than it does. Absent specific criticisms; it's not "eww, there are people who weren't even born then", it's "the software has been in service for a generation".

All the more if there are a lot of outfits doing the same thing: having some unique oddball legacy thing means having potentially crushing maintenance requirements unless everything was gloriously secure from day 1, which it probably wasn't; but if there is some big mass of enterprise Java 8 why should we call it all eol and scramble rather than just maintaining java 8? Especially when we can do so in software, without some of the vendor and hardware inflexibility you see with things like old school mainframe applications where there's an implied commitment to a single old school mainframe vendor in perpetuity.

It's not elegant; but realistically we are far enough both into the history of computer science and the history of computers-as-hardware-you-can-buy that there's a lot less obvious, low-hanging, progress to be had by going 'modern' relative to the amount of fashion and fad chasing. Especially if (as is the case for a great many people and organizations) the scale of your problem has grown at or below the rate at which hardware advances have made systems not particularly well designed for scalability faster.

Obviously this would require coordinated action, and some people likely have other reasons to want to either poke at or kill legacy applications; but(since all those java versions are solidly post openjdk) I'd be very curious to know how the cost and risk associated with "modernize because java 18 is going eol!" would compare to just...not...having java 18 go eol. Unsexy maintenance project that you'd need to pay to have done, sure; but very plausibly better characterized and lower risk than trying to deal with a lot of the oddball internal accretions that would otherwise need updating; and, depending on how much people have running on java 18, certainly possible that they'll individually spend a fair bit more running the treadmill than it would cost to just keep kicking java 18 down the road until (almost) nobody cares.

My response was specifically to the original poster who, for some reason, was taking a "we are losing the class wars; breed faster!" position rather than the "if you are already losing the class war why would you even think about putting in that much effort and cost so your children can deal with a bad or worse outcome?" position.

It would honestly not surprise me if that is a nontrivial contributing factor: If you aren't emotionally invested in children as an end in themselves the wage and cost of living numbers have done very little to encourage you to see them as affordable since roughly the late 70s(with a combination of substantial stagnation for anyone who is primarily wages rather than capital gains; and such good news as there is mostly confined to people who complete at least undergraduate education and remain in a career track full time) and people who are emotionally invested in children are often willing to go to considerable lengths to try to improve their children's outcomes; but are presumably discouraged by the prospect that they will most likely be downwardly mobile instead.

It's not a surprise that people who want labor, cannon fodder, or taxpayers to be abundant for them are fretting about it; but it's hard to see why most of us should care. Why do things that are good for society when society is pretty overtly disinterested in being good for you? You may be able to squeeze the current labor market a bit; because people who already exist tend to take the "or starve" possibility pretty seriously when deciding what they will put up with; but if you offer nothing but the demand for a toiling underclass to encourage people to have children that's not terribly compelling, either for those who aren't interested in sacrificing for children and see hitting education and career hard as increasingly existential or for people who would sacrifice a lot to better things for their children but are more or less accurate in seeing it as highly unlikely that they will be able to.

I'm rather doubtful of the plan's viability; but if they are willing to justify the company name by chaining Bezos to a rock so a bird can eat his liver repeatedly I could be persuaded.

The Games and Entertainment division has always been a loss for Microsoft. Long before AI came along it was supported by the more profitable divisions (OS and Applications). It's the same story over at Sony with the Playstation losing money and being funded by more profitable things.

It's just after 25 years of making a loss, the M$ management aren't seeing any benefit from it.

Florida Man has done almost anything but he ain't stolen no kids.

Algorithms also assume that people know what they're doing and will act rationally. If anyone thinks people drive this way they are clearly not paying attention to the roads.

Every traffic jam starts with just one arsehole, just one who thinks they're different, special, above it all. One arsehole who decides that 30 is fast enough for everyone. One arsehole who sits on the phone, One arsehole who cuts people up, straddles two lanes, doesn't proceed at a green light. One arsehole who thinks the rules don't apply to him (and only him) and refuses to fit into traffic.

The kicker is, there are a lot more than just one arsehole on the roads.

And don't think that autonomous cars will save us, first off, they'll never work in our lifetimes but ignoring that they will be programmed to follow the rules to the letter (not the least important reason is to ensure the manufacture is as indemnified as possible from any blame), they will wait for a large enough gap, they will ignore faster moving lanes, they will wait for intersections to be clear, they won't speed... So the arsehole will decide that they know how to drive better because they will force their way into traffic, tailgate, so on and so forth.

I'm not sure what confuses you here: everybody has an EoL, age related if nothing else, and they don't live on either through their class or their descendants. What do you gain by throwing more poor bastards into a sucker's game when you could just not?

Yeah, it's ultimately a matter of taste and what becomes economically and strategically feasible; but I figured that there is at least a conceptual distinction between weapons that are better at being obedient(basically any attempt at stable aerodynamics on the low end up to electromechanical gyroscopic stuff, to TERCOM and GNSS guidance; but you specify where you want it to go and the guidance system attempts to minimize or counteract outside influences), weapons that can independently follow a very specific instruction(at least the simpler acoustic and IR seekers where you need to point them toward a particular loud/bright object but they can compensate for it moving, to a degree); and finally the ones that can take fairly generalized instructions of the "anything that looks like a target in this area" flavor; which seemed like the best candidates for 'autonomous'.

Film at 11:00.

Throw in a decline in the use/abuse of alcohol, and you've got declining fertility, which should surprise nobody. :)

I realize that it's a better hype piece if we assume that the 157000 'agents' are fancy chatbots; but this is just an HTTP API; on what basis are they distinguishing between 'agents' in the currently trendy sense and someone's little script around cURL or whatever?

I was going to say something similar. AI companies today are cash furnaces. The kicker is the data center spend will never decrease due to the need for complete replacement every few years. (Mark Cuban said they are "shitting money at scale"). The only way they get profitable is to increase end user cost by an order of magnitude. That just won't fly. Look at any new paradigm shifting technology - first generation companies are never successful. It's the 2nd or 3rd generation companies 15-20 years from now that will provide amazing products and services we haven't even dreamed up, that are built on the carcasses of 1st gen companies.. Those will be wildly successful.

Remember when we used to mock this?
It's still mock-worthy...

I, for one, completely trust this objective and disinterested report from a company that has no stake in the ease of ramming datacenter approvals through.

As one economist I read long ago wrote, business is very expensive without trust (e.g. that you can trust your long copper telephone lines used to communicate or long electric lines used to power your business will not be stolen when just sitting there unguarded). A big cost of theft or vandalism or murder (what war is essentially about) is not just the act itself but all the locks and other deterrents (including guards) people then put in to reduce such acts. Powerful tools of abundance like robots, if misused for theft or vandalism or murder, then can increase costs for everyone as an arms race.

That's implicit in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

And I feel our best hope to avoid high-tech-created disasters is to learn to laugh at that irony. :-)

As I wrote in elaboration on that in 2010: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism" https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
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Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ...

There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...

The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance [otherwise they would not be so powerful]. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.

We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ...

Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. ...
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