rodgerd

I mean sure if you want to rely on a tool where this guy will disable chunks of it because he's had a hissy fit, I guess it "won't affect you".

The modern analogue of 4GLs would be the promise of LLMs letting you write prompts so you don't have to learn a programming language; the promise of the original 4GLs like Pearl (not to be confused with perl) and Objectstar was to let you have non-programmers writing business logic without being COBOL or FORTRAN programmers.

About a decade ago I looked into moving some COBOL components off-mainframe (either as COBOL-on-Linux or a rewrite into Java, which itself is really COBOL Mk II at this point), and your point about the operating environment is one of the key elements, but not all of it; there's also the fact that the first big shift to automation, via mainframe assembler and COBOL, is when companies sacked a lot of the folks who knew how and why the pre-automation processes worked - that knowledge exists in the mainframe code and the heads of the people who work(ed) on it, and nowhere else. A rewrite or a replatform is very, very hard and risky as a result; the system is now defined by how the mainframe runs the processes, to a very large degree.

The third is that COBOL is only the tip of the iceberg. As soon as I spent time learning about the code I was being asked to look at, you get into decades of evolving programming practises. Modern COBOL is multithreaded, probably uses DB2 and relational datamodels. COBOL from thirty years ago is probably single-threaded, only runs right on high-clocked single-execution models, cuts down to hand-written s390 assembler regularly, and uses VSAM files with non-relational data. Older code still will be sharing data simply by banging it into memory regions for other code to read out of, because that's how you got performance back in the day.

Trying to identify how you'd pull a function out of that and move it off is somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible. It's usually so complicated and expensive it's easier to try and hire people who want to apprentice as mainframe programmers and keep the current codebase running.

My number one is fans of scumbags, or scumbags themselves, blaming autism for them doing rapes or sexual assaults.

If you like the post referenced, you'd probably enjoy "The Autist's Guide to the Galaxy" by Clara Tornvall.

It's better than that, OpenAI are stealing the eggs and lobbying to make egg theft legal, so long as you only steal eggs from small farmers and back yards. Because they can, by their own admission, never stay in business if they have to pay for the eggs.

The biggest problem with making Mastodon better is exactly that: anyone who dares suggest the way it's always been has a flaw will quickly be shouted down by people telling them that they're an idiot who clearly doesn't understand that the shortcoming is a feature.

> In my opinion these are a huge miss.

Oh, really? Can you share your expertise that trumps that of the people who work with them every day?

Write events in parquet format and use DuckDB for your analytics?

If the discussion leads with the idea that we're entitled to question whether authors and editors deserve to make a living for their work, why should anyone else be immune?

Basically you're paying extra money for the murdering at this point.

> Virtually all humans in the books -- and I'm aware of the fact that they're not Earth humans but a wide variety of humanoid aliens -- are kept as pets by the ships, for amusement, basically as clowns.

So like current late stage capitalism, except the AIs are more interested in our comfort than the billionaires are.

So you do mean "I am happy to steal from living authors who would like to be paid for their work, this is my excuse du jour".

Hey, how do you make a living, jampekka?

If the centrepiece of your legal defence is "we're just like a library" it would probably help to behave like a library: for example, if you purchase five books or CDs then lend five copies at a time.

The IA doesn't appear to buy many books or CDs or DVDs (it has donation drives for second-hand copies). It doesn't do any controls over the number of copies "out". It resembles MegaUpload or other piracy sites more than a library.

> the copyright cartels

You mean "living authors who would like to be paid for their work", right?

There's a reason Adam Smith's feelings about landlords are scarcely distinguishable from those of Marx.

I was looking for a clip from a trailer for a film that is available on physical media, streaming, and was in cinemas two years ago.

IA had the whole film online as bluray quality rip.

What's the difference between the IA and Kim Dotcom at that point?

There's a reason that Apple won't let you enable FIDO keys without having two of them to enroll.

Unfortunately the Texas courts have indicated that they will be finding the NRLB illegal in and of itself.

The AI craze is based on wide-scale theft or misuse of data to make numbers for the investor class. Funneling customer data and proprietary information and causing data breaches will, per Schmidt, make hundreds of billions for a handful of people, and the lawyers will clean up the mess for them.

Any company that tries to hold out will be buried by investment analysts and fund managers whose finances are contingent on AI slop.

That describes YouTube's path to becoming the online video monopoly.

Imagine my complete surprise that the guy in charge of Google when sex with subordinates was rampant, and who gave an exec who was sacked for sexual harassment a ninety million dollar parachute, is upset that there aren't more people in the office.

I hope that you aren't expecting a court with a rampant Clarence Thomas to care about anything pertaining to your rights vis-a-vis the police.

You can buy open hardware running Linux today. Why don't you?

Oh right, the mobile Linux experience is so bad only the most devoted will subject themselves to it.

Yeah, remember how great computers were in the 90s? So secure and usable.

I get that a lot of nerds long for the day when "desktop computer janitor" was a well-paid job and normal people couldn't use a computer effectively for any length of time. But that doesn't mean it was a good time.

Yes?

Any "lets move this COBOL to something else" will, more often than not, flounder on the fact that "rewrite all this functionality" will cost massively more than "just find someone to extend what we already have".

Yeah, large scale copyright theft for profit is something that you're only allowed to do if your name is "Sam Altman".

Similarly, the Citroen GSA actually existed: https://www.autoevolution.com/cars/citroen-gsa-1979.html#aga...

Indeed. One of my rules of thumb is that if it requires permanent storage, k8s is the wrong place, even if it is in-theory possible to do. Dealing with that whole side of things is so error-prone.

> Container orchestration is the thing I believe is "overused." It was designed to solve "hyper" scale problems, and it's being misused in far more modest use cases where VMs should prevail.

As a relatively early corporate adopter of k8s, this is absolutely correct. There are problems where k8s is actually easier than building the equivalent capability elsewhere, but a lot of uses it's put to seem to be driven more by a desire to have kubernetes on one's resume.

Well, it was initially covert, and he stalled both the results and then the votes, both under pressure around the "clean up" he was doing.