Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Age (Score 1) 57

I haven't seen much if any slow-down as I age, and I'm 60. What I have seen is that I spend more time thinking so I write less code to get the same result and need to do less debugging to get it working correctly. I also have a bigger library of code I can use without having to write it all from scratch so again I end up writing less code. This last is especially true for tests, and I already know the corner cases and odd cases out that many of my co-workers don't even realize need tested. But the correct measurement isn't "How much code do you write and how quickly?" but "How much time and effort does it take for you to get the functionality production-ready?". There I (and my managers) can see a clear difference between those who do it fast vs. right.

Comment Re:Can't trust dev estimates (Score 1) 57

One would think, right? Yet there's a constant stream of "new" done-to-death games in the Play Store that exist solely to appear at the top of the listings (because they're newer) and attract clicks to the ads in them. The people who write those games absolutely would use AI to do it if it'd let them do it faster, and we'd see that in the number of new releases (those lists don't care about how substantial the software is). It'd also make it less boring to create Yet Another X Clone. So, as Mike asks, where is the uptick in the number of these titles?

Comment Can't trust dev estimates (Score 4, Interesting) 57

The problem with this survey is we can't trust developer estimates of how long it took them or how much time they saved. The METR report and Mike Judge's write-up show that quite clearly. Talk to me when Fastly includes actual timings of how long developers actually took to do the job with AI vs. without showing a statistically significant difference.

Comment What does it do? (Score 5, Insightful) 92

What exactly does Agility's robot do that can't be done just as easily by a fixed robotic arm with an attachment to grab and hold the baskets? The fixed arm would be cheaper and wouldn't have battery-life issues, and probably would require less maintenance (fewer moving parts). This sounds like a solution in search of a problem.

Comment It won't survive (Score 2) 80

Long-term, societies based on a shared ideology don't survive. Whether because of immigration or children just not agreeing with their parents' ideology, they quickly end up with a population that doesn't share a single ideology. Then either the society learns how to deal with sharing territory but not ideology, or it kicks the non-conformers out and dies as it can't replace it's population, or it turns into a police state/cult compound. That last one doesn't end well either unless it starts out the size of a small country and manages to avoid being inside the jurisdiction of another country.

When the society is being founded by grifters and con artists, implosion's going to happen even faster.

Comment The point went right over their heads again (Score 2) 72

This is probably the worst approach they could take. The biggest problem with AI and mental health is the AI encouraging the user to harm THEMSELVES, not others. The vendors need to detect when that's happening and disconnect the user from the AI until they seek help, or alter the AI to not take users down those paths in the first place. But they'll never do that.

Comment Jurisdictional question. (Score 2) 67

This is where we really ought to look into the state of jurisdiction regarding businesses who are not located in a state, do not have offices in a state and do not target users in that state. This has come up before when it comes to taxes and other state laws, and I'm pretty sure it's ended up with binding rulings at the Federal Appeals Court level if not the Supreme Court level.

Comment Re:no (Score 1) 147

  • "action item" = "need to do"
  • "offline" = "later"

Those cover the meanings exactly or at least exactly enough that the alternatives don't change the intended meaning. By contrast, "starboard" and "port" are used because "right" and "left" are ambiguous, are they "my X", "your X" or "ship's X"? "dorsal" and "ventral" come from Latin terms used in science, there are equivalent terms in ordinary English but using the Latin allows distinguishing between casual references and technical ones ("dorsal" means different directions depending on the organism's neural tube).

A good rule of thumb is that if you use terminology when speaking to someone not in that terminology's field and expect them to understand it, it's not jargon.

Comment Better yet, don't use buzzwords. (Score 3, Insightful) 147

"Let's touch base offline to align our bandwidth on this workflow." isn't jargon, it's buzzwords. It just translates to "Let's meet after this and make sure you understand how I want that to work.". Just use the ordinary English instead of the buzzwords. A lot of the "confusion" is probably the employees thinking "Just speak English, dumbass.".

Jargon has specific meanings that can't be quickly expressed in plain English. "hack" vs. "kludge" for example. Both have implications beyond the basic "solution to a problem" that take several sentences in English to state clearly but represent things you need to identify often enough that you can't readily spell it out in full every single time. Others, like "mis-bug" (as in "This is a mis-bug, clarify the code and docs so someone doesn't accidentally fix it.") are jargon but the plain English terms are simple enough you ought to use them most of the time.

Comment Re:I remember when.... (Score 1) 158

One big difference, though: when you had to wait in line it was because there were so many people wanting tickets. In this case there's 5 people at the head of the line and each one bought thousands of tickets so there's none left for anyone else. Then they turned around and started selling to everyone else at 100x the price. If not for them, everyone else WOULD HAVE been able to get tickets at the regular price. Completely different situations.

Comment That's because the workplace counter-trains people (Score 5, Informative) 151

The abysmal results are because every workplace trains people to fall for phishing scams. That change in vacation policy? The real, legitimate notification of it will be in an email from an external bulk-mailing service telling employees to click on the link included. There's nothing in it to distinguish it from a phishing attempt, and employees are supposed to trust it.

Progress is going to require workplaces, schools etc. to:

  1. Send official mail from an internal address, not through any external service.
  2. Have all email cryptographically signed and email clients are set up to automatically verify signatures.
  3. Have information users need to know delivered through the organization's intranet site, with users directed to log in to that and check notifications for more information.

Comment An insoluble problem (Score 5, Interesting) 137

The problem is that for the studios behind the streaming services, the money isn't in the media itself. It's all in the subscription fees and advertising revenue and the ability to collect and mine data about the viewers. None of those things are available unless the viewers go to the studio's streaming service. Ironically, the things that would stop piracy in it's tracks are the very things the studios and streaming services can't afford to do because it'd bankrupt them.

Comment Not a bug (Score 2) 61

They'll have a hard time "fixing" this because it's not a bug. It's not even a feature. It's an inherent part of the design and it's working exactly as intended. And since it stems from the basic requirements, fixing it's going to require coming up with new requirements and developing a new design from there. Good luck with that considering the number of parties whose own requirements include "Must NOT follow those new requirements.".

Slashdot Top Deals

"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell

Working...