Music. I have some data CDs I burned in the mid 2000s, that I booted up a few years ago (Linux live CDs). I don’t have any data CDs from the 90s though. IIRC, ISO 9660 does have error correction.

Edit: I just looked it up. ISO 9660 doesn’t have error correction, but the underlying system, CD-ROM Mode 1, does have error correction.

I have CDs that I burned in the 90s that still work fine. I’m assuming the blu-rays I burn now will probably last as long, which is decades longer than I need them to.

I just use a USB Blu-ray burner. Similar to this one:

https://a.co/d/0KIB1LJ

I burn Blu-rays once in a while. They work for backup.

I’m not sure what you mean. Like, make sure it works on any size device?

Literal fucking alchemists. That’s why they built the $20 billion machine.

There’s an SBC called Le Potato that usually goes for around $40.

That’s too much power for one man to wield.

An AMD GPU and Bazzite would be great for you. The AMD GPU makes installing any Linux system easier, cause the drivers are already there.

Pathetic. I can store that on one compact disc.

Of course it is. And now all of our social security numbers are probably on the dark web. I mean, AT&T already did that last year, but now they’re on there twice.

This is called a PD Trigger or a PD Emulator. They come in adapters too with a female USB C port and are only a few inches long.

Like this:

I’ve used several of them before. They’re super useful.

I love my Epson Ecotank. It solves most of these issues.

Yep. When I was a cashier in a grocery store, I had every code memorized except some of the less popular bulk nuts. A human cashier is way faster than a self checkout.

I can’t answer that for you. I’ll tell you, I don’t think a computer science degree is a waste.

I live in California, so any place that sells alcohol needs at least one real cashier. A lot of places took that “at least one” to be an upper limit, not a lower one. For a while there, going into Albertsons was a nightmare. Twenty minutes shopping, another twenty waiting to check out because everybody had alcohol.

Any place that is replacing junior devs with AI is probably going to really regret it when they have no senior devs in a few years. Being a junior dev in a team is kind of like an apprenticeship. You learn the trade, but you also learn the shop. Then when the senior dev moves on, you have all that knowledge and can step into the role of senior dev. If a team decides to not have junior devs anymore, then they’ll have no one to take over when a senior dev leaves.

So the answer is yes, it is already replacing junior devs, but that’s only because management hasn’t learned how bad of an idea that is yet. Ultimately, it will cost them more through losing foundational team knowledge.

You also have to hold an AI’s hand the entire way through coding something, whereas you can kind of just let a junior dev go do their own thing, and eventually they’ll probably get it right. An AI “agent” tries to hold its own hand, but that doesn’t seem to work out usually when I’ve tried it. It starts making changes that are really bad, then just seems to always double down and eventually make a huge mess.

Yeah, that’s probably true. Remember how all the execs decided to replace cashiers with robots, then the stores started losing money because a. it made stealing a lot easier and b. people would avoid stores that only had self-checkout robots and never had anyone to help you because a robot doesn’t know where the flour is. Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers. It turns out cashiers do more than just scan barcodes. But, upper management didn’t get to where they are by being smart.

I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.

My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.

When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.

Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.

I didn’t say the code didn’t work. I said it was dog shit. Dog shit code can still work, but it will have problems. What it produced looks like an intern wrote it. Nothing against interns, they’re just not gonna be able to write production quality code.

It’s also really unsettling to ask it about my own libraries and have it answer questions about them. It was trained on my code, and I just feel disgusted about that. Like, whatever, they’re not breaking the rules of the license, but it’s still disconcerting to know that they could plagiarize a bunch of my code if someone asked the right prompt.

(And for anyone thinking it, yes, I see the joke about how it was my bad code that it trained on. Funny enough, some of the code I know was in its training data is code I wrote when I was 19, and yeah, it is bad code.)