Posts by frankyunderwood123 125 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jun 2019
I have a new comparison when discussing the idiotic idea of playing the lottery and the likelihood of winning the top prize.
My usual is it’s akin to being struck by lightning twice at the same place.
I shall now add getting hit by an old Russian satellite on the head.
When it comes to the euro millions lottery it may as well be both at the same time along with the second coming of Jesus Christ
The anti lottery is instead being struck by the bad luck
This paints an interesting picture which could theoretically be the first place where LLMs or dare we say AI is pitted against itself / other models in real time.
Bad actors use LLMs to quickly find exploits while systems are protected by LLMs real time constantly scanning for vulnerabilities, attacks etc. and self patching the system.
Human interaction is simply to watch, check logs, occasionally prompt.
At this point it really is AI against AI with all the hallucinations that could result.
Bad actor AI tricks system protection AI into becoming a Bad actor too.
It's a weird idea, always on 24/7 self learning LLM's "battling" each other at a speed humans can't match and perhaps even left unattended/unmonitored for hours end.
What could possibly go wrong?
… it can escalate enough to make grown developers weep tears of blood as they pull what remains of their hair out.
That own goal feeling shortly followed by “I can fix this before anyone notices “
The problem is your brain is often compromised by the small child weeping in front of their derisory peers syndrome.
The best course of action is ALWAYS to fess up immediately, no matter how much it hurts
Several tin foil hats being worn by this one.
Struggling to get through the lack of punctuation and coherent sentence structure, but I believe it’s full of stale regurgitated FUD.
The lack of even a basic understanding of why co2 is a greenhouse gas is staggering in its blatant ignorance.
All the data is at your fingertips but you’d rather repeat factually incorrect crap.
I reckon huge developments like the Botley West solar farm in Oxfordshire will be rushed through and sod the consequences. Thought it was for houses? Nah mate, data centres. Then we have projects like the massive reservoir near Abingdon.
Earmarked as a fresh water supply for the Home Counties it’s also going to be convenient for data farms.
Everything is going according to plan in the UK, big business building infrastructure for … big business.
Sod the nimbys
That’s the way it’s all gone.
When I got my first pay packet, 36 years ago, it was in a packet. Cash.
I had no bank account.
I lived in shared housing and my name wasn’t on the paperwork.
The only time my location would be known was travelling abroad.
It was possible to live completely privately and still function in society.
In fact, you could’ve been entirely invisible fairly easily.
Now, to do so is risking extreme poverty and harassment, even off grid.
This is a nonsense statement, but typically gets upvotes because we can all be narrow minded.
Windows 7 was the last decent windows version and granted, that was nearly 16 years ago.
Since then, however, the company has excelled in a few areas. A notable one being the web.
Once derided by web developers, they became somewhat of an unlikely darling, with great contributions to web standards, along with some excellent tools.
Windows 10 rectified the ridiculous mistakes in windows 8 and whilst not being the release 7 was, it was useable.
Sadly, Microsoft were and are still playing the same data games as all big tech and effectively spying on users with very little transparency. The amount of tracking in a default windows install became exponentially bigger with each release.
Overall , however, the company remains a shining beacon of how to play nasty.
The now legendary OEM vendor lock-ins were a masterpiece of how to ship an inferior operating system to billions.
The schmoomzing of big corporations and governments to sign up with Microsoft is equally legendary.
Microsoft have done a huge amount in the last few decades in terms of propping up their market share with hard ball evil tactics.
… so can someone in the developing world, who will work for a quarter of your salary.
I see this as the double edged sword - and yes, I work remotely and very much like it.
Given the choice of having to return to the office or be made redundant?
I don’t think I have the luxury of choosing anymore.
Tech sector jobs aren’t booming like they once were and firms are looking for savings.
Workers in Chennai, for example, can be 25% of their developed world counterparts and are taking on far more experienced positions than previously and international firms are lured by that cheap labour and compliant work ethic.
There is some competition, whether you can call it effective or not depends on ... numbers.
