IF THEN MAYBE...

TBH that sounds like a lot of code I’ve seen from outsourcing companies in India. Their typical approach is to copy an existing program, module, web page or whatever and modify it as quickly as possible to turn it into what’s needed. The result is often a mishmash of irrelevant code, giant data queries that happen to retrieve some field that’s needed along with a ton of unnecessary crap, mixing frameworks, etc.

In the early 2000s I had a manager who hardly ever gave me anything to do. Like in 6 months I did maybe 3 weeks work. And it’s not like I never asked. I was already fairly disgruntled and had other reasons, but it led to me leaving the company for a job at a cancer research center. The problem with not doing anything at MS is that unless you can hide it somehow your review comes up and you have nothing to show for the year, you’re kind of screwed. So after a relaxing 6 months it was a good time to jump ship. Anyway, a couple years later I read MS was laying off like 600 people - which might have been their first layoffs ever, I dunno. It was supposed to clear out “deadwood” - so I checked after another couple months and found out my old manager was still there! So much for “clearing out deadwood” lol.

Capitalism fanatics will say with great conviction that business has to be efficient because of competition, while government is inherently inefficient because it has no competition. There’s a little truth there, but the complete truth is that business is as inefficient as it can afford to be. The more money a company has, the more inefficiency they can absorb. In my mind that’s one good reason not to allow these gigantic mergers of mega-billion-dollar corporations. Huge entities with tons of money can be inefficient and sloppy as hell for a long, long time before they fail.

My daughter has used AI a lot to write grant proposals, which she cleans up and rewords before submitting. In her prompts she tells it to ask her questions and incorporate her answers into the result, which she says works very well, produces high quality writing, and saves her a ton of time. She’s actually a very competent writer herself, so when she compliments the quality I know it means something.

Retired dev here, I’m curious about the nature of “the mess”. Is it buggy AI-generated code that got into production? I know an active dev who uses ChatGTP every day, says it saves him a hell of a lot of work. What he does sounds like “vibe coding”. If you’re using AI for grunt work and keep a human is in the workflow to verify the code, I don’t see how it would differ from junior devs working under a senior. Have some companies been using poorly managed all-AI tools or what? Sorry for the long question.

And no doubt struggling to blame their bad decisions on each other and preserve their salary bonuses.

Could things like this go in linuxmemes? Memes are fun but it would be nice to keep this a place for actual information. And no, this is not a comment on what it’s saying, I’m just tired of so many memes.

So they’re saying removing distractions improves focus? Woah dude, spoiler warning!

Backpedaling to “defending creators” - that’s a bold move, Cotton.

Walk me thru how the tariffs will work on that, will ya taco boy?

Only half kidding now… the way morality and ethics get extrapolated now by the perfection police, this must mean anti-AI = misogynist.

Very good analogy. They’re also ignoring that getting faster and faster at reaching a 50% success rate (a totally unacceptable success rate for meaningful tasks) doesn’t imply ever achieving consistently acceptable success.

Ok let me Sheldon it for you: Yes, deals existed “back in the day” as the saying goes, but fans were not aware of (or reactive to) the business aspects of gaming enough for the deals to be the subject of headlines or controversy.

So has fire insurance on game company office buildings, but fans never cared about it or boycotted games over it, etc.

I’m confused - by Abbot do you mean Gov. Abbott of Texas, and are we talking about the same issue? Cuz the 99-1 vote was about a senate bill regarding AI. Greg Abbott can’t vote on senate bills, and there’s no senator named Abbot.

I long for the era when fans who were asked if they would swallow future exclusivity deals would stare blankly and say, Wat?

Expecting people to know about that 99-1 vote might be misplaced optimism, since it hasn’t been made into a meme yet.

Thanks, cap’n.

Instead of laws keeping up It also might turn out to be a case where culture keeps up.

Twenty years ago tracking armed thugs in ski masks would have been called a public service.