RegW

Reading the comments here - I can't help feeling I've missed this bubble.

I don't have a mandatory bank or gov id app. Where are you living?

Also didn't ask about docker and "docker system prune".

... when we find that it also affects us - sat on our fat backsides in our air conditioned gold plated ballrooms.

I yet have to see someone actually argue that you don’t need to understand SQL and ORM will suffice

Well that's because decades of bitter experience has told us all that object graphs rarely map cleanly to sets of relationships.

However, I do think that must have been the original idea as tools such as Hibernate tried so hard to obscure the underlying SQL and database. As a result all Hibernate objects have their own particular identity requirements which only made sense to a developer that knows what's going on under the hood.

If it is conscious then perhaps it will human like. If the consciousness is human like perhaps it will have a conscience. If it has a conscience then may be it can be trusted.

But then again, perhaps that conscience will convince it that the universe is better off without us.

May be search is not the golden goose, perhaps more the carrot that brings the user into range of the shitty stick of ads and data leeching.

I'm a bit afraid that although AI is being presented as part of the carrot, it may actually be a shittier stick.

Because they don't know

(that they are an ad company (and they don't know what the implication is)).

What exactly is the example?

Sorry, I'm in the UK so I haven't read the article that the author has decided to block my access to.

Note: This PDF only works in Chromium-based browsers.

I thought that PDF was some sort of open standard.

I don't know how I feel about this. I started programming in 1979.

I went for a job in AI in the late 1980s and realised from the bonkers spin of the company founders that it really wasn't the 5 to 10 years away as I was being told. I went looking something that was going to deliver a result.

I came back to it maybe 6 years ago when while on the bench at a consultancy. I got into trying to do various Kaggle challenges. Then the boss got the bug and wanted to predict the answers to weird spurious money-making questions. I tried but even when there was good data, I didn't know how to do better anyone else. When there wasn't good data it just produced complete shit.

Since then the world has changed. Everything I touch has AI built in. And it's really good. When you don't know your way around something or you've got stuck it really gets you moving again. Yeah, if it regurgitates a stupid negative example from the documentation as if it is "the way to do it", you just ignore it because you have already read that.

Now, every week I'm subjected to lectures by people who don't know how to code about how productive AI is going to make me. Working in the financial sector every Californian pipe dream seems to be an imperative, but all must verified by an adult. My IDE tries to insert all sorts of crap into my production code as I type, and then I'm supposed to be allow it to generate my unit tests.

I know it will get better, but will it be another 5 to 10 years?

Are we 80% of the way there yet?

Right now as I eat my lunch, I'm listening to The Rest is Classified.

Productivity is a moveable feast and tricky to compare with the past. The productivity business talk about is the ratio of cost to profit.

As tech become available to help reduce your costs and drive up your profit, the same tech also reduces your competitor's costs and perhaps lets more competitors into the market. This drives down your product prices and reduces your profit.

So you invest but see no increase in productivity, but if you don't do it - you're toast.

Follow the law. As a guest in a country, treat your host with respect. Do not support terrorist groups.

The article describes Thomas-Johnson as a "student activist and journalist" and "whose work has appeared in outlets including Al Jazeera and The Guardian".

Are you saying that there is evidence elsewhere that he is part of some terrorist organisation? Hey wait a sec, perhaps you are confusing "Al Jazeera" with "Al Qaeda". You know Google is your friend - oh wait...

Did you take a copy of that flyer? I would be interested to see it.

Is it just me that sees "Windows Recall" and thinks "Total Recall -> Arnold Schwarzenegger -> Terminator"?

Feels like a Wiremock for Rust.

Hey dude. That's a thought. Get your AI to expand it into a full report and send it to my AI to summarize!

I really enjoyed unchecking all those cookie controls. Of the 1668 partner companies who are so interested in me, a good third have a "legitimate interest". With each wanting to drop several cookies, it seems odd that Privacy Badger only thinks there are 19 cookies to block. Could some of them be fakes - flooding the zone?

Damn. I forgot to read the article.

I'm a bit confused about if it does calls. It doesn't mention it for most of the page, but then says:

DIY Phone

Use the Comet and the Linux stack for calling*, messaging and mobile data as an alternate to your walled and closed smartphone. Contribute to the Linux ecosystem for mobiles.

So I guess this means it can, but it's not supported and you need to contribute the software. So perhaps it has the hardware, and perhaps it might work.

It is sad. It's now happening west of us. In Europe we have been trying to protect ourselves by not saying too much and attracting the attention/wrath of the bosses. I don't think it will work.

If you are in Iran - keep your head down.

10+ years ago I had a job which involved developing/testing geo-restricted software in another country. Eventually each VPN exit point would get marked up as such, and I would have to switch to another.

So if posts were marked with the country of origin or VPN, that might be enough for most people to evaluate the intent of the post.

Of course things have changed. There might not be so many IPv4 addresses around to trade, but IPv6 has probably changed that. And it's probably hard to know how long an address was used by a VPN before being traded back to a telco.

Apparently X is entirely blocked in Iran unless using a VPN.

Perhaps they mean to influence Iranians who activity circumvent internet restrictions :-)

I used to find when listening to a good many podcasts with VLC there would be:

... See you after the break.

brief pause

And we're back ...

Unfortunately, most ads are now burnt in. The 10 second advance will skip through them, but as it's usually the host parroting the ad text and it's easy to over shoot.

In my first job out of university in the 80s, I spent all one night playing Knight Lore on the Spectrum with friends. I failed to get up the next morning. My boss drove across Leeds and to bang on the door to see if I was alright. I needed that job so I stopped playing computer games.

In the 90s a later boss called me out for spending my days attached to the Slashdot firehose. I had sort-of known that it was a wasteful time sink, so I resolved to completely stop using the social media of its time, and have avoided most incarnations of it ever since (but here I am).

As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves. I know that some simply won't finish school without strong guidance, but delaying exposure to this might just be worse in the long term.

Is this some obscure hint that there will be well paid skilled jobs to replace those taken away by AI?

I'm sure I've previously heard it implied that all the grooms who lost their jobs to motor cars became mechanics and chauffeurs. Surely this would be just too poetic.

But that’s not what Brenda was hired for.

Are you suggesting that Brenda should stay in her box?

... and just a by-product of chicken production at that. Gotta eat more chickens to save the oceans.

Surely there is still some merit in having competition in the market place?

Oh, I remember the joy I felt when Phil Collins finally f'd off to Switzerland.

I can't wait for Ed Sheeran to follow him - clearly we need to more to make those pips squeak.