Where I live there's online headlines from 2013 "fiber broadband heading for <where I live>", with a prominent local MP waxing lyrical about the opportunties.
It never happened, at least via BT or OpenReach(Around)
It took a decade for fibre to reach premises in my town, 10 years after that announcement.
It also was a private company that did the job - Gigaclear.
Much derided at the time they started up, because they were absolutely bloody awful, but they delivered the goods in the end.
Open Reach will probably never get to my town to install fiber, but it's already done, so screw them.
It may be the entire race just cools down due to lack of a killer commercial app and thus the huge returns.
We're in a hype cycle, as everyone knows, to the point where the top dogs in tech are serving up hardware touted as being AI Ready.
All of that hype has been a massive dud for the billions of consumers, because there's no compelling application for Joe Average Public to get excited by.
They can make creepy AI generated images or get AI to spit out a resume or a reply to an email, but that's fun for about 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, the actual use case for AI is going great guns - research.
LLM's are cutting the time it takes to do deep research by 50% or more, which is impressive - this is where it is useful tech.
For consumers? - FFS, microsoft trying to boost PC sales by calling them "AI ready?"
Or Apple, doing only what Apple can and pretending they invented it by renaming it, doing the "Apple Intelligence" crap?
It's Mr. Clippy on steroids, that's it - that's all you get.
It feels impressive until you realise the "black box" you are chatting with has walls, has a point where it hallucinates because it isn't AI.
It was never AI.
It's pattern recognition - very clever pattern recognition, but still just pattern recognition.
The reason it's boomed is because compute power - suddenly, that pattern recognition can be near realtime.
And then we get the tech bros warning about AI - the same damn assholes creating it - and they are warning about it to boost it.
Hype cycle.
Well written - "expected".
It may be the entire race just cools down due to lack of a killer commercial app and thus the huge returns.
We're in a hype cycle, as everyone knows, to the point where the top dogs in tech are serving up hardware touted as being AI Ready.
All of that hype has been a massive dud for the billions of consumers, because there's no compelling application for Joe Average Public to get excited by.
They can make creepy AI generated images or get AI to spit out a resume or a reply to an email, but that's fun for about 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, the actual use case for AI is going great guns - research.
LLM's are cutting the time it takes to do deep research by 50% or more, which is impressive - this is where it is useful tech.
For consumers? - FFS, microsoft trying to boost PC sales by calling them "AI ready?"
Or Apple, doing only what Apple can and pretending they invented it by renaming it, doing the "Apple Intelligence" crap?
It's Mr. Clippy on steroids, that's it - that's all you get.
It feels impressive until you realise the "black box" you are chatting with has walls, has a point where it hallucinates because it isn't AI.
It was never AI.
It's pattern recognition - very clever pattern recognition, but still just pattern recognition.
The reason it's boomed is because compute power - suddenly, that pattern recognition can be near realtime.
And then we get the tech bros warning about AI - the same damn assholes creating it - and they are warning about it to boost it.
Hype cycle.
AGI? - decades or centuries away.
I've tried to like Gimp so many times over the years, really I have.
I've never succeeded - the UI is so bloody minded in terms of NOT being Photoshop I just can't get on with it.
That's a real shame for ME. For anyone who has never used Photoshop, it's a Meh. Having said that, the gimp UI is tricky.
For context, the first time I used Photoshop was on an SGI O2 - version 3 or something.
Prior to that, I was using Corel PhotoPaint.
Yeah, I'm an old git.
We're talking 1995.
However, interestingly, the first release of Gimp was the just the year after.
For me, in 1995, using an SGI machine was new and using Photoshop was new.
In 1996 I was introduced to Linux for the first time - Red Hat 3.0.3.
I recall trying Gimp in that year, it was ok but I never considered it a "player" - the UI was so unintuitive for me personally.
Back then, not many people beyond Stallman gave a rats ass about open source software - it wasn't exactly in the public realm.
I didn't even know who was behind the Linux project until the late 90's.
As Photoshop made leaps and bounds in terms of functionality, UI and UX I kinda grew with it.
