The Usenet post I linked to claims it’s originally from the 1st quarter of 1990, but who knows if that’s accurate or not. I actually can’t find a good source for whether Stumpf is the original author or just the one who posted it to rec.humor.funny.reruns, but it’s usually attributed to him at any rate.

But yeah, fairly ancient by internet standards. I remember first running into it in the 90’s

Some plans less so than others.

Also, I like this framing of users as the enemy. Matches my experience, really.

Wasn’t expecting a fucking rainforest

Orders a

Makes sense that it’s not a Tesla.

Javascript bad.

Applause please.

Doctor of Computer Science

stringly-typed "100%"

yeah that tracks.

Oh I’m barely a Julia programmer 😅 I learned it a couple of years ago just to check it out, started writing a personal project with it but got a bit irritated with how interfaces are defined informally and you have to dig through documentation to find out the methods you need to implement, and then just sort of drifted away. Will definitely use it in the future for eg. some signal analysis thingamajigs and so on though, it was a fun language to use with notebooks.

I usually prefer type systems that make me beg for mercy, heh.

Oh yeah definitely; a lot of the AI crap out there hasn’t gotten rolled out to the EU yet – some of it because of the GDPR, thank fuck for that.

I’d practically guarantee there’s a nonzero amount of suits out there who think it’d be a fantastic idea, and have at the very least tried to make it happen, and that it’s only a matter of time before one of them talks somebody into it if they haven’t already

Naturally I had to try this, and I’m a bit disappointed it didn’t work for me.

I can’t make that “Looking for specific info?” input do anything unexpected, the output I get looks like this:

On pages that reader mode supports, you should see the icon on the right side of the address bar. Here’s an example from one of my tabs:

Yeeeaaah you’re supposed to regularly test that you can actually restore your backups, because boy do a lot of companies find out they can’t only after shit goes sideways and to their horror they then realize that they can’t restore some system’s backups because reasons.

Not sure I’ve worked in a company that did that, and frankly even when I was CTO in a startup we didn’t have automated backup tests – mostly because it was still early days and I just manually tested restoring our in-house service when a change was made that would warrant it. N + 1 other things to do besides automating backup tests so I deemed that Good Enough™.

Could AI personas attend your work meetings for you? One tech CEO says yes

One tech CEO has drain bamage, I take it. To paraphrase Charles Babbage, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.

Like, what the fuck is the point of this? If you think meetings are a problem and AI is the solution, there are a countably infinite amount of ideas you could come up with that aren’t this idiotic

Wait, has somebody actually suggested automating meetings? Like, has somebody said that out loud without a hint of irony or sarcasm?

I can’t help but love obscure punctuation

That said, it’s wonderfully cathartic.

Right‽ This was seriously the best rant I’ve read in ages; not only was it spot on, it was fucking hilarious.

This has to be the best way I’ve seen anyone describe what the problem with the current AI woo-woo is:

And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper’s robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet’s engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn’t worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.