timochka

The important thing is this: can you still deliver lectures to the rest of the world on the Importance of Freedom Of Speech, and the fact that only Yanks have it because Elon can worship Hitler on the Internet?

And the answer is, yes. Yes you can, and always will. So the actual reality isn't really important. Because all you actually learned from 1984 is that of the government tells you that you have freedom of speech, and also tells you that Eastasia and Eurasia don't, That's Good Enough For You and you're The Free-est People In The World.

I don't buy the Epstein files distraction, because it's pretty clear the US public don't give a shit. What would the Epstein files even prove?

You could release an authentic video of Trump fucking an 8 year old and then throwing the lifeless body down a laundry chute and most Yanks would just shrug and say "whaddaguy". Hell, if the kid was an immigrant's, his ratings would probably go up.

There is nothing in the Epstein files that could possibly touch Trump. It's all already priced in and you elected him anyway.

No idea why the downvotes here.

I mean, someone up there just unironically called someone else a "class traitor".

This is not a crowd that's hanging straight on its hinges.

A brigade of yanks with "you just can't understand how many solar systems fit in Texas, though" is incoming...

Be fair though, "saving from a GUI app" is not exactly Linux's strong point either.

Click "save"; wonder which badly written save dialog this app is going to use; is it the one with the save button at the top? Or the bottom? Will it actually appear, or will it pop up below the window for Reasons, making you think the dammed thing has crashed? Maybe it's one with a list of favourite locations in the left maybe it's not... Maybe they're actually my favourite locations, or maybe it's an entirely different set of the developer's. If I'm lucky, there's a way to navigate to my home directory without going all the eay to the root and working up from there, more than likely not...

Best of all, it's one of those Save dialogues that thinks it's smart to enumerate the entire goddamned filesystem, network mounts and all, before it will respond to any input at all, leading to the window manager eventually fretting that maybe the application has crashed... Or perhaps it's one of those ones related to Dolphin that thinks it understands WebDAV mounts better than davfs, except that it actually doesn't and you end up saving to a temporary directory just so you can move the file where you actually wanted it from the commandline...

aaaaaargh

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux on all my machines and have been a Unix user since NetBSD 0.8 (33 years, fml...) But clicking "save" or "open" is one of those things that has me shaking my head thinking "how can it STILL be this bad" every time.

He may be dead right, and unduly pessimistic at the same time.

The industry massively overhired relatively unskilled people who believed the job was "writing code", for a few decades; those people got by thanks to Stack Overflow and the fact that most of the code that needed writing really didn't need much skill anyway. There's very little innovation or engineering in most business platforms - a couple of decent architects and an army of code monkeys can deliver most of the software that's needed. We also developed programming languages and frameworks that made it much easier for the unskilled developers to be productive.

Sad to say, these are the people now loudly wailing about the iniquities of AI. If you thought churning out code was the profession - you absolutely should be very concerned that AI will replace you - it will. But if you realised that code was only ever a side effect of the job, which was applying computing to solve problems - you have little to worry about. AI is just a new tool to do it, and is no more a threat than optimising compilers, mamaged runtimes or IDEs were.

When I started my career, I wrote assembly code by hand for platforms that barely even had an operating system. Then C. Then Java - and as far as I'm concerned, every programming language since then has pretty much had training wheels permanently attached... For the last few years, I've preferred Rust, although the job has been more about developing architectures for others to implement than coding myself. But my expectation is that I'll end my career writing instructions for AIs to implement; and that's absolutely fine. The job didn't change, just some of the intermediate representations I had to write to do it. The profession will probably go back to look more like the one I entered - fewer people doing it, but with more formal education in computer science, and much less "coding".

Which is not to say I don't think there's anything to worry about for the profession, there absolutely is. How the hell we identify the future senior engineers with the actual skill and aptitude required, when there are no junior roles to provide the necessary apprenticeship - and when the education system is struggling to adapt to AI use in class - is a massive and fundamental problem. That's what keeps me awake at night, not people who think writing CRUD APIs in C# is a divine gift.