Never paid for it once - and never have - mostly I got it through my workplace - as was the overall plan by Adobe.
The Gimp never stood a chance against what Adobe produced, but the developers didn't care - they chugged along.
It's not for me and never will be, but should always be praised for bringing free bitmap editing - and very advanced editing - to the FOSS offering.
The scripting in Gimp is just so geeky and so powerful - a tool made by coders, for coders.
Go Gimp!
Sounds familiar, Mozilla 20 years back.
Thing is, there are plenty of privacy browsers, but that’s not the problem these days.
Web content itself is in the control of too few companies, as is the tech which hosts content and services.
Then we get mobile apps fragmenting the web into vendor lockin.
Government restrictions on encryption another issue.
The browser is the least of the worries.
The org I work for is very switched on. Private repos are scanned for secrets constantly. We don’t use GitHub actions. Frequent and strict security training for all employees, however..,
It’s still going to be a busy day. I suspect there will be a mandatory credentials reset.
The bottom line is don’t store secrets in GitHub repos. Use a secrets manager as part of the deploy pipeline.
Why not?
macOS is an outstanding operating system without these additional tweaks.
I don’t know why some people feel the need to try and rain on other people’s parade.
I use windows and Linux as well as macOS.
Each has their own issues and positives.
A true computer geek embraces all tech that they find beneficial to them and never dismisses what they haven’t used.
Aside from gpu capability, assuming you upgrade to a higher end video card, a base model Mac mini m4 smokes the Mac Pro cheesegrater, wipes the floor with it.
I loved my old 5,1 and upgraded it plenty over the years, but as soon as the first apple silicon Mac mini was released, it was obvious to me that switching was a significant upgrade.
The power consumption was enough of a draw card alone!
Each to their own, but I never really missed my 5,1 Mac, the base M1 model was that good. Now upgraded to Mac mini m4 pro.
Looks like the main beef is fairly well documented and the mini-spat with Linus is really just a side note.
Hector Martin approached his annoyances the wrong way and Linus pointed it out.
Linus may seem to be a real pussy cat sometimes, a super nice guy, but to continue to lead a project with such massive importance is no mean feat - you can't afford to pull ANY punches.
You have to keep everything in line and nip trouble in the bud before it starts.
As an old grey beard - 57 in January - I'm waiting for the inevitable.
I work for a large corporate - one of those massive corporates hardly anyone has heard of, 36,000 employees and offices in 40 countries.
Amazingly, we're still WFH permanently with just a guideline to meet at least twice a month at the office - very few do.
The company recently sold a building they own in my region of the world and rented a smaller office space.
In a way this makes WFH seem more permanent.
However, there's two other threats.
The company I work for is very tech driven and has already released numerous AI driven products to bolster it's digital offerings, however, AI is still a threat.
The main threat is what we at the office jokingly refer to as Chenn-AI.
No criticism meant for my fellow Indian colleagues - they are lovely people, hard working and great developers.
The problem is my company has decided that 90% of tech hires can only be from candidates in India - mostly Chennai and Bangalore.
Despite the fact it has offices in 40 countries it has become mandatory that we backfill roles with candidates from India.
It's a no-brainer for the corporate - you can hire 4 Indian software engineers for the same price as a European engineer and probably 5 for the same as a US engineer.
It's a WAY bigger threat than AI right now.
Yeah, I know this has been an issue for some time, but it was generally for less senior roles.
The call centre thing for example.
Now it's reached Senior engineer level.
Oddly, the corporate I work for isn't recruiting from India for management roles - go figure!
The writing is on the wall for me.
I count myself lucky I'm approaching retirement because from where I'm sitting, the gravy train days for software engineers are drawing to a close in the developed world.
It was inevitable I guess - we all basked in the glory of a seemingly never ending stream of high paid work, patting ourselves on the back for having chosen a career which paid highly.
For many of us, WFH was a thing before the pandemic. If you worked for a forward thinking company, 3 days at the office and 2 at home was normal.
