Recent content by harborsparrow

Of course I would not have done it in that situation. But USGS had been very heavy handed, coming in and demanding that we send them all our data but without even understanding why our data model was more complex than theirs. So we had to do all this extra work to send them dumbed-down data...

So if we're gonna talk about passwords--I had to work on a project for my algae scientists that was funded by the US Geological Survey. I had to maintain a login on the USGS site, and their system required me to choose a difficult-to-remember password. But also, the password had to change...

Interesting and thought provoking.

My main concern about Google docs is to avoid using the file sharing any more than possible. Sharing folders and files onto one's local drive is a substantial security risk. I've heard too many talks by Rebecca Mercuri about those risks. She makes her living in part by being an expert...

The fact that a podcast narrator says a thing is meaningless. I have heard podcasters make all sorts of wrong statements while speaking with apparent total conviction. No matter the credentials of any speaker, absolutist claims about "all rivers" may be considered a red flag of caution, as I...

Given its age, I suspect the monitor first. If you buy a monitor and that doesn't fix the issue, you should be able to return it (save,the packaging untilmuou know).

This may seem off topic, but it might be related too, since we're talking about the phenomenon of software development managers possibly skimping on best practices to save money. Remember that Toyota fiasco where cars would accelerate no matter what the driver did? The very description of the...

I don't think Amazon really expected to make money from the Kindle hardware anyway. Where they make money is in sales of Kindle books for reading on their free tablet and phone reader, which IS fairly friendly albeit full of annoying ads.

Factchecker, we'll have to disagree about the usefulness of code reviews. I recall them catching many issues, but I also recall them becoming far less effective when the software engineering pinheads came up with the idea of basing performance reviews on how few faults were found in one's code...

OTOH, had Amazon not pushed forward into ebooks and created the free reader, my house would still be cluttered with hundreds of old sci-fi and fantasy books so that I could reread them someday. Instead, I have them on the Kindle software client provided by free by Amazon. Cleared out like an...

AI should not, in my view, be used in weapons at all. This will be an unpopular view. I feel certain it has been happening for many years already. In the 1980's at Bell Labs, I worked in software for long-haul lightwave communications and later for managing networks of these systems. I...

AI "assisting" programmers is indeed extremely helpful. I use it too. I think the enquiry here was whether AI agents can or will or should be trusted to do the whole development process from a specification or design fed to it. It is impossible to know. Just remember that the U.S. and Russia...

I agree that AI will always be faster than humans, and managers will use it to generate software if it seems to save money. But because of the probabilistic nature of AI's underlying algorithms, I think AI coders will always misunderstand a few important things that (if it is true) would make...

My comments were in the context of whether AI can be guaranteed to perform well. AI that produces code cannot be made more reliable just by making it (i.e., the code-generating AI agent) open source where a lot of eyes review it's source code, because AI is Not Just Code.

There is a lot of wisdom in many of the above comments. My two cents is, don't go overboard. Code documentation ought not be a design doc, though people may feel falsely reassured by the presence of a lot of verbiage. Code documentation exists to assist future code maintainers in...