Management is always managed by the Peter Principle.

Then it’s still just a commissioned work

Line in the sand? Going after political opponents. Censoring information. Dismantling media. Abandoning rule of law. Business and government mixing too much.

USA is speed running these.

And that’s why they slapped the juniors in the mine until they learned to keep the light out of other people’s faces.

It’s like playing Russian roulette. A big gun, 100 chambers, one bullet. You pull the trigger, click, no bang, you get richer. Click, you get richer. Click, click, click, you are wealthy. Click, click, click, you’re a billionaire. Click, bang, your brain is splattered all over the wall. That’s the game the rich are playing. You can’t keep winning forever.

A client with s very low budget wanted a solution for their filing. We suggested they could get more bang for their bucks with preprinted paper forms, pens and a cabinet than going for software. They were not amused.

In terms of Mars

• Client wants a robot to go to Mars
• Project is budgeted and sold to send a Mars Rover
• Work starts and after successful test the robot is shown to customer. Customer states he wants to send a Mechwarriors in a drop ship, not a little Pathfinder.
• Panic, change requests, money being discussed, rockets are being strapped together with duct tape and the rover is bolted on an old Asimo that is being rebuilt into the smallest Mechwarrior ever the day before launch
• Mech Asimo lands successfully, stumbles and falls on a rock after three steps
• Customer disappointed

They’re real. I also encounted one.

“It’s already in the demo you guys just did so why do you need weeks to make it?”

We’re in trouble when it learns to debug.

Now start adding the “Well yes, but if” demands until the system inevitably breaks.

I suspect for a bunch of projects, AI going to make programming itself obsolete. If it comes pre-trained to use a number of libraries, protocols and databases, giving the thing a bunch of specifications and scenarios and let it do the actual work of doing bookkeeping or whatever becomes possible. Most managers would jump on the idea to throw extra hardware at a problem to run AI locally is it means shipping in half the time. As long as the problem to solve is generic enough and not too big. And those limits will go up quickly.

Said social media blocks you from using tor. Reddit back in the day freaked out when the apparent ip keeps switching and forces you to login again and again.

But it’s pretty fun when the customer says your program does it wrong and you pull out that old Excel, plug in the data and their Excel does exactly the same as your program. It makes the discussion about billable hours a lot easier.

Dump to an Excel sheet and ask them to make a formula for “active”. A client that can’t use Excel deserves to be teased and be charged extra.

Turns out that technically they don’t have wealth, just a lot of loans with paper assets as collateral.

To name a few:

• the classic riot, violence and/or revolution
• the coup
• organizing through unions and have general strikes until things change
• sustained peaceful protest
• voting
• switching to a different (underground) economic system
• massive emigration

All come with some serious downsides of course.

First you need to stop money from systematically flowing to the top or that dividing is only going to be a temporary measure.

It’s very common. Every few years there is some no-code platform claiming no developers are needed anymore in any sector, not just web dev. Invariably these only work if you stay on the narrow path and of course the customer asks something outside of the easy path after the first demo so a lot of work by devs are needed to make of happen.

AI is just one more like that, but with hype on steroids.

“We call her Carrie, because of the carriage return.”

You can also try to give the child NULL as middle name for additional fun.