All of this lovely stuff is ending - either get on the AI wagon and help train AI to replace you or get on the Management wagon and try to claw your way to a position high enough to escape being replaced by cheaper labour or AI.
Or change career and become a tradesman - sparky, plumber etc.
In a world of so called GUI perfection, flat UI's, billions of dollars of user research and big tech dominance, it's great to see a project like enlightenment still going after all these years.
I've tried it a few times, each time running away screaming because it's so ugly, but it was way ahead of it's time at one point.
I'm going to try it again, to see if it's less ugly - I kinda hope it isn't.
… but that’s my heart thinking.
The reality is business is going to see huge benefits and cost cutting due to AI.
Even at its current level, it can reduce headcount significantly.
By effectively automating the grunt work, more experienced staff can treat an AI assistant as if the work were done by a junior employee.
It will still need checking. It may take some time to get quality output, but it’ll likely be as good or better than junior level for most tasks, and far quicker.
There’s already been a lot of fallout in many sectors. Some of the first to fall have been translators and copywriters. An old friend of mine who has been a copywriter for 30 years can no longer get work.
We can make snidey comments about how businesses will fail due to AI over expectations, but you’d be a fool to dismiss the obvious.
AI is coming for your job, but you just may be lucky enough to hold on for a while if you are smart enough. Just long enough to help train the next generation of AI assistants.
What this means for the economy is anyone’s guess. Fun times ahead, maybe it’s time to learn a trade. Electricians are in demand where I live.
How many people in the market for a new laptop would really know what co-pilot is and what they would need it for?
Many may have heard of it, but not really understand what the fuss is about, nor know why they need it.
So I guess this puts co-pilot PC's into the realm of the computer geek.
But why would someone who understands LLM's want to spend £1000 and up on a laptop when they can build a custom PC with a Nvidia GPU in it?
I bet there's hundreds of thousands of them just gathering dust.
Then there'll be ones that have only ever been used for pure compute tasks - iow, the GPIO never used.
That's great if the device is the same price as the PI used to be.
However, for $120 if all you are going to do is use it as a mini computer for pure compute tasks and not do any GPIO stuff, a second hand NUC is a way better option.
I dabbled using the PI for media servers years back, but found them not powerful enough.
They sure are now, but I opted for a second hand NUC and never looked back.
I can't say I'll buy another PI again - got four of them in various states of slow decay.
... Big tech has most people's data anyway and the majority don't give a damn.
I have no idea what the stats would be between these two outcomes :
Big tech customer data leak
Or
You don't wipe your phone before sale and a buyer steals your data
On the latter, most devices from the last decade ask for a simple verification, passcode or fingerprint, so its far more likely the buyer complains that they can't reset the device.
The chances of a buyer being able to hack the device then depends on luck and skill. If the data is encrypted, that seller would have to be a very important person to make it worthwhile.
The bigger data risk is old PCs, often trivial to get into, including changing user creds.
I've seen people dumping them outside their houses, or at the recycling centre, hard drives still in place.
Even this isn't that risky when it comes down to it. There's far easier ways for bad actors to get data. Let's face it, trawling in skips for old computers from Joe public in the hope of a lucky data score is a fools errand. Businesses less so, obviously.
The more I think about it, the less of a big deal this is for your average Joe, who is already giving away troves of data.
but you like Apple hardware, surely a good solution?
A base model mac mini M4 is a compelling option or even a second hand M1.
Ditto for laptops.
Of course the caveat being you like the hardware, but if you didn't, moot point given the context.
... Waits for someone to mention soldered ram... Oh wait, they already have...
Upgraded my motherboard and cpu recently, so I gave Win11 another try.
I could keep win10 but I hate that too. May as well have the new shiny hate
I went into the installation with the knowledge that on first boot, I'd run a debloater app.
Also that the only thing I would use Win11 for is VR.
That debloater works wonders, making the OS STFU and removing heaps of cruft.
The only "noise* I get now is when Microsoft force me to upgrade.
If I could get ALVR working well in Linux I would ditch Win11 in an instant. Sadly after many hours tinkering with ALVR the best I can get is virtual night, which isn't much fun.
