I always was in one of the major cities so I had full confidence in them. Lacking the natural fear of death probably has something to do with it as well.
The power of macros is somewhat overblown and not at all hard to explain.
Consider e.g. the "with" statement in Python[1]. Someone came up with the idea, found a way to integrate it into python and a year later, people could use it. In Lisp, you write a macro.
Now Python is a rather agile language as these things go. In other languages it would be a lot more than a year. When I was in college, my professor wanted us to use generics, but the school mandated language, Java, lacked generics at the time. So we were told to use a fork of javac that had generics added. Pretty much none of the development tools would play nicely with this, and javac was at least two orders of magnitude slower at compiling than my preferred java compiler at the time (jikes).
None of this is world-ending, but it really is annoying. The argument for macros is just "what is the next generics/with/whatever feature that your language is missing." Most of the features that lisp programmers use macros for have made it into modern languages that continue to evolve, so the leverage narrows. In the late '90s it was probably a much bigger multiplier than today.
I've found that these incompetent folks (mostly in management as you say) really don't want to reveal their intellectual inferiority; they are desperate to hide it.
If you started using this with your team, everyone adding value would benefit from the clarity, and the incompetent folks will just go along with it so as not to reveal their incompetence.
Suppose you tell a coding LLM that your monitoring system has detected that the website is down and that it needs to find the problem and solve it. In that case, there's a non-zero chance that it will conclude that it needs to alter the monitoring system so that it can't detect the website's status anymore and always reports it as being up. That's today. LLMs do that.
Even if it correctly interprets the problem and initially attempts to solve it, if it can't, there is a high chance it will eventually conclude that it can't solve the real problem, and should change the monitoring system instead.
That's the paperclip problem. The LLM achieves the literal goal you set out for it, but in a harmful way.
Yes. A child can understand that this is the wrong solution. But LLMs are not children.
I saw some gamebook for two players many years ago that had a small 5x5 table printed on each page. When players needed a random number 1-5 they simultaneously revealed a hand showing 1-5 fingers and used the table on the current page to cross-reference to get a number .
Of course it would work fine without the table, just using simple maths, but I think having unique tables on each page to scramble the result removes some of the ability of players to try to mind-game each other.
It would not work as well for ranges other than 1-5.
Obviously it wouldn't work for everyone but for those who have an interest in computers it would be a nice option.
I was unemployed for a while in 2008 and I'd have loved it if I could have got paid minimum wage for working on open source rather than just getting jobseekers allowance and searching for jobs that didn't exist.
Plus I'd have learned some valuable skills that would help me find work anyway. And it would have increased the numbers of IT savvy workers. Seems like a win-win-win.
I don't know because I don't drive with turn-by-turn audio.
For the record, I actually like Maps quite a lot. My main complaint is that if you let it have access to your location, Maps is constantly resetting your pan/zoom every time your location jiggles. So on MacOS I block location, but phone has location out of necessity of course.
Somewhat offtopic curiosity: Is there anything that Japanese fishkeepers do to keep the water and livestock inside the tank during earthquakes? Here we have no such risk for earthquakes, so a 600lb tank of water 4ft off the ground isn't much of an issue, even when bumped. I'd imagine earthquakes of this frequency could complicate that.
Cursor with Claude 4.5 Opus has been writing all my code since a few days. It's exhilarating, I can describe features and they get added to my code in a matter of seconds, minutes at most. It gets almost everything right, certainly more than I would at the first try. I only hand code parts that are small and tricky, and provide guidance on the general architecture, where to put things and how to organise them. It's an incredible way of working, the only nagging doubt is how long will it last before employers decide they don't need me in the loop at all.
Linux isn't a single OS. It's hundreds of different and weird combinations.
There are Linux distributions that are better than Windows or iOS for grandma to use as well as distributions where you need to be an expert to do anything.
