Posts by AbominableCodeman 57 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Nov 2022
Do you really think any meaningfully novel code has been written since the 80s-mid 90s? Show me a 'new paradigm' I'll show you a clear inheritance of prior art, or more likely snake oil marketing pedalling a solution looking for a problem. If you're producing something for internal use only, which is how its going with AI coding, bespoke software everywhere, why would you even give the ridiculous US patent system a second thought?
Same situation, decades of experience, more databases, APIs, CRMs and billing systems than I care to remember, numerous game titles from indies to triple AAAAAAA.
If you act as the a senior dev/ architect to your coding assistant, keep it on task, force it to keep modules under ~200 loc, regularly get it to decompose to separate responsibilities and other best practice, it can turn out perfectly reasonable, reliable software that's well written, maintainable and debug-able.
Let it spew out 5000 loc in a single file and try to bug fix or extend it, yes you'll be on the road to nowhere.
It's allowed me to realise a number of personal projects I've had on the back burner for years, but just didn't have the time to do the typing.
Over the Christmas break I did a ~2m loc NVR suite with almost 250 modules, compatibility with a wide range of IP cams And it provided a couple of hacking tools to break into proprietary cloud protocol cams. It did Open CV2 person, object and facial recognition, auto tracking for PTZ enabled cameras, with or without CUDA support. Dozens of other features you would expect from a professional NVR suite. Oh and it also did firmware for ESP-32 Cam modules with fill STA/AP web WiFi and config setup. I've hooked up 12 cameras to it and had it running since 2-1-26 with no restarts, hangs or CTDs.
There was definitely an inflection point somewhere back in November '25 where Codex 5.2 and Claud became significantly more competent at not-trivial coding, if you are basing your opinions of AI assisted coding on tools from a year ago or more, that's now ancient history in AI terms.
I have been highly sceptical of the 'AI with everything' marketing, and there certainly is a bubble that will burst. Now I'm more terrified of how fast its getting better for knowledge domains, and the implications for society at large. No, it's not 100% accurate, and you certainly should not trust it outside your area of expertise, and thoroughly validate outputs, but just brushing it off as 'fancy autocomplete' is foolhardy.
Fun fact, I was looking at the obfuscated code for <major system currently used in many UK councils> and found a copyright notice* from 1982 attributed to Bull.
*I'm not entierly sure if a simple SQL query to select financial values between 2 dates is actually copyrightable, but here we are.
I couldn't agree more. If the poors don't have access to daddy's money to set up thier own plantation, well they should just work harder. It's so very tiersome having to listen to the poors whining about 'cost of living', do they have any idea how much it costs to run a Gulf Stream for a year? I wish they would just shut up and get on finishing my next Range Rover.
Is there any ideology or organisation structure that is devoid of using 'think of the children' or similar to overstep privacy boundaries and enforce control? Left or right, public or private, at some point "improving customer experience", or "protecting the public" always seem to turn into increased monetisation or power. As it ever has been, it will always continue.
Not for want of trying to stop users shoehorning Excel to be a database, we've got edicts from on high not to use it in such a way, legal regulations regarding such behaviour, and a development department ready to satisfy evey data and application need.
I think introducing miscreant's fingers to 'the bench vice of enlightnment' is may be the only option.
Or "any field with a slash in it is a date"
Or "lt looks like you're tring to input a long/lat, let me mash it with a float for you"
Or Copy paste adding arbitary CR/LF to the copied cell contents depending on if MOD(RND)=7
$org is trying to save £24M, yet wont consider LibreOffice, I suspect mainly because of M$ marketing warfare...it certainly can't be because O365 is actually good.
'stop it from working' an interesting proposal, which would probably involve nuking linkedin/facebook/ecquifax/transunion and any number of huge data harvesters from orbit, i suspect this would meet quite some resistance.
Maybe the problem lies not with the AFR, but with the unconstrained data harvesting and people throwing thier PII up on the internet without consideration, that preceeded it?
It would be a difficult metric to measure I would think. Considering how many 'ship of theseus' thier desktops from one decatde to the next. I made the mistake of bying a dell off the shelf desktop once, never again, it was literally engineered landfill with misleading specs and a support scam attached. On the other hand I have 3 machines for coding and 3d design all in cases hailing from the late 90's and '00s. How can one possibly measure 'desktop' sales when I imagine the majority of desktop owners get them specifically for the ability to incrementally upgrade.
