aleph_minus_one

> Ops is a specialized skillset completely orthog[o]nal to the business of building applications.

Exactly this was the idea: persons in a DevOps role have skills in both areas, i.e. are very wide skill set, so that one can assign them to very diverse tasks for more flexibility. Additionally, these persons can implement synergies to make things more efficient in areas that intersect both development and operation.

But in many countries (including Germany), you are not allowed to encrypt your transmissions via ham radio, e.g. using TLS with such IPv4 addresses is against the law.

If it is not rocket science, how does it work?

> Or just learn how to teach.

Most people don't want to learn (in particular not learn sufficiently hard to really improve).

> Regular people don’t even upgrade to Win 10/11 unless they are forced to.

In consideration how much spying functionality was added with Windows 10 (which worsened even more with Windows 11), and that Microsoft made it insanely hard to install Windows 11 without creating some Microsoft account, it is actually very sensible that people don't want to upgrade to Windows 10/11, despite the technological improvements that these versions provide.

> Microsoft went all in and have really not got much out of their efforts.

The problem was rather that Microsoft had no real plan what they wanted to get out of AI. If they had a plan, they could have laser-focused their all-in on AI.

Instead, Microsoft just AI-slopped a lot of their bread-and-butter products, making them much worse than before. If AI is as revolutionizing and beloved by users as Microsoft believes, Microsoft could easily have created an offering like "Windows AI Pack" or "Microsoft AI" that should sell like hot cakes.

On the other hand, if you have to force AI functionality onto the users, it should be considered as a strong sign that perhaps it is not something that the users want.

> The Aaron Swartz case is not an analog of these claims.

Indeed: the prosecution of Aaron Swartz drove him to suicide, while Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei is still alive.

> N.B. JSTOR explicitly settled with Swartz, suffered no financial harm, and begged the federal government to drop the case

... and the course of action of Carmen Ortiz', the responsible Attorney General, drove Aaron Swartz into suicide.

> Funny how "maybe they work in different domain" doesn't come up here as well.

Good point. :-)

> Otherwise, the person building the bridge is not an engineer.

One is likely not an engineer if one does not notice the risk. But in practice, managers commonly desire docile subordinates, so the only thing an engineer can do in such a situation is to ensure that a paper trail gets generated that will be capable of breaking the manager's neck once the disaster has occurred. :-(

> To properly understand what you are going to build, it's not enough to read specifications from some manager as gospel. You need to ask questions, and challenge the requirements sometimes, to make them your own.

Many managers don't like being challenged. :-(

With this answer, you rather have revealed which style of programming you are strongly biased to.

> I’ll claim the ones in the end that will have that responsibility [to figure out if you're building the right thing] will be engineers.

One can have this stance. But in practice, programmers who have strong opinions on this topic that is not aligned to the management wishes will commonly become personae non gratae in the company, and are thus commonly on the brink of getting fired.

So, in the end, the incentives that exist in most companies are strongly biased towards the position that figuring out if you're building the right thing is the job of the managers and product owners. :-(

> I have a harder job convincing a team member who spent several days manually coding something that they’ve headed in the wrong direction compared to one who built it with AI. The person doesn’t have a personal attachment to the AI written code. Of course that also means they don’t understand every line like they would if they wrote it manually, but the lack of attachment is certainly a benefit.

If the situation that you have to convince a programmer to stop working on something is something that happens more often than very rarely is in my opinion a strong sign of bad leadership. These are people who are really in love with what they are doing and are thus so attached to it, and you want to cast out this love for working?

So, the moral that I can only get from your post is:

- AI can be used as a mitigation for bad leadership.

- Programmers should care much less about the work that they do.