If you have to use Win11 and are admin on your PC, search github for debloater.
... If you don't use it.
Jokes aside, I have a Linux gaming rig that I dual boot into Windows for VR gaming.
It's been running Win11 for a few months. At boot steam starts and I barely see the underlying OS unless it wants to update.
It was necessary to run debloater on it to make it usable - and what a god send that is.
Look it up on github
Despite some inroads recently with the game porting toolkit, plus some triple A titles being released with macOS support, the OS is so far behind the curve when it comes to gaming, it's sad.
Doubly sad considering the power of the M4 chip.
Unless you really must game on macOS and are fine with trying out Crossover, you'll be far better off just getting a steam deck or a dedicated gaming PC.
I've cranked up Crossover on the M4 and it's impressive - a fair few Steam games run relatively well - but it's so hit and miss.
It feels like Linux gaming a decade ago.
I'm a Linux user for gaming (and some work related stuff)
And a windows user - only for VR gaming.
Until someone like Valve are prepared to shake up gaming on macOS, it will never be a truly useful gaming platform.
And Valve aren't going to do that - why would they?
The did it for Linux for many reasons, but one of them is certainly related to control and revenue.
The Linux community got the benefits of all that research, the culmination being the Steam Deck - win-win for everyone.
The game porting toolkit is only really useful if a third party want to take up the mantle and do what Valve did for Linux gaming on the Steam Platform.
Not. Going. To. Happen.
It's obvious that any security patches will find their way online for "free", opening the door to compromised computers, with bogus patches circulating.
Extend support for free at the same time as ceasing beating the dead horse of windows 11 hardware requirements, lift or relax those and more consumers will switch.
Microsoft have to face up to the fact that new versions of Windows don't increase new PC sales like they once did.
> No, I don't know why a virus definition file would need to be embedded in the kernel.
Well, exactly, Microsoft allow this kind of insanity.
So many people are coming to the defence of microsoft with this excuse.
"But yeah, it failed because it's a kernel driver"
As if it is somehow a good idea to allow a third party to add and update a driver in the frikkin kernel on your operating system without you actually bothering to add systems which check it's not going to screw everything up. I don't care how damn complicated or expensive or time consuming it may be to have end-to-end tests checking this shit, even if it takes 24 hours to run them.
It's better than a global outage that will result in billions of lost revenue.
This is ABSOLUTELY the fault of Microsoft, because it's a design flaw in the OS, or rather, it's a design decision that is bat shit crazy.
"Oh, sure, yeah, we trust loads of third party companies to shove kernel driver updates into automatic windows updates, without us checking. What could possibly go wrong?"
"Uh, end to end tests for any updated kernel drivers? No, we can't do that, we have thousands of vendors pushing code. What could possibly go wrong?"
I'm not saying other OS's are immune to this - of course they aren't - but you sure hope there's a level of sanity that prevents a third party from updating your OS at a kernel level without you having any oversight of it.
FFS!
And a thumbs-down.
Seriously?
Having watched all of the media showing BSOD all over the world and you thumbs-down a post saying Microsoft are to blame?
Of course they are, an entire Operating system tanked because a souped up Anti-Virus service released some bad code.
How are Microsoft seemingly getting off scott-free here?
The BSOD issue is _obviously_ shonky coding - seriously it is.
To take down an entire OS due to a 3rd party service failing is cowboy coding circus clown territory.
"It's fine, CrowdStrike _never_ fail, we don't need no graceful failure checks, screw error handling"
Perhaps I'm failing to understand the issue here, or perhaps the world has gone mad.
If you cannot code defensively to ensure third party services don't take down your product when they fail, you have no place as a software engineer or a software company.
It seems that nobody in the wider media is apportioning a lot of blame on Microsoft.
They've been, obviously, very quiet about all of this. The media focus is all on CrowdStrike.
It should be noted that falcon hasn't impacted macOS or Linux users.
The corporate I work for uses Crowdstrike across all operating systems - my work issued mac has falcond running.
I can still use my mac to do my day job.
