Peace of mind. We have a light that lights up red when a door is open. At the end of the night we get an announcement “all doors closed” - last night I got an announcement telling me one door was open - I went there and sure enough: the magnet side of the sensor had fallen off, door was closed.
some girl who shares a huge collection of games that don’t require connectivity
Dunno her, https://www.mensxp.com/technology/gaming/171080-best-offline-games-without-internet.html
I had about a dozen WeMo devices controlling various stuff around the house, they just accumulated over the years. About a year ago, I “got serious” and ripped out all the cloud connected stuff and setup a Zigbee based Home Assistant system. It’s about 5x more capable than the old hodge podge of cloud devices, much lower lag, much better management capabilities, and when the internet connection goes down, it still works. The cloud devices would take long coffee breaks about twice a year.
Dream on, meanwhile the world will be buying $8 cloud connected “smart switches” because they’re the cheapest, easiest to install things out there and even grandma is able to say “hey Alexa, turn on the coffee maker” and make it work.
Resist the temptation, hundreds of hours will be lost down that rabbithole after you start.
Though, it is kinda cool stuff, when it’s working.
Kodi is pretty reliable…
Education is a good thing, but in a society where everybody is well educated just having an education doesn’t get you the most desirable real estate…
I sense my IT career is over.
The IT grunt work is going to get 10x easier (need 1/10th the head count for grunt work).
If you do more than grunt work, as most “computer” people actually do, your job should be safe from AI for a while.
More efficient for whom?
That would be the people paying less tax…
Learning isn’t a guarantee of a higher income. It might help temporarily, but when all the poor are educated they will still be on the bottom of the economic pyramid, and possibly less complacent about their situation having been educated…
The piece of paper is a barrier to entry, an entrenchment of academia in the global economy.
Read some Ivan Illich on the topic (Deschooling Society), he’s pretty lucid and still very relevant 50+ years later.
There’s a corp solution called “CyberArk” that’s intended for storing passwords and other secrets and providing an audit trail for every access, as well as access controls, etc. It’s nothing like a solution for personal data storage, but those core concepts would be great.
The trick is getting Meta, Alphabet, X, banks, retailers, libraries and the rest to agree to use this API for storage of your data. The next (impossible) trick is enforcing their secure deletion of copies of your data in a timely fashion after they have accessed it.
Some do, some don’t, but more importantly: most just don’t care.
I had a tester wander into a set of edge cases which weren’t 100% properly handled and their first reaction was “gee, maybe I didn’t see that, it sounds like I’m going to have a lot more work because I did.”
I work in a “tight” industry where we check ALL our code. By contrast, a lot of places I have visited - including some you would think are fairly important like medical office management and gas pump card reader software makers - are not tight, not tight at all. It’s a matter of moving the needle, improving a bad situation. You’ll never achieve “perfect” on any dynamic non-trivial system, but if you can move closer to it for little or no cost?
Of course, when I interviewed with that office management software company, they turned me down - probably because they like their culture the way it is and they were afraid I’d change things with my history of working places for at least 2.5 years, sometimes up to 12, and making sure the code is right before it ships instead of giving their sales reps that “hands on, oooh I see why you don’t like that, I’ll have our people fix that right away - just for you” support culture.
bullshit tests that pretend to be tests but are essentially “if true == true then pass” is significantly worse than no test at all.
Sure. But, unsupervised developers who: write the code, write their own tests, change companies every 18 months, are even more likely to pull BS like that than AI is.
You can actually get some test validity oversight out of AI review of the requirements and tests, not perfect, but better than self-supervised new hires.
I’m mixed on unit tests - there are some things the developer will know (white box) about edge cases etc. that others likely wouldn’t, and they should definitely have input on those tests. On the other hand, independence of review is a very important aspect of “harnessing the power of the team.” If you’ve got one guy who gathers the requirements, implements the code, writes the tests, and declares the requirements fulfilled, that better be one outstandingly brilliant guy with all the time on his hands he needs to do the jobs right. If you’re trying to leverage the talents of 20 people to make a better product, having them all be solo-virtuoso actors working independently alongside each other is more likely to create conflict, chaos, duplication, and massive holes of missed opportunities and unforeseen problems in the project.
but unit tests should 100% be the responsibility of the dev making the change.
True enough
A bad test is worse than no test
Also agree, if your org has trimmed to the point that you’re just making tests to say you have tests, with no review as to their efficacy, they will be getting what they deserve soon enough.
If a company is going to rely heavily on AI for anything I’d expect a significant traditional human employee backstop to the AI until it has a track record. Not “buckle up, we’re gonna try somethin’” track record, more like two or three full business cycles before starting to divest of the human capital that built the business to where it is today. Though, if your business is on the ropes and likely to tank anyway… why not try something new?
Was a story about IBM letting thousands of workers go, replacing them with AI… then hiring even more workers in other areas with the money saved from the AI retooling. Apparently they let a bunch of HR and other admin staff go and beefed up on sales and product development. There are some jobs that you want more predictable algorithms in than potentially biased people, and HR seems like an area that could have a lot of that.
We have had guys submit tests like that, long before AI was a thing.
A software tester walks into a bar, he orders a beer.
He orders -1 beers.
He orders 0 beers.
He orders 843909245824 beers.
He orders duck beers.
AI can be trained to do that, but if you are in a not-well-trodden space, you’ll want to be defining your own edge cases in addition to whatever AI comes up with.
Depends on your level of trust. I trust the sensor to tell me the door is open/closed (which is a concern to know if people are actually coming in or out - can’t do that with the door closed)… I don’t trust a smart lock to always lock or unlock when I want it to, and those are the things that will give you a locked/unlocked status report. If anybody really wants to get in/out of our house it doesn’t matter if the doors are locked or not, they can always break a window.