Does that harm me or my stuff? Because smashed furniture and banged up walls suck.
Yes absolutely. By the loss of the founding principles and freedoms of your country using technology as an end run.
Readit Newsvemom commented on When flat rate movers won't answer your calls aphyr.com/posts/381-when-... · Posted by u/kevincox
Dead Comment
vemom commented on When flat rate movers won't answer your calls aphyr.com/posts/381-when-... · Posted by u/kevincox
A good removalist will come and quote and figure it all out. They'll discuss what you need to do to protect things and who will do it. You pay on delivery so at least there is the option to not pay.
Any company that subcontracts as a surprise is shit. My MO now is if I get a surprise subby for any job, from coding to paving to moving I am going to tell them to fuck off. It ain't a good sign.
vemom commented on Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests arstechnica.com/ai/2025/0... · Posted by u/amichail
This is what makes software interesting. It theoretically works forever and has zero marginal production cost, but it's durability is driven by business requirements and hardware and OS changes. Some software might have a 20 year life. Some might only be 6 months.
A house is way more durable. My house is older than all software and I expect it to outlive most software written (either today or ever). Except voyager perhaps!
vemom commented on Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests arstechnica.com/ai/2025/0... · Posted by u/amichail
> It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter?
I recently retired from 40 years in software-based R&D and have been wondering the same thing. Wasn't it true that 95% of my life's work was thrown away after a single demo or a disappointingly short period of use?
And I think the answer is yes, but this is just the cost of working in an information economy. Ideas are explored and adopted only until the next idea replaces it or the surrounding business landscape shifts yet again. Unless your job is in building products like houses or hammers (which evolve very slowly or are too expensive to replace), the cost of doing of business today is a short lifetime for any product; they're replaced in increasingly fast cycles, useful only until they're no longer competitive. And this evanescent lifetime is especially the case for virtual products like software.
The essence of software is to prototype an idea for info processing that has utility only until the needs of business change. Prototypes famously don't last, and increasingly today, they no longer live long enough even to work out the bugs before they're replaced with yet another idea and its prototype that serves a new or evolved mission.
Will AI help with this? Only if it speeds up the cycle time or reduces development cost, and both of those have a theoretical minimum, given the time needed to design and review any software product has an irreducible minimum cost. If a human must use the software to implement a business idea then humans must be used to validate the app's utility, and that takes time that can't be diminished beyond some point (just as there's an inescapable need to test new drugs on animals since biology is a black box too complex to be simulated even by AI). Until AI can simulate the user, feedback from the user of new/revised software will remain the choke point on the rate at which new business ideas can be prototyped by software.
Most of a chefs meals are now poo. Memories of those meals survive but eventually they will fade too.
There is a lot of value in being the stepping stone to tomorrow. Not everyone builds a pyramid.
vemom commented on Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer (1987) [pdf] classes.matthewjbrown.net... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
This writer doesn't look obnoxious to me they make good points. Of course they make good points only for their use case. I'd rather keep computers as a thing and have all the medical advances, plane safety, science advances we have seen. I also couldn't do what I first did on a computer with a pencil: program an automaton. But it is worth reading other points of view and seeing their side.
vemom commented on Legendary Bose Magic Carpet Suspension Is Finally Going Global thedrive.com/news/legenda... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
Do you want traffic circles? Because this is how you get traffic circles.
(I used to live in a neighborhood full of them and I liked them but very many people disagreed with me. If you make speed bumps not work then they will all be replaced with slaloms or circles.
Yes I dream of them. Just imagine cars at 4 way intersection all being able to move!
This is an excellent reply and what I wish the article had been, thanks!
Oh yeah the article does stop abruptly after "2 lines to install"
Buy your steak, toss in a pot of unsalted water. Cook for a while to make it edible. Eat it when hungry. Tell me again how tasty the meat is.
Do the same with rice, potatoes or lentils and you'll have completely different experience. Pick any fruit. There's even no need to boil. Tasty from the get go.
Rare steak is nice.