The women in my life also say that it depends a bit on where. For instance, most just don’t want to be hit on at the gym.

Which is why so many women hate talking to men they don’t know: there’s so often that request for a date after even the most innocuous small talk.

I’m a manager at a large aerospace and defense company. We had a hybrid arrangement where most people (who didn’t have to touch hardware) could work from home a couple days a week. Most people seemed to think it was pretty reasonable. There really are benefits to in person collaboration, so some on site days seemed to make sense.

We recently moved to fully RTO, and I find it frustrating. It’s not a big deal personally - I live close and I’m older - but it pisses off a lot of the employees, who see no good reason for it. I don’t see any notable productivity increase moving from three to five days on site, it just makes my management job harder.

Yeah, I’m far from anti-AI, but we’re just not anywhere close to where people think we are with it. And I’m pretty sick of corporate leadership saying “We need to make more use of AI” without knowing the difference between an LLM and a machine learning application, or having any idea *how" their company could make use of one of the technologies.

It really feels like one of those hammer in search of a nail things.

LLMs don’t “understand” anything, and it’s unfortunate that we’ve taken to using language related to human thinking to talk about software. It’s all data processing and models.

The article makes a mention of the early part of the movie Her, where he’s writing a heartfelt, personal card that turns out to be his job, writing from one stranger to another. That reference was exactly on target: I think most of us thought outsourcing such a thing was a completely bizarre idea, and it is. It’s maybe even worse if you’re not even outsourcing to someone with emotions but to an AI.

What are you taking about, he didn’t bait anyone. You aren’t obligated to honor a quote from someone who isn’t in your company. If I said my son is a mechanic and he can put a new engine in your car for $50, you absolutely should not expect a $50 engine.

Yep, you get it. And it’s really hard to get people to understand the value in learning to do that stuff without the tools.

We do a lot of real-time control software, and just yesterday we were taking about how the newer folks are really good at using available tools and libraries, but they have less understanding of what’s happening underneath and they have problems when those tools don’t/can’t do what we need.

Apparently he wants everything written in COBOL

That sounds like absolute hell

Hmmm, no, because which of your genes you pass down is still a bit random.

Yeah, good point.

Two things about that (overanalyzing your shower thought):

1. Geneticists have what they call the “50/500 rule,” which basically means that you need at least 50 people to avoid inbreeding, and at least 500 to avoid genetic drift. So while three people are 50% better than two, it’s not going to come close to avoiding inbreeding.

2. If you read up on Lilith, including your Wikipedia link, you’ll see her name only comes up once in the Bible, and it’s not as Adam’s wife. All the stuff about her comes from other things, including Babylonian and Mesopotamian writings, and lots of folklore from the middle ages. And at that, she’s sometimes Adam’s first wife, with different explanations about what happened to her that really in her not coming back to the garden, or she’s a demon. So there’s not much likelihood that she’s contributing to the gene pool.

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Grouped tightly enough, this combination of red and green wavelengths will provide a perception of the color we call “brown”

If you defined “brown,” you’d have to do it that way - by describing the wavelengths that we perceived as that color. The fact that your phone screen - a technology that works by emitting light - can display brown means there’s light that we call “brown.” It may happen that is really a dark orange, in much the same way that pink is a light red, but so what? It’s light and we see it as brown. Brown light.

Riddle me this: if there’s no such thing as brown light, how do you see the color brown on your phone screen?

Not sure why you say that. With the right filter, you can project a light of any color. What makes you think brown is special?

Title question first: yes, you absolutely can be too dumb to program.

But as others have mentioned, being bad at math isn’t necessarily a deal breaker, especially if you’re taking about the actual arithmetic part of math.

What turns out to be key to programming is breaking down a problem into steps and figuring out the logic to do what you want to do. The computer is going to do the actual arithmetic, but you’ll need to tell it what you want to do step by step.