If you look at the first 10 years of Whole Earth Review, starting in 1985, it's startling to see the similarities to the issues of today.

January 1985: Computers as Poison - "It is not our hand that we put into the computer, it is our attention."

July 1985: Digital Retouching - "The end of photography as evidence of anything"

Winter 1985: "Islam: Beyond the Stereotypes"

Spring 1986: "Peering into the age of Transparency" - about space surveillance

Summer 1986: “This text tries to explain how minds work. How can intelligence emerge from non-intelligence? To answer that, I’ll show that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.”

Fall 1986: The Fringes of Reason - Strange myths and eccentric science

Winter 1986: AmerRuss - Joining America and Russia into one country

Summer 1987: What is real & A No-Cash Economy that Works

Fall 1987: Doing Drag & Male Identity

Summer 1988: The Far Left & Far Right Converge Summer 1988: The Rights of Robots

Summer 1989: Is the body obsolete

Summer 1991: Electronic Democracy

Winter 1991: Questioning Technology

Fall 1992: Artificial Life

I'll believe it when they ship.

I just attended a DoD "Scrum of Scrums" meeting.

> In my experience, the worst of software is written by teams with little experience improvising under Agile and taking on tech debt with no time/resources to get things done the right way.

Sounds like every DoD software project I've worked on for the past 5 years.

LOL

You know, maybe you're right. It's possible that entire comment was meant as a joke. Poe's Law strikes again?

As someone who lives the DoD software delivery process on a day-to-day basis, it's too on the nose to not be satire. Everything is _exactly_ wrong, even the waterfall part (everything's "agile" now!).

Edit: Never mind! I just saw their other comment and it seems more like they are blissfully ignorant of the reality on the ground.

If history is any indication, you've got it backwards: it's more likely that LLMs will be phased out for SQL.

What history are you considering?

I've only been through a few cycles, but there's three flavors I've seen:

1. Better query language: QUEL, LINQ, etc.

2. Better data model or performance: CouchDB, Mongo, Redis, etc.

3. Better abstraction: Zope, Active Record, et. al.

SQL vendors keep absorbing the differentiating features from other approaches with enough success that they capture most business use cases. That's not to say there aren't successes outside of SQL! But I've seen it claimed SQL will be dead several times over thanks to some new tech and most of the time SQL instead kills that tech or makes it niche.

This reminded me of a particularly relevant Paul Graham essay: https://paulgraham.com/usa.html

For what it's worth, it's not quite so bad everywhere. In New England infrastructure decays faster due to the weather, so most of our infrastructure is more frequently maintained or replaced. There's definitely some blighted areas, but the image of quaint New England towns with covered bridges is not a lie, and gentrification has caused local governments in our richer cities to invest more in infrastructure. This leads to a dramatic difference in appearance between e.g. New Orleans and Boston.

Kudos to the Globe/AP for getting it right:

> An Amazon Web Services outage is causing major disruptions around the world. The service provides remote computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Boston Globe.

> On DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, users reported issues with Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite online broker Robinhood, the McDonald’s app and many other services.

Even in America they've just chosen the easier cities. I would love it if Waymo came to Boston but until it learns to proactively break traffic laws like all the uber drivers I'm not sure it's going to be very competitive :/.

> I'm not sure it's going to be very competitive

Uber may be faster by driving dangerously, but Waymo has advantages in safety, privacy, cleanliness, no tipping, etc.

I mean, some drivers do drive dangerously, but that's not what I'm talking about. With the narrow network of one way roads, going down an alley or going the wrong way down an empty one way road for 20 feet can sometimes make a 15 to 30 minute difference in trip time. And in traffic, it can be hard to get across some intersections unless you block the intersection. None of these is dangerous behaviors, per se, but they can be difference makers for riders.

I struggled with this for years, until Apple released the iPad Pro with tandem OLED and nano-textured glass. With that I could comfortably program outside, even in direct sunlight. The only issue has been when too much sun hits the iPad for too long and forces it to shutdown. But usually in that case I'm also too hot so it's not too much of a bother to find shade.

Now, with the MacBook Pro w/ nano texture display and the Vivid program to increase brightness, I can have a dual display setup outside using the MBP and iPad. It's an expensive setup if your employer isn't paying for it, but it works very well.

Which MacBook Pro’s have this? Only the newest lineup?

M4 MBP and M4 iPad Pro only. And it might not even be available on the cheapest iPad Pro model.

I think this is meant to be satire, but it's subtle enough that it went over a lot of heads here. Well, that or I'm reading too much into it, but...

Everything the author said was just as true pre-GPT. He's imparting basic business knowledge under the guise of "oh, now that there's this AI thing, you can't just build it have users show up."