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Comment Re:failed pedagogical experiment. (Score 2) 101

Now that that's been firmly established that kids spend the majority of time goofing off on their computers, will anything change?

It hasn't ever changed.

We used to use our school's only computer, a PDP-8, to play the original Star Trek game on the line printer. One move per sheet.

Comment Re:Will It Just Make Software Cheaper and More Acc (Score 1) 88

How good any bit of it will be depends on the level of QA it goes through - just like it depends on that now.

The QA process currently assumes that at least some people actually know how the code works, and QA is already one of the biggest bottlenecks in the development process.

For example, it's often very difficult to get your peers to do code reviews so you can commit your updates because they're busy and the work of doing code reviews sucks. The main reason they get done at all is quid pro quo: You have to eventually do code reviews for others or they'll stop reviewing your code.

If all anyone is doing is reviewing orders of magnitude more AI slop than any human can produce, the review process is going to suck. The best people are just going to quit instead of sitting there reviewing code all day, even if they have to switch careers and become electricians. With nobody actually writing code, the reviewers will eventually atrophy and lack the knowledge of what problems to look for in the first place.

Similar issues will show up for product testing and all of the other steps in the product pipeline.

Comment Re:Prolonged headphone use? (Score 4, Interesting) 95

Tell me what chemicals are in the fake pleather cover of the ear foam, or the headband foam. Everything else is irrelevant.

Generally, the softer the plastic, the more plasticizers have been added. Plasticizers are usually the chemicals of concern, because they are often endocrine disrupters.

I'm pretty sure these plasticizers routinely leach out of headphone pads because the pads on every pair of headphones I've owned over the past 40 years has gotten brittle and disintegrated after a few years of use.

Comment Re:why vim? (Score 4, Informative) 116

If somebody has X or Wayland and a DE on top of it, why would s/he want to use vim? Why not just use one of the editors that come w/ the DE?

Because vim has super-powerful features for development. I still prefer it to any IDE I've ever used over the past 30 years. (Although I will say that VS Code is better for read-only browsing of large code bases. Other than that use, I find its behavior to be infuriating, and its "vim mode" is crap.)

vim is also superior to nano-type editors for any nontrivial editing of non-code files, with macros and powerful commands that can reorganize thousands of lines instantly. Notepad++ is also OK for that work, but you have to install it separately and is mostly just for Windows.

BTW, with a desktop environment, use the GUI-based gvim, not plain vim in a terminal. You get scrollbars, better cursor and mouse behavior, etc.

Comment ISPs have forgotten what their job is. (Score 5, Insightful) 70

I don't see why a device that simply shuffles data between the internet and your house needs more than 100 MB. Let's be charitable and say 1GB (which was an absurd amount needed only to power high-end servers and workstations just a couple of decades ago). Looking on Digikey, you can still get the cheapest 1GB chip for $3, retail. This is worth about two days of a $50/month internet connection fee.

Luckily, I have an old ISP box that they doled out before all their equipment had to be a router, and I doubt that it has even 1GB inside. My own WiFi router runs OpenWrt just fine with 128MB. If ISPs would just stick to their core mission of delivering packets, this memory crisis wouldn't be a problem for them at all.

Comment Re:Romance schmomance (Score 1) 104

Agreed. 40 years ago I read a few to understand what the then-new publishing sensation was all about. Newer stuff might be better, but that stuff did nothing for me. Not stimulating, not even enjoyable. And I was reading Tom Clancy. The blunt fact was even my failed attempts at romance and getting a GF were far more detailed, interesting and compelling to me.

I've come to conclude (contrary to advertising) that far more men are capable of pair-bonding and romance than women. So they have to work at it.

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