Isn't the current hot water and central heating fashion to have a combi boiler without an immersion or hot water storage tank anyway? I know I get interesteng comments from the gas inspector about my old but fully functional and safe 40 year old CH setup when they see the storage tank.
I'm not sure how one would heat the water off peak for use later without anywhere to store aforsaid pre-heated water.
Oh my sweet summer child, if only it were that easy.
You use DNS? an ISP? You have relatives and friends with Whatspp on thier phones or who use social media themselves, you have a mobile phone (let alone 'smart')? Need to use unicorn sites that won't work without JS?
You are still very much tracked. Much as we may catch a murderer by his 3rd cousin's DNA. You need to make that medical appointment or book that ticket on some bloated, badly written wordpress site which uses google fonts.
The only way to win is not to play.
Luckily due to the sterling efforts of Valve, it's getting increasingly difficult to find software that won't run on Linux, even really esoteric, expensive software (and at least Linux still works with weird old serial devices). My windows 10 Box has been relegated to a headless install that only ever is accessed via Steam link when I want a VR fix (the one last windows hold-out). Come 2025 it will get some nice firewall rules, and I'll be done with M$ bovine excretions.
Other than that I went fully Linux 4 years ago and have never looked back, and that's after a fair few decades as a Windows fanboy, but M$ have worked so diligently at alienating their user-base with needless UI change for change's sake, slurp and adware. And to think "retraining users to a new OS" used to be the C-suite excuse not to move to Linux, now Mint is more windows than Windows is.
I assume this is for some very specific and narrowly defined specification for 'it works'. It certainly works for me when I get a contract to clean up a bunch of Agile technical debt and allows me to ask some fun questions like:
Have you ever heard of optimisation an Karnaugh maps?
Why is the no input validation anywhere.
Why are these debug options available to users.
Why are these hard coded credentials here.
These questions are invariably answered by the catch all "we didn't have time on the sprint'.
Less sprinting, less 'rituals' and a bit more quiet contemplation about best practices, now that will be $400 ...per hour.
With the corollary that any time you're doing Agile, and it's inevitably not working, some Agile cultist will tell you you're doing it wrong, or using the wrong flavour. One begs the question after 30 years of being subjected to Agile, is it actually possible to do right?
I don't think you being in Eastern Europe is a factor. The road etiquette of the scooter delivery riders is crap everywhere.
In my city they completely disregard pedestrian only spaces, I overlook a pedestrian square bordered on all sides by restaurants, the number of 'roo delivery guys who mount the pavement and shoot across the square full of children playing, without decelerating until they get to their target restaurant is beyond counting. They ignore one-way systems, park their rides on the pavements, and gangs of them clog up motorcycle parking bays while waiting for orders on a regular basis.
I'm afraid the article author is rather late to the party, the content mills have already gone well beyond anachronistic text sites for their revenue.
I suggest they go study the field of automated AI Youtube channels, such as Spark and Future Unity (which I suspect is a front for the CCP), with appropriate setup, you can churn out multiple apparently high production value videos a day
Hang on, isn't the typical "number of pirated copies" levied against pirates, as mandated by the RIAA and MPAA. The number of potentially downloaded copies* raised to the power of number of MOSFETS ever manufactured, multiplied by the time to the heat death of the universe, measured in microseconds. There appears to be some discrepancy here...
*A random number between 8e7 and 8e9.
"Don't forget, the gamer crowd is going to get smaller over time as the console kiddies age. "
I don't think you understand the gaming market, the reasons for wanting a general purpose computer over a console, have not changed since it was Atari 2600 vs Sinclair spectrum, 40 years ago.
Better quality graphics, pron, content creation, modding, not loosing your purchased content each generation, FPS games, and the general anti consumer/walled garden behaviour of console manufacturers will ensure the PC master race's survival for some time yet.
Indeed, one of the notable design features of the Nintendo switch is no protection on the rx/tx lines. With only 0.3 mm separation between the 4 USB-C VCC and rx/tx line conductors, any guesses as to what one of the most common failure modes is?
Icon for the state of the switch's APU during a frantic game session with the USB plugged in.
Don't forget to get this years version, which is identical to last year's. Apart from the arbitrarily reordered chapters, and the answers to the in-text exercises available only through a website, that can only be accessed using DRM serialised single use codes in the hard copy.
