1979, 14 years old, my dad brought home a TRS-80 Model 1. I started to learn BASIC by typing in code listings from Byte magazine. Then I started coming up with my own projects. Loved it so much I knew what I wanted to to do for a living and what college program I wanted to get into.

Nearly 40 years post college, I still play with coding and system design on my time and TBH, much more satisfaction and happiness from that than my day job.

As more and more things we might consider "platform" move to the cloud, I think it also matters what the service provider means by saying it's up. Just because the servers are alive and responding doesn't mean the platform is really functional.

One vendor in particular we deal with has a powerful feature which we use to a large extent. Unfortunately, that particular feature is all too often not working. The servers are up and the rest of the platform is working, but we need that feature, so if it's down, it doesn't help much that the rest of the platform is up.

And very hard to re-assemble after you have done that. They are not in the book binding business.

I think the problem will be that there was only so much we could do wrong while we were learning 15+ years ago and our mentors had a reasonable scope to watch around us as we learned. People learning now can get a coding agent to build the entire system for them and it is much harder for the mentor to review that work.

My concern is how much damage could be done by someone learning 15+ years ago vs someone learning now.

I must have missed the press release when Two Sigma open-sourced their algorithmic trading models so that the rest of us could make the best stock investments for our retirements. /s

Unions tend to use otherwise arbitrary criteria to determine a members value. Not all people with the same number of years of experience, the same job title or the same degree provide equal value to the company.

As a school board member, I had to deal with the situation of a nationally recognized(awarded) teacher who got paid the same as every other teacher with the same degree and years in district. When asked why we wouldn't pay him what he is worth, the answer was simple, your union won't let us. Not every job type/environment make sense to have a union.

If they don't contribute equally, why should they be paid equally, especially when the individuals desire to be paid per their contribution. Some rest on their years and degree while others go above and beyond to deliver a difference. The union doesn't allow the employer to recognize that.

I think there are jobs where those distinctions don't matter as much, but creative jobs and other areas where the ability of an employee to deliver quality is very personal don't seem to work well with unions in my view.

I would have loved to pay that teacher more because he did so much more and had a huge positive influence on his students, but the union would never have allowed that.

> If they don't contribute equally, why should they be paid equally

I prefer to be paid 150 than be paid 130 and my colleague 110. It is stupid to have as a goal to earn more than you colleagues. Your goal should be to maximize your own pay.

Maybe because the union role is not to encourage anyone to burn themself down in relentless efforts? Maybe in the union eye, trying to protect people in the working class includes to dodge the traps of the exploiting class and the meritocratic myth?

Divide and rule is nothing new, and playing on the extra individual effort rewards is a very cheap trick to lower the working condition of everyone, possibly even the one doing the extra efforts. It doesn’t take a Nobel price in economy and a certificate of adhesion to Marxism to fathom this basic power dynamic leveraging on sociological imbalance, does it?

I think apps like this are the real risk. Who is going to get in trouble because vim* has a bug from AI generated code? Errors in your accounting software can get you into audit/compliance trouble.

Looking around my home area, I found HS football bleachers showing up as buildings and an outdoor basketball court showing up as a building. Looking at the coloring of those features on Google maps, I can see how the mistakes might have been made. But still feels like it needs tuning.

To be fair, I checked my boyhood home in very rural Maine and it was correct for the size and shape of the multiple farm buildings.

I live in Central NJ, which is pretty densely populated and surrounded by tech firms. The nearest MicroCenter to me is 35 miles away in Brooklyn.

I think Apple would be better served by re-introducing a line of smaller phones. Whether it is for physical or functional reasons, not everybody wants to outdo the size of the previous model. Bigger isn't always better. People with smaller hands, young teens or smaller stature adults, would love an appropriate sized phone.