My college kids do everything through cloud services, so it shouldn’t really matter what their device is.

• One of them has a Mac and is just finishing his first year with no problems, so I would expect a neo to be no different.
• My older kid jumps among an iPad in class, his laptop when necessary, and his gaming rig in his dorm, and has had no issues

On the other hand, my niece has very specific requirements for her major, so there will always be a few specialties

My company is working on one such product. So far AI has essentially no guardrails so can too easily go from potentially helpful to harmful. There’s nothing keeping it from sharing confidential data, like customer data, nothing looking at whatever dreck it’s pulling in from the internet, and nothing keeping it from doing harm internally. We can do that.

But most of the more immediate harm is poor practices that we’ve known for decades. Maybe consultants can make bank by pushing best practices we should have followed all along. That article that keeps coming around Lemmy about losing their production database and backup in 9 seconds is a great example. Sure, that LLM needed guardrails to stop that, but any normal best practices would also have prevented that

I’ve seen some baby steps

• LLMs with “planning” mode that shouldn’t make changes until approved …… except when they ignore that
• IDEs with sandbox where you need to whitelist allowed LLM invocations, except there’s too much noise so too many people allow all
• MCP servers with a read-only mode, or allowing configuring credentials to be read-only

I know of some companies where they write up a full spec in markup, and have the ai code from that. They claim it works well, but that seems like extra work.

Personally, most of my coding is maintenance and AI sucks at that. I can get the ai to give me good recommendation, but not usable code. I have had it do a good job writing utility scripts such as data extraction, and tests - it can even save me time

So if you have a greenfield project, and are able to give it sufficient context, people claim it can work …… I’m highly doubtful it’s maintainable though, and maintenance cost is far higher than the cost of initial creation. I really think these companies are digging a hole for themselves

Of course I’m taking advantage of this

• scheduling extra refactoring on the claim that maybe AI can be useful with cleaner code
• fun and games to give AI more context, in case that can make it useful

But you can kill More people more easily with smart bombs. Look at the gulf war as a triumph of technology and innovation over pure strength. Despite a huge and experienced Iraqi military, it was completely lopsided based on things like GPS, night vision, integrated air defense, innovative tactics, and logistics like the world had never seen. As supreme military commander who surely deserves a congressional Medal of Honor for his bone spurs and his willingness to send other people to die, Even Trump must realize this is counterproductive

Not copy-paste. Let the ai do it for you. …… else how would we get these entertaining stories of idiots letting ai delete their production database

But it’s not the same for both sides when one merely supports the actual aggressors while the other also has a plan to drive the survivors out of their homeland to redevelop it for the Epstein class, to abuse their piwer to personally enrich themselves by the death and misery of millions of people and potentially of an entire culture

Isn’t that the whole problem here? We have all these walls to limit authoritarians, fascists, royalists but are discovering how easily they shatter when someone has no shame, no morals, no allegiance to anyone but themselves ignores their existence. We have this system of checks and balances to keep fascists in place, but are discovering how quickly they abdicate their responsibility and how symbolic that defense is

Before ai, my company’s misguided kpi was the number of merge requests

At least that one worked well for me since I’m generally making many small changes to an existing code base

Yeah, even before its ceo came out of the closet as Nazi- after growing to a successful car business they got distracted by new and shiny

But I still think their cars are better technology than anything else in the us, and now cheaper than most. They still have their big upcoming push into semis. They still have most superchargers. They still have a rapidly growing storage business. The cybertruck flop really hurt them and I don’t see how they can afford another.

But ai doesn’t really have a profitably business model yet and humanoid robots are a much bigger gamble with no market yet. This is where a more typical business owner would create new corporate entities so Tesla could become a successful car company while the ceo could try other gambles

What does that have to do with trees? Or research about trees?

There are all too many cities in the world that are poorly located or have outgrown their resources. This article was not about that

However I do remember seeing that discussion a few days ago. Perhaps you want to search for that and add your comments there

Ah yes, the single issue person coming to move the goalposts

Targeted temporary tariffs work best when you’re trying to develop an industry to catch up, such as Biden’s EV tax incentives to more quickly grow a larger market, infrastructure spending to speed buildout of chargers, manufacturing incentives to help legacy automakers transition, and a years long transition that manufacturers could plan around.

They also said that about Tesla, “no new car company can be successful…”

I was curious about that so tried googling ….

Canadian buses were

• earlier models - I see years like 2018
• at least some were built in a new plant in Canada
• part of the blame was lack of spare parts
• part of the blame was limited range, especially in winter

London buses

• newer. I see years like 2024
• no real winter
• I see articles about a new larger battery to fix range issues
• appeared to have similar problems, including a major recall for fire risk

Maybe London benefitted from newer models and doesn’t get as cold as canada

I recently found out one of my college kids believed the crap about raw milk. I told him that any such benefits were due to it being whole milk, not due to it being unpasteurized. I’ll take my milk fat without a side of diarrhea, thank you

Hopefully not. The kpi just states usage.

Looking at the report provided by the ai vendor, there are several measures that might apply. There is also a “quality” measure that seems to be the number of lines accepted. I don’t have any indication that they card about that, but it is there

Yeah I can see the temptation. Ai usage is part of my kpis and is the one place I got dinged on my review. I thought i was insulated as a “partly coding” position, but they put me against full time coders so I look even worse

I guess they’re trying to force change, make us figure out how to make it work. The skeptic in me thinks it rewards people who have time to screw around, but when I set aside a week to see what I can do, I did increase my ai use.

I did find some useful tasks that also increase my “agentic” score! But my “quality” score (ai generated lines I accept) is stick at zero. We currently pay a flat fee but that’s changing next months to pay per token

I have to admit to developing the habit of wiggling the steering wheel regularly. Unfortunately that doesn’t help for camera based systems

Definitely one of the weaknesses is: what about maintenance? Ai has been poor at maintaining existing code, and we all know that maintenance is much more expensive than development. Will it be able to maintain its own code? What if there are no longer enough developers to do it manually? Where is our future then?

I’ve definitely been adding priority to refactoring. It was always a good idea for maintainability, for new developers to get up to speed and be able to contribute, but now we have the idiot developer that is LLMs. Perhaps more refactoring is meeting it halfway