Isn't the real problem here the unscrupulous AI scrapers? These sites want to be paid for their content to be used for AI training, if this same content is scraped by the Internet Archive the AI companies can get the content for free.

It's unfortunate that this undermines the usefulness of the Internet Archive, I don't see an alternative. IMHO, we'll soon see these AI scrapers cease to advertise themselves leading to sites like the NY Times trying to blacklist IP ranges as this battle continues. Fun times ahead!

I think trademark, I remember Bill Gates referring to Windows NT as "a better UNIX than UNIX".

OS/2 is likely where that came from - https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/21/successor_to_unix_pla...

That's Plan9 and 9front. I'd say NT it's a better VMS, VMS++ in the alphabet ;), as you get V->W, M->N, S->T, so "WNT".

In my opinion, time spent learning Perl or an outmoded framework still helped me learn new things and stretch myself. A lot of that knowledge is transferable to other languages or frameworks. After learning QuickBasic and REXX it was pretty easy to pickup Ruby and Python. ;-)

> knowledge is transferable

I concur: Perl taught me to mentally parse and build (complex) regexes, a highly transferable skill. The Lisp course I was taught in the late 80s, certainly helped me grok Clojure and find it a pretty natural fit. I think this is a very common trope.

"Dang, the AI really screwed up this time. Call in the de-sloppers."

In my opinion, it is far too early to claim that developers developing like it was maybe three years ago are statistically irrelevant. Microsoft has gone in on AI tooling in a big way and they just nominated a "software quality czar".

I used the future tense. Maybe it will be one hundred years from now, who knows; but the main point still stands. It would just be nice to move the conversation beyond "but I enjoy coding!".

Like the new features in Windows 11? They’ve just anointed a “software quality czar” and I suspect this is not coincidence.

I am not confident that AI tooling can diagnose or fix this kind of bug. I’ve pointed Claude Opus at bugs that puzzle me (with only one code base involved) and, so far, it has only introduced more bugs in other places.

I'm not saying it can btw. I'm arguing for the opposite.

And for the record, I'm impressed at issues it can diagnose. Being able to query multiple data sources in parallel and detect anomalies, it sometimes can find the root cause for an incident in a distributed system in a matter of minutes. I have many examples when LLMs found bugs in existing code when tasked to write unit tests (usually around edge cases).

But complex issues that stem from ambiguous domain are often out of reach. By the time I'm able to convey to an LLM all the intricacies of the domain using plain English, I'm usually able to find the issue myself.

And that's my point: I'd be more eager to run the code under debugger till 2am, than to push an LLM to debug for me (can easily take till 2am, but I'd be less confident I can succeed at all)

I have junior people on my team using Cursor and Claude, it’s not all great. Several times they’ve checked in code that also makes small yet breaking changes to queries. I have to watch out for random (unused) annotations in Java projects and then explain why the tools are wrong. The Copilot bot we use on GitHub slows down PR reviews by recommending changes that look reasonable yet either don’t really work or negatively impact performance.

Overall, I’d say AI tooling has maybe close to doubled the time I spend on PR reviews. More knowledgeable developers do better with these tools but they also fall for the toolings false confidence from time to time.

I worry people are spending less time reading documentation or stepping through code to see how it works out of fear that “other people” are more productive.

The federal government doesn't manage any national credit agencies.

I don't see how that matters, the point is that we don't need the federal government's mandate in order to have a national clearinghouse of title data.

That’s not what’s being discussed. In other countries that operate under what’s called the Torrens title system, the government maintains an authoritative central land registry. If you wind up in a legal dispute about ownership of a piece of land, the judge looks at the government books and is bound by what they say (with minimal exceptions).

We cannot have such a national registry in the United States. We could have 50 independent ones, but the few states that tried it have given up and reverted.

Since title events, like marriages, can happen outside the US, that only helps a little.

It's pretty common for software developers to be asked to code up some random algorithm on a whiteboard as part of the interview process.