Ooh. I like that. Ethical, and fun!

10/10. No notes.

Also, I now realize that “Dumbass Billionaire” is a single unambiguous word.

Lol. I did put my money on “barely distinguishable from the Switch 1, maybe bigger”. I guess I win the betting pool.

I’m mainly happy because I didn’t want to be tempted to support Nintendo’s lawsuit happy asses, anyway.

If they ever release a Virtual Boy Mini, my conscience will never recover from my own hypocrisy, though.

That’s a great point. And come to think about it, the flamethrower drones may work better alongside the attack dogs.

With auto targeting tranquilizer dart firing turrets, of course.

It’s pretty important to me to not turn to a life of crime, but I appreciate everyone laying off their security teams, and putting all their most valuable data in one place, just in case I should change my mind…

I’m not going to change my mind, but it’s awfully considerate anyway.

Sorry about that. I copy pasted the wrong thing.

I’ve corrected it to the intended link at:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

Agreed on all points.

That said, I am smarter than the asshole CEOs, and the current state of computer security is abysmal.

So there’s still some hope that we are barreling toward my (mostly) benevolent reign over endless Michael Bay blockbuster summers.

Hopefully, for everyone’s sake, reality will fall somewhere in between.

But joking aside, money isn’t the only form of power. There aren’t that many billionaires (compared to he rest of us) and a billionaire’s influence is limited by what the rest of us will or won’t do.

You’re oversimplifying things here there are a lot

I think… we’re agreeing?

My point is that what is currently possible with AI doesn’t solve any of that.

People in this thread keep discussing growth in programmer productivity as if programmer typing speed and number of languages known are the limiting factors of programmer productivity. They are not. It’s all the other bullshit that makes (the vast majority of) programming projects fail.

My source: I know so many programming languages and I type insanely fast. My team is also productive beyond all reason. These two tidbits are only related in that I tried and failed with the first before succeeding with the second.

but how do people have the patience to deal with all of that in the beginning?

Whenever I was frustrated with a stupid undecipherable error message, I would just tweak my vim config a bit.

Within a few minutes, my rage at the error would be completely replaced with rage toward vimscript.

Then I would revert my vim config change, and return to the undecipherable error message with a fresh perspective. mainly relief that at least it’s not vimscript.

Joking aside, I really did learn vim mostly during coffee breaks or while waiting on some long running build process.

I’m actually anxious this is where it’s going.

If we end up there, I’m going to charge so much money, and I’m going to have all kinds of pain-in-the-ass clauses in my contract.

If I have to clean up the stupid again, everyone else is going to be doing doing some stupid shit that I find funny, in exchange for my help cleaning up their mess.

Yeah. In this wild scenario, only the people who can crack the robots security protocols, and reprogram them, will have any influence over society.

I promise to be a benevolent ruler.

Except Michael Bay will have to return to making Transformers movies full time. Sorry about that, in advance.

Yeah. The whole job is figuring out just the right away to say “pretty please” to the computer. The ways it’s done changes every decade or so. The fact that it’s a huge pain in the ass has yet to change, in spite of decades of marketing promises.

AI isn’t ready to replace coders, but it’s quickly going to make a dent on the numbers needed.

Let me push back on this a bit - this belief comes from the assumption that I, as a hiring manager, need more team members because they can only type so fast.

My actual need for separate development team members is to achieve a bench depth of two people in each of the seven specializations necessary to keep my employer un-bankrupt. (My annual bonus is better if I somehow miraculously cover the 14 specializations necessary to make us never look like idiots. But these are wishes, not miracles.)

I don’t currently see any sign that AI will ever materially affect the number of people I need to hire.

In contrast, the specific individuals I hire have massive impact on how many others I need to hire. One person with three specializations brings me massive savings.

But I pay my people to understand our organizational domains of expertise. LLMs don’t bring any new understanding whatsoever into the organization.

Now lets say A.I makes developers 50% more productive

That’s wildly optimistic. If I recall correctly, early studies are showing the 51% of participants who saw any improvement, reported an average of a 20% improvement.

Even granting that optimism, since 5% of all software projects are on time and within budget, we may look forward to a whopping leap to 7.5 out of every hundred software projects arriving on time and under budget, in a best case scenario.

The hard truth no one wants to talk about is that the average software development team is awful.

This glorified parrot tool of LLMs is one of the coolest we have seen in awhile, but it’s not going to materially fix the awful state of the field of software development.

The average software development team doesn’t understand how to deliver high quality maintainable solitions on a reasonable timeline.

AI may mildly improve the delivery timelines of the still very incorrect and over-budget solutions delivered by the average development team.

you put yourself out there with confidence and your parents blood money from emerald mines you will outcompete the quiet competent types.

But yeah. Point taken.

“There are still the billion other footguns built directly into bash that will destroy hopes and dreams, but”

That’s well put. I might put that at the start of all of my future comments about bash in the future.

Yeah, I mean. If I unlock the basement door, I don’t suddenly regain all the trust I lost, either.

(Edit: In my hypothetical example. I cannot stress enough that there is no one trapped in my basement. I just watch too many horror films.)

it seems weird to attack Canonical so much over it.

I mean, on the technical side, sure. Canonical’s technical choice is just weird. Plenty of fully open app store environments have almost no competition, because self hosting is still hard work.

But all of the business reasons - for having a closed proprietary sole app server - go against everything that Canonical used to claim they stood for.

Canonical’s business choice not to open source the snap servers is an open declaration of war against the FOSS community who have previously rallied around them.

It’s like inviting someone into my basement and locking the door with a key as they get to the bottom step. The action isn’t illegal, but the probable motive is creepy as fuck. (Maybe I just watch too many horror movies. Lol.)

Oof. I’m anxious that folks are going to get the wrong idea here.

While OCI does provide security benefits, it is not a part of a healthly security architecture.

If you see containers advertised on a security architecture diagram, be alarmed.

If a malicious user gets terminal access inside a container, it is nice that there’s a decent chance that they won’t get further.

But OCI was not designed to prevent malicious actors from escaping containers.

It is not safe to assume that a malicious actor inside a container will be unable to break out.

Don’t get me wrong, your point stands: Security loves it when we use containers.

I just wish folks would stop treating containers as “load bearing” in their security plans.