WesBrownSQL

We have ways to measure productivity now. AI doesn't change what to measure unless you just want to flex. Every time I see "100k lines of code, all AI," I think they probably could have done the same thing with a fraction of that. Anytime productivity is measured that way, you will always fail. As a CTO, my mantra was "I pay for outcomes, not hours." AI coding tools are just that, tools. My outlook on that hasn't changed. I enjoy working with LLM's especially locally, to handle quite a bit of the heavy lifting. I'm not paying for tokens, I'm paying for outcomes.

I've got a friend who has been doing this research since the 90s. There is real money involved in this. This isn't like a math proof with a 1mm dollar payout. I seriously doubt this discovery. Until they show it working, I call bullshit. A room-temperature semiconductor is worth WAY more than an AI company.

Munitions exporting. I fondly remember the PGP feasco. I spent years using PGP to encrypt my emails to several people who refused to use email without it. Good times.

Yeah, I'm stuck on X11 since Wayland and NVIDIA with two video cards for display is hot garbage. I have been a Linux user on the command line since the days of root and boot floppies. I don't think the desktop has felt this broken to me since the early days. I'm a tech veteran and don't have a problem working through issues, but when the issue is "you're running Wayland compositor," Then that's a problem I can't fix. I can't write a compositor. I'm running X11/KDE on Manjaro base, and it is stable after some cursing and poking things with a stick. Oh, and telling me "Tell NVIDIA to fix their drivers!" or some other thing, if I could effectively and efficiently use something else, I would. Again, lack of competition has hamstrung us. Oh well, I'll go back to yelling at kids to get off my lawn and coming out of my thick, luxurious neck beard.

As someone who has been dealing with SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 9001, etc., for years, I have always maintained copies of the third-party agreements for all of our downstream providers for compliance purposes. This documentation is collected at the time of certification, and our policies always include a provision for its retrieval on schedule. The problem is when you certify their policy said X and were in compliance, they quietly change that and don't send proper notification downstream to us, and captain lawsuit comes by, we have to be able to prove that they did claim they were in compliance and the time we certified. We don't want to rely on their ability to produce that documentation. We can't prove that it wasn't tampered with, or that there is a chain of custody for their documentation and policies. If I wanted to use a vendor that wouldn't provide that information, then I didn't use them. Welcome to the world of highly regulated industries.

And that's why they call it a hot take. No, it isn't going to give rise to microservices. You absolutely can have your agent perform high-level decomposition while maintaining a monolith. A well-written, composable spec is awesome. This has been true for human and AI coders for a very, very long time. The hat trick has always been getting a well-written, composable spec. AI can help with that bit, and I find that is probably the best part of this whole tooling cycle. I can actually interact with an AI to build that spec iteratively. Have it be nice and mean. Have it iterate among many instances and other models, all that fun stuff. It still won't make your idea awesome or make anyone want to spend money on it, though.

SNOBOL FTW!

That's what you don't get. You aren't just watching ads. You are giving them data about you, a lot of data. That data is used to heavily manipulate you. This isn't like the old days of broadcast TV where ads air and you aren't directly tracked. If you ever find a product that is free, it isn't. You are the product that is being sold.

100% this one of the big reasons I fell in love with go. Single executable, no runtime stuff to install and crazy portable. I can look at anyone's go code and very quickly get up to speed. I don't worry about how they format it. Patterns are pretty universal which makes it easier. Does it have its warts? Oh, you better believe it but I know that any code base I go through will pretty much have the same warts the same way. Does go fit every need? Nope on that front too but man its pretty good and what it was designed to do.

I am sad for for your loss but glad he had such a large impact on my life and so many others.

I also still have the books and a CoCo 3. When everyone else I knew either had a c64 or an appleII I was on my own and just had to push through. I started with a CoCo II then UPGRADED to a CoCo III, that's how much I loved that machine. The only other friend I had that was also left out in the cold had an Atari 400. Poor kid asked for an Atari for Christmas thinking he would get a 2600 and instead got that brick ;)

LEGEND! I remember pouring over the xmodem doc's back in the day. Thank you sir, without your work my life would have been a much experience.

100% contextual. In every business where I've been an executive, or had access to the budget, we talk "made" as gross revenue and EBIDA as a stand in gross profit and specifically call out net profit in internal meetings. For example, "We made 10 million with an EBIDA of 1 million and net of 200,000.00." Using EBIDA to talk to potential investors and as a guiding metric if we didn't have a well established gross profit formula that followed GAAP.