Posts by Michael Hoffmann 1339 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2007
Indeed. Considered as a duology, GP and MM are frighteningly good and insightful descriptions of the grift and corruption of late stage capitalism of the last 25 years or so.
Except no Vetinari and Von Lipvig to fight back.We have only the equivalent of Colon and Nobbs, with a lot of Rincewinds.
Anybody remember "Going Postal" where Lord Vetinari, in the end, had to dedicate his entire grand hall to visualise and track the convoluted, circular routes of money and shell companies of the fraudsters who stole the Grand Trunk Company?
If he got his hands on our techbro overlords, he could get Mister Trooper to write a whole new book! I don't think any of them would get the "Angel Treatment".
If you have your phone with you on the can, I found that it's now the equivalent of the old almanacs.
You know, reading up about the rains of fishes and lambs with 10 heads and murders most foul and 'orrible.
Except with the old almanacs you would then tear out the page and.... don't do that with your phone!
And then there is the absolute of "NOR" - no original research. So if you happen to be an authority and wrote the book on a subject, don't you dare and try correct or at least update some of the entries. You'll be pushed back because you dare quote yourself. I can understand why to a certain extent - you don't want every kook to extensively quote their self-published nonsense, but with all the admins and oversight you'd think they'd have a verification and approval process for peer reviewed material.
That would normally be the easiest route, but one day Windows 10 will die and I will NOT have 11 or anything after around, barring some miraculous change in Microsoft, which is as likely as me winning the lotto. Liam's suggestion of just going Mac is probably the most sensible, if I can convince her.
If your job is to build and debug Windows apps, would you really do that on a Linux box though? (not counting a full bore Windows VM on top of Linux)
Cross dev is a thing, of course, but if you need the full VS rather than, say, Jetbrains Rider, you probably need every single idiosyncratic bit of Microsoftness.
If only Wine 11 would finally make that jump to support Office, regardless of what MS try to obstruct it with (the local installable one, even if it's 2016 or 2019 - what have they actually added in useful features since?) I could at least get my wife on to a Linux distro of here look&feel choice (I suspect something like Kubuntu which goes some ways to make itself look Windows-y).
She needs a browser, Outlook, OneNote, Word, Excel and Project. Oh, and iTunes... that's it. No, I am *not* going to proselytise for (inferior or just different enough that her aging brain can't switch) native Linux alternatives.
Heck, I could have her on Linux full time before me: I had already made the switch when I hit a wall with my Flightsim gear, a fairly serious setup that resulted in a number of components simply not working, alas. I had to switch back - in this market a dedicated flightsim box is not in the budget. I'm looking at comfortable retirement, not techbro obscene riches.
I am glad to see that finally corporations will move away from their quarterly, stock-market driven schemes that determine bonuses and compensation for executives, to the detriment of long term company health and employee and customer satisfaction!
Finally they will move to long term planning to account for the years, even decades, it take to build and activate power stations, especially nukular!
........ sorry, I couldn't keep it up with a straight face... yeah, right, as if!
... in a "not funny at all" kind of way, seeing as literally this morning, after glancing over some news headline, I was wondering if we will soon see a distinction between "AI medicine" for the masses and real live doctors for those who can afford it. Even in countries with universal healthcare, one of which I'm so far fortunate to live in.
Share price equals success, does it?
Have you been paying attention? Like, anywhere? By now we know that share price is the last indicator of success.
IBM has been peddling the family silver, pensions funds and off-shoring on a massive scale, all to finance ginormous stock buybacks to bring that precious share price up. "Success" doesn't come into it.
Ultimately, Gerstner failed. He halted the rot during his tenure but it didn't last. All he did was prevent the split - which may have been better. What we see is the IBM that continued on the road as if he'd never been there. Heck, some with more insight than me may even be able to say that he contributed. He came from McKinsey after all.
Liam, I'll just summarise:
- massgrave.dev
- O&O Shutup 10
- gently, very very gently, begin broaching the subject to SWMBO that one day, for her daily use, she will be just *fine* using something that isn't Windows (don't yet mention the word "Linux")
- even more gently broach the subject that even though it is SWMBO, the O stops at letting anything Windows >=11 on to any machine within the premises.
