@donkulator is right. It is all about the industry pivoting from science and technology to utility services. It happens to pretty much every disruptive technology.
Modern planes were invented by the same initiatives that brought people to the freaking moon and haven't seen many major conceptual upgrades since then. Even most of those few significant upgrades were invisible, like GPS and flight computers.
The internet is now a necessity, and with this classification comes regulation that privileges the ones who move the slowest and are there longer. Just like it did for legacy airlines and their seventy year old plane models.
But we haven't reached rock bottom yet.
I predict a future where there will be no markup moving around on the network, just protobuf-style binaries on the wire and llm-powered transcoders on each end. Bleak, indeed, for UX design will be non deterministic. That also means slow if you're unlucky.

@djsumdog "to fix a printer" is not in the sense of replacing parts or realigning heads or some other hardware jumbo jumbo. I meant it in the sense of "making it work". As in, "you click here. Now here. This alert shows up, dont be afraid, it is not some hacker stealing your soul, it is just a pop-up dialog box"
Purely software problems. Text-based AIs should be more than capable of fixing that.
Maybe this (genAi) will be the UX that makes old people finally use anything more complex than a toaster. They already enjoy reading poorly written, fact-lacking propaganda slop on their phones all day anyway, it should be a familiar experience.

I used to go and change my youngest kid's diapers. It's worryingly calming and its like debugging, you are barely finished with one and you have another filling up with shit already.
But now that none of my kids use those anymore, I try to explain my problems to them. It used to work well when my older twins were a bit younger, but now they're 'tweens' and dont wanna hear about it. And the younger one is still just four, its veeeeery hard to explain data engineering to him. Still easier than explaining to my bosses, though.
I need an outlet for this moment. Picking up after my kid's endless mess in the house is proving to be effective.

And if your website needs a CAPTCHA for compliance reasons, add in a button to allow the user to order ChatGPT to pass the "are you a human?" test for them.

Can't you just use AI to make videos? Just so that the crappy click bait crowd gets crowded out. That makes longer, well though videos the high value premium content. This is the Time Warner channels / HBO strategy.
Seriously, dump so much free crappy shit people will actually pay to see you perform. Just look at Nebula.

Oh, shit. I just realized it means there will be content miners out there looking for nuggets of non-crappy content into oceans of AI-generated sameness. The future is fucked.

@BordedDev the suits think unrealized stock "gains" are money. Or that money has intrinsic value, since we're on this subject.
They dont even want a Scrooge McDuck pool of cash to swim into, an ugly up-trending chart is all that matters.
Performative wealth assholes.

@jonathands "arranged marriage" and autocorrect. Problems with either are not so uncommon for an Indian my age.

I thought I would be married at eighteen, but my arranged married would-be wife dumped me before we ever even met (for more than a few hours). To this day I have no idea why, and I was so bloody relieved when I got the news. She probably had a boyfriend or something.
Then a decade later I helped a dehydrated lady in a political rally a couple continents away, and her friend turned out to be just the most beautiful woman ever to grace the earth. We've been together ever since.

Weird thing, our fathers (retroactively) declared that they arranged for us to meet, and used some sodding excuse that they used to play cricket in the same club. I bet they had never even seen each other before we introduced them.

@cafecortado dude, just write "crappy" in a really tiny piece of post-it note, a "zero" in another one, paste each to one lens of your regular glasses, and grab a red lantern. There, you can see, respectively, your health, your ammo and all your enemies are shown in a red light.

Lad, if one could just stop time at the perfect moment... life is gonna throw you some curve balls, you gotta stay ready to dodge or throw some back. Your current summit is not meant to last, so you can either look for some more things to go up, or fate will eventually pull you down. The kids previously suggested are a good option, but maybe you want to learn to play the cello or get a six-pack. Never stop.
This is not fatalism, that is reality. A mortal cannot stop the tides of karma from ebb and flow. Unless you somehow can, and in that case you cease to be and become one with nothing and everything. Yoga blabber aside, seriously, go find something. Dont stop wandering "what else" nor pursuing your wants, too much stability its bad for your mental health.

@BordedDev it was even worse to say it. I felt so much like punching myself.

@AlgoRythm the fuck we didn't. We just got lucky we invented tools and high fructose corn syrup before the crustaceans did. Every living creature on earth is the product of some stupidly random variation on the initial parameters and the rest is natural selection mixed with sheer lucky mutations.

Evolutionary algorithms are quite the black box. Their inner workings are simple, their structures are regular.
No, the hard part here is to fine tune the parameters, and to run it all fast enough so you can make many, many experiments. Non deterministic randomized approaches are a bitch, you can have very different results from the same data set. So you need to try a billion dofferent parameters.
You might want to try parallelism and grid search.

Ask her. Do it. Just do it. But be mindful that this is her place of work, dont embarrass her or make she look unprofessional or something. And that she might say no even after what appears to be some special interest, after all this is her place of WORK, lad. 20% is peanuts compared to the margins in the retail of restricted products like vape. She might just be hitting quotas by influencing repeat customers to come back to this same specific store. That is just business, dont take it personally if she says no.

@netikras 's definitions are very professional and SFW enough to be posted on LinkedIn.

My abridged version:

Junior: younger dev who gets assigned to some tasks in that messing up is not that much of a problem, and is still getting the hang of the business

Mid: After a while, a junior finds out they're too good for this crap and asks for real consequential tasks. Either the team assigns the real tasks, and the junior gets promoted, or the junior GTFOs to another company as a mid. Now that I think of it, wimpy juniors may have the skills of a senior, but if they're not willing to fight for it, they remain as juniors.

Senior: Same as a mid - or highly skilled junior, but is one that all other seniors have quit on them. So they may handle the shit themselves and get recognized as seniors, remain mids, or quit to a senior role. Solo devs are de-facto seniors, but it is meaningless if there is no one else.

Principal: bloody suits that can't tell a calculator from an elevator button pad

The other answers are sure to give you all the actionable information, so I'm gonna do it in a more entertaining and far less practical way. And definitely not very precise.

Back in the days of yore, we had this thing called "memory constraints". Processors were so primitive, you could only have a few precious bytes on them. But clients were just as whiny, so we had to get creative.

One cool thing we invented were "structs" - sets of bytes that could be composed of different elements of the regular types, like one or more integers and strings. It is just like a string - a sequence of memory positions - but each few bytes can represent different things and have different types!
Then some MANIAC put an struct inside another struct! To avoid creating a matrix inside the matrix we came up with pointers - do not copy the other struct there, just point at it in the memory, and your original struct only have to contain the bytes of the pointer.

Nowadays we hardly do that. Unless asked to.

> "why the fuck does management think it will solve all our problems"

The best answer I came up with is based on this principles:

First, think like an idiot. It is much easier than it seems at first, all you have to do is be absolutely sure that you are a secret genius and you already know everything you need to know about everything.

Second, try to see things from the perspective of idiot managers. "This computer wordy thing makes, like, computer wordy babies!" They can't really grasp the concepts much deeper than that.

Finally, put dumb and dumber together and consider this: if there was such a thing as a tool that made coders obsolete, but only real coders were capable of using it, would we tell management about the tool?
A smart person would say: "OBVIOUSLY! It would be the most important scientific discovery since the wheel!"
Idiot managers see all of us denying the effectiveness of GenAI and think: "It can ONLY mean that there is a global conspiracy against my genius!"

@hjk101 I'm still pretty sure the alphabetical layout wouldn't be much better... maybe the DVORAK layout would help more.

