I looked around in my area, and the is not a soft ban on this sort of space. No need to guess about probabilities. How about in the country where you live? No need to guess; what's the reality?

Some of these houses have been transformed into being unfit for human habitation due to the damp and mould. In some cases, the botched insulation has resulted in an increase in heating costs (along with the damp and mold). Some have suffered structural damage due to the botched insulation, costing tens of thousands to repair.

And an awful lot more written by Jimmy Maher on that site.

This was always so odd to me. I used to think it was just a US weird thing but I understand it happens in many more countries as well (and maybe in my own country as well; I did go through my first degree literally two decades ago, and only at one university). When I went through my first degree, the lecturer provided the material - lectures and some handouts. Every so often there would be a reference to some book for some particular additional topic, but it was never required.

"Uh Oh" realization of what these models can do?

The code reviews was just how I first saw it, but the rot goes deeper. The "uh oh" was my realisation of how much these can damage people's professional development. These people will never get better at their job than they are right now.

A lot of what else GenAI does is great, but this is an "Uh oh" indeed.

Would the company not conduct interviews and pick out whoever seems like the best candidates?

Acquire it from other people. That's how I do it; my day job pays me less money than me just swapping stocks around. The companies whose stock I buy and sell have never seen a penny from me; never received from me a single penny of investment in their business. I harvest wealth without having ever invested in any company and my actions create no new wealth; I harvest wealth I did not create.

They're interested in getting more wealth for themselves. The easiest way to do that is not to generate new wealth.

It had such a long lifetime.

The last time I used it in anger to release commercial software was round about the year 2020, at which point the dev environment for that particular piece of software that customers were still paying annual license fees on was a VM machine. The source code repo it linked to had been unknowingly destroyed years earlier, so the VM image was copied around as needed. One had to find the very latest version of that image, because otherwise any changes one made would of course exclude some other recent changes and customers would receive a Frankenversion.

Starting the VM would reveal a desktop with VC++6 already open, and enough supporting evidence to show how to build the software. Make your changes, build, carefully extract the binary to send to the users, freeze the VM again.

I expect it's still there, still being brought back every year for "one last update."

Well, 80% of sales are physical rather than digital. In what way is that dead?

The evidence indicates that you are incorrect, and while I appreciate your passion, if I must choose between you and reality, reality wins.

So far it's worked out very well. I moved the money into space and green energy.

Is this true? There are a lot of low-productivity and zombie companies trudging through year after year.

I have a fairly broad portfolio of stocks, ranging from blue chips to outright bets inspired by the wallstreetbets crowd.

I have divested entirely of anything that relies on the spending power of the British consumer; retail, house builders, all of it. British people just don't have discretionary money to spend, and it's getting worse rather than better. Thus far, this particular stock market bet has gone well for me (although obviously it's a sign of bad times for the UK consumer). This is not the same as British companies; those with large overseas markets are still going. My Games Workshop shares have been absolute champs, for example.

I cannot speak for other countries, but the UK is one I can see with my own eyes. The people are just ending up with ever less discretionary spending power, where discretionary now appears to be gradually edging towards including "something to live inside" and "food."

Well those ones might be, but the ones I want sure aren't. I have to moderate my book-purchasing to avoid over-spending. The library is pretty helpful (reservation fees are more than I'd like, but a lot less than buying); some years I draw a couple of hundred books. But a lot of them I end up buying. Got one in my hand that was just delivered minutes ago (the new partial biography of Jobs about his years outside Apple).

I guess where this train of thought is going is to point out that people like me do exist. I do spent a lot on books. I borrow a lot from the library. Your assertions come across very strongly suggesting that people like me are a rounding error. But I assure you, when I'm in the bookstore I'm definitely not the only person there. Between us we appear to be propping up entire publishing industries. Almost 80% of the sales are physical rather than digital (1); if we weren't here there would be nothing for you to pirate!

[1] According to https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/books-ma... "Print remains dominant, accounting for 78% of consumer market revenue"

That's the Platinum Premier tier. If you're on the regular tier, paying the minimum, the AI will silently fix all that right up for you.

It's painful indeed. Today, I watched the price go negative as wind and solar reduced the gas contribution to about 3% of the mix. As that gas mix rose to 5%, the price turned around and became painfully expensive again.

That said, from the review: "open source maintainership as cosmic horror." Genuine laugh.