OK, those last 2 may not come from your article, but were added by me.
That'll tell 'em! That'll make 'em sit up and take notice!
I wonder if the Chinese leadership sits around laughing till snot runs of their noses, just like they surely must be in the Kremlin.
I mean, this is like playing the moron in Axis & Allies who plays the Soviet Union and has all their factories pump out submarines.
... OK, I did that only ONCE, alright? I was trying to test a strategy. Purely experimental!
“Some network engineers failed to attend these project meetings to assess the impact of the planned work.”
You mean the 10 left after you "rightsized" them from the original 100 or whatever? So that the pitiful remainder is constantly up to its necks in fire-fighting and P2 incidents? Meaning the only way they could even attend those meetings while keeping your shit network running would have been either by time-travel or cloning?
Those network engineers?
But hey you found your scapegoats, so no danger to your bonuses. Never mind criminal prosecution!
How about a loudly advertised commitment to "we are the only browser that let's you install addons and mods so you can keep the vultures from stealing and monetising every bit of your personal and private data, or shove malware ads in your face every 5 microseconds"?
Heck, pre-install them! "Firefox, now with ublock origin pre-installed"
Just focus on that. On repeat. Loud. Even louder! You know how loud a jet is? That loud! (to paraphrase M. v. Lipvig)
And if you (truthfully) state that you don't have any social media accounts, and haven't had any (I quit FB close on 10 years ago and don't even have the account info anymore), you get deported for lying at best and handed over to ICE thugs at worst?
I could only give them LinkedIn, and the drone at passport control would prolly go "what's that?"
This article on El Reg is the equivalent of some ancient Christian walking into the arena, knowing the lions are already waiting and blowing a raspberry to the Emperor's Seat.
But I'll bite:
What you're saying is that an experienced, senior developer can indeed make use of an LLM to steer it to some code that might actually do what you want it to. Simply assuming that you are one. Though making the bold claim that your app is "professional level" had me go "orly?"
I'll leave aside for now how you checked the code wasn't a dismal mess, whether you had tests (unit and integration) generated and verified they weren't just a giant set of methods mocking everything and returning "assert True"
How will this aid an inexperienced coder (or worse, a Dunning Kruger manager)? Is the success criteria "well it seems to do what I want and if I squint the results look correct"?
I've done what you have and frankly, I don't call it "vibe coding" because "vibes" don't come into it. I have an idea, some very precise prompt instructions that can on go on like a Tolstoy novel, and then expect to be doing a lot of hand-holding. To the point where I wonder I shouldn't have just written the whole mess from scratch without boiling the planet.
I'll just pile on, and also join the choir:
For RAM it's been Crucial, then Corsair. Not least because they always continue to have equally good non-RGB models. If I wanted a disco in my office, I would have kept my leisure suit.
For SSD it's been Crucial, then Samsung (and for a brief while Intel, they had some good going in the early years). My Crucial T705 is an absolute beast. but you gotta keep it cool.
Been that way for years and years (I've been an early adopter of SSDs, when I remember even some fellow techs thinking I was exaggerating and they were a fad)
I moved all my work to Gitlab a few months ago, who are like all of them, starting to do some AI intro, but currently I can turn it off and ignore it. Have my own local runners, so infinite "minutes".
Gitlab Pipelines makes Github Actions look like it was written by interns over a weekend. Heck, Microsoft's own "Azure Devops" is superior, albeit having Azure idiosyncrasies that can drive you up the wall (only use it when a gig is unfortunately MS or Azure heavy :-( )
Github nowadays only has inertia and incumbency on its side. Par for the enshittification course.
This wouldn't have been a certain online bookstore that I frequented in the early/mid 90s?
Somewhat wonky website (weren't they all?), but a good way to get US books fairly cheaply from Europe.
They charged my CC twice once, and I wrote to customer support and got an email of apology and rectification, signed by "Jeff".
I never did find out whether they had more than one "Jeff" at that time.
Also wonder what became of them. Started with an "A". A-something.
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