I was weaned on a TRS-80 Model 1 in Junior High (we fought over who got to use the 16k model IIs!). I saved money for 6 months to get an Atari 400 but at the rate I was going it was going to be another 6 months before I could buy it. In the meantime my dad had a buddy at work who had a Challenger 1P from Ohio Scientific that I could get right now and did. I suspect his buddy was trying to dump it because there was practically zero software for it as I quickly learned. So no fancy games (aside from the ones I keyed in) and no color. OTOH I probably learned a LOT more about computing and electronics than I would've. I kept trying to load a larger game into the 8K of memory which should've worked but the computer kept crashing the computer while loading. Got curious one day and opened the thing up and discovered that whomever did the memory upgrade had inserted one of the ram chips so that one leg hadn't gone in! Reinserted it, tried loading the game and voila. Probably my first case of debugging something!

While it's not mandatory at my company (which is fairly large) AI is strongly encouraged to be used by all employees of any job. My team is tracking our AI usage of a particular type to see how useful it is. Team leads have integrated AI into their workflows with PR reviews, generating meeting agendas, let alone code production. All because of a giant top down push for AI, AI, AI.

And, of course, the company is now providing "AI" products. (thanks Steve)

Is it any wonder that a poll finds AI use has increased when it's being demanded to be used by CEOs and CTOs alike and people are being fired over it?

In all my years as an engineer, I've never seen this kind of ramrodded adoption and supercharged spending of an unproven technology/process simply so they can get on the bandwagon. Yes, I use it for unit test generations and function generation. But I'm no longer gaining skillz about minutae in mocking for unit tests and while I can let the AI generate modern code syntax, like current C++ syntax or the latest Java syntax, I'm not "learning" it. I'm just having the AI generate the code, reading up on the routine and going "oh, that looks right" but it's not working its way into my inner thought processes.

Maybe I'm just an old man yelling at clouds but while it's cool to get the AI to do your homework for you (In a very talk to the Star Trek computer way) we're moving the ability to craft code, especially for younger programmers, further away. Although maybe this is just another argument of going from machine language to assembly to high level languages... (but even then I think some of those arguments were valid, though in the age of cloud computing and virtual computers... coding to the metal is a lost art unless you're an embedded programmer)

Sure, most people can probably get their photo editing/touch ups done with a simple AI tool. But letting AI help you fill out your taxes?! Unless people are using TurboTax to fill out their 1040EZ forms (and dear God, I hope not) it's hubris to let AI do their taxes with the complexity of the tax code, let alone the HUMAN interaction of the IRS shifting rules interpretation at whim.

Somebody can train an AI engine solely on tax code and offer that as a solution. But then you have something like TurboTax AI where the company is still liable for what it's AI does and that's still, last I checked, software as a service. Just going to Google and say "Do my taxes" is just asking for trouble.

Is there nothing it can't do...

Pizza Hut has degraded its food quality so badly that its barely edible. Growing up and in college that was my pizza of choice but after not having pizza from them in over 5 years I decided over Christmas to try it again as "maybe it got better?". No. It was still the same tasteless, oversalty, slop they've been pushing for years.
Likewise for Papa Johns which continues to lower their pizza quality to cut costs which I'm sure their CFO here is well aware of and approved.

The problem isn't just pizza though, all the big restaurant chains are following the same MBA approved march to death.

Mexican restaurants are doing well because they're mostly mom and pop shops actually COOKING their food and not relaying processed garbage.

I have long ago moved my personal folders OUT of the stock provided directories (photos, documents, etc), initially out of convenience as I had a D: drive and wanted to keep stuff there rather than on the OS drive, but more recently it's been advantageous to stop MS from snooping around and trying to auto index my content for personal reasons or even auto-move it to OneDrive.

The most irritating thing about this is the repeated advertisements on the start bar that I can't block (Hey! LIssen! Time to backup to OneDrive! Oh, you don't have enough free space on OneDrive! You should rent more storage space!) and moving the OneDrive directories to the top of the File Explorer.

And Pamela Hensley...

Senators have been "democratizing" projects like football stadiums and "public works" projects they want for years. Now that they can get some political grift out of it they suddenly have a problem with it..

Yeah, using Intellij via Amazon Q. In "theory" it should've been on the same context but maybe there's some quirk somewhere.

There was a separate time where I had a really complex test, same code, that required merging 4 different data sets into a unified data set. I generated the 4 different test sets from real world data then gave the prompt about generating a test for the merge using these 4 different data samples and... it, first time, made a proper test with mocks that read the files at the appropriate time and then verified that the returned, merged result was correct.

It's just wild that that complex unit test was 100% on the first try but simpler tests went off into the woods. But, like I said, that's been my experience with AI, so far.

I'm not sure that's true, at least for Claude Sonnet 4.5. In the same chat I had it write up some unit tests that exercised a function and verified that certain external libraries were called via mock. It wrote up the tests and they looked good but the mock syntax was incorrect. So, in the same chat, I pointed out the error and asked it to fix the syntax issues. It churned for a few minutes and couldn't figure out how to resolve the issue so it decided the best solution was to simplify the test... which it did... and removed all the mock verification that the external libraries were called! So I pointed out that the test looked good but still had to verify that external libraries were called via mock. To which it responded, yes I can do that - and proceeded to generate a wholly different set of mocks, perfectly.

That's been my experience overall so far. Sometimes the AI gives a bang-on solution and code and sometimes it just flails about. I'm sure part of that is how I'm prompting but even then the AI seems to respond differently even if I phrase/word instructions in a similar fashion.

Ya gotta go all Captain Kirk on that AI!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Is COM still a "growth opportunity" technology?

Don't live in California but I've just gotten bitten by this. My apartment complex was sold to a new management company last year and this summer they installed wifi transmitters in all the apartments and then announced that we all now have fiber internet with a whopping 200mb up and down for the low low AND MANDATORY fee of $65/month.

These apartments have DSL and Cable internet providers as well and I've been a customer of both - currently on cable internet with 1gb down and 300mb up!

I can't even opt-out. When I renewed my lease last year they added an addendum that they had the right to charge fees for included utilities. Guess what's a "utility" now? Internet.

There's not even a way to setup a hard connection with ethernet to their transmitters (wifi only) and there's no "cable tv" included (not that I had cable tv but if any of the renters had a combo tv/internet deal they're further boned)

I've got no problem with them offering the service. But this mandatory, no opt-out fee for an OPTIONAL service that's also served by 2 other ISPs is predatory and monopolistic.

Posting pictures of their juice boxes and glazed carrots to their instagram?!

More seriously, was out at a semi-nice place for dinner last week and the number of kids and their parents carrying around pads and tablets to keep the little ones entertained... instead of teaching them how to socialize at dinners just seems sad. And yeah, I was a pre-ipad kid and remember being bored silly but it also encouraged me to try to get involved in the adults conversation.

To a lesser extent we have the same problem as adults with tv monitors showing sports games all over most restaurants these days.