The fact that Windows BSOD's due to a third party service failure is the real news story here.
Who the hell thinks it's a good idea to NOT bother to code in a failsafe scenario to cover a third party AV service provider failure?
It's coding 101 - or it should be.
One of the defining laws of software is Fail Gracefully.
A complete failure of the OS to boot and for the workaround to be manual intervention on a machine by machine basis?
That beggars belief.
Why are so few people mentioning this glaringly obvious issue?
Once upon a time, I used Slackware - from 2001 to 2004, it was my primary desktop ... apart from gaming.
I'd previously been through RedHat rpm horrors, I absolutely loved win2k as a Desktop (I still rate it as my favourite)
Bottom line, I've got a bunch of t-shirts where I claim I've been there and done that.
But Manjaro? Arch?
I've been a Debian lad since 2005, so stepping into this world was hard. Really hard.
I can't do it - it's almost like trying to move to iOS from Android.
Maybe I'll try again one day, but for now - I'm a lazy ass old computer nerd.
I've kinda got bored of trying Linux distributions for the sake of it.
I switched to macOS a decade back for my primary "get work done" driver.
I switched to Linux two years back for my primary "play some games" driver - but Debian flavoured.
I just can't be arsed fighting with operating systems anymore...
There's a lot of comments here along the lines of pedestrians should be paying more attention.
I'm absolutely inclined to agree with that, but we all know that humans in general are often rubbish at paying attention.
Even those who think they are amazingly attentive are often suffering from a Dunning–Kruger effect.
The fact remains that at low speeds, some EV's are near silent and humans use both vision and hearing to safely navigate around their environment.
I can imagine all sorts of scenarios where even very attentive people are at risk.
Right now, the amount of EV's on the road is still relatively low, it'll be interesting to see how this safety concern pans out.
Probably the most worrying are SUV's, hybrid or full electric, due to their height and mass.
Getting hit by one of those at even 20mph is going to seriously damage you - and they really are almost silent at that speed.
There's no way this is going to be able to be enforced.
Sure, the big brands will play along, but there's hundreds of manufacturers, most in Asia - China - just flooding the market with products.
Some cheap and nasty, others cheap and not that bad.
To enforce this, means getting Amazon to enforce the new laws on sellers.
Given Amazon barely even pay tax and get away with it, good luck getting them involved.
Also, AliExpress continues to gain popularity in the UK - despite slow shipping times and often exceptionally questionable goods - the crazy low prices attract people.
We're no longer in a world of Curry's or Maplin (no longer exist) or Argos dominance of tech products - that ended well over a decade back.
We're in a world where you can get product shipped from anywhere on the planet.
Unless Microsoft go on an all out blitz to push users to 11 (and let's face it, not like they haven't been trying), they will surely be forced to extend the EOL date.
At the time of writing, 11 only has around 25 percent adoption!
I don't know what the minimum adoption rate Microsoft would consider when pulling the plug on win10 support, but if 50 percent of users are still on it by October 2025, that's a HUGE headache for Microsoft.
If you aren't using one yet, you probably should be.
And if you are on the JavaScript bucking bronco, where there's a new re-invented lib or framework every other week, you may want to be locking version numbers in your package.json files.
Sure, automated checks (you have got those, right?), do a damn good job of alerting you to security threats, but they'll only catch what is known about, and release updates happen in seconds.
... perhaps all of that silly "playing at being a big tech company" whilst the former CEO was onboard and driving the fat bonuses for the C-Suite gravy train emptied those coffers?
It really did seem there was a rather large start-up style play area for the top brass to muck about with, where every single venture failed, other than the core business.
That core business being the unsexy but incredibly important infrastructure that kept the companies lights on whilst the the money was frittered away on all sorts of daftness.
"Zorin OS, like its Irish cousin Linux Mint, is not a distro intended to appeal to existing Linux users."
Wow, now just hold on a minute there El Reg!
I've been using Linux since '95 in various flavours, I used to spend hours trying to get devices drivers working by kernel hacking.
I ran slackware as my primary Desktop OS for 2 years, long before Ubuntu appeared and the days of easy installs and configuration.
I've used Linux in all manner of areas - very familiar with what is under the hood.
Guess what, I use Linux Mint for my Gaming needs. (replacing Pop_OS! because I found it to be better)
Why?
Because it's super easy and I don't waste my time on any setup - it just works.
Yeah, I could install a totally minimal distro, heck maybe antiX Linux and then manually setup everything I need, creating a minimalistic system that'll run all my games with zero bloat.
But that'll take a few more hours and really, I've got terrabytes of disk space ... and I just want to play some games dammit.
<blockquote>AI could be the mechanism to shorten notebook replacement cycles, according to the chief financial officer at Dell.</blockquote>
There isn't even any attempt to hide the fact that Dell intend to clamber onto the AI hype train in order to shift product.
You can almost see what will happen next.
Dell will start marketing new lineups of notebooks, where they hype AI capabilities due to "new" chip models - mentioning all the right buzzwords.
Forget the fact that ANY computer that can get onto the internet and use services like ChatGPT can already access AI services.
Forget the fact that even the most powerful notebook GPu/CPu combo won't even come close to matching cloud based services, assuming software on it leverages some form of LLM functionality.
They'll just be slapping stickers on the box "New and improved AI capability!"
It's bullshit.
"IBM was upskilling all its employees on AI"
So those employees can expedite their eventual replacement?
It makes sense, right?
Who better to train the AI to do their job?
The employees start leveraging AI, which improves LLM's and slowly makes those employees redundant.
----------
I'm fairly confident that I've got maybe 5 years before I get made redundant, but that's fine, as I'm only 10 years off from retirement age anyway.
I'm a software engineer with 35 years of experience, yet 25 years of that experience is mostly useless, such is the pace of change.
You can already see, as an engineer, where this is headed. When experienced engineers are impressed with what something like co-pilot can already do, that says a lot.
We know right now it's not capable of designing entire systems, yet it's only a matter of time before, with some experienced proompters, it can do just that.
It's echoing the industrial revolution, when machinery replaced man power.
Human intervention will still be required, but if 90% of the grunt work can be automated and be 1000x faster, a team of 20 can be replaced by a single person.
Microsoft seem hellbent on destroying Windows, don't they?
There doesn't seem to be any joined up thinking in terms of what they ship to the Desktop or how they change the Desktop, just a series of experiments.
It seems to be one massive playground involving billions of Desktops, but the end-user makes none of the rules up and half the time, isn't sure what the games are.
Everything is "opt-out", except for things which you can't "opt-out" of.
Even the "opt-out" things can often mysteriously "opt-in" again after an update.
Talking about updates, it feels like every update is a roll of the dice - you never quite know what you'll get, never exactly know when it'll hit - aside from a few paltry options to skip for a while - and never know whether it's going to break something.
In short, if you use Windows 11 as your personal Desktop Operating system, your computer is no longer yours - it isn't under your control.
Windows 10? Not much better.
VP - niche product in a niche market.
I sold my Quest 3 on eBay after 2 months - and that has an absolute TON of content available.
VR gaming is still fairly niche, but heck, the Vision Pro effectively becomes a niche product within a niche market - it's only the Apple Hype Machine that is driving sales, which will soon dwindle.
For my tuppence, the Quest gave me rapid headaches until I got my "VR Legs", but sadly often resulted in all-day headaches the next day - classic eye-strain.
Tried everything - four different straps, different glasses prescriptions etc.
But heck, I got my fun out of it - once I'd played Half-Life Alyx, every other game I tried paled by comparison, so there was no point keeping the device.
This screams out in the story, right?
"heavily customized version of Oracle for finance"
You can read that in a number of ways,
"Hacked on core functionality, can no longer upgrade"
"Didn't understand how to develop properly, so customized (hacked), now in world of hurt"
"Oracle was the wrong solution in the first place"
Either way, whenever you read a term like that, "customized", as opposed to "extended" or "framework", it sounds very much like a cluster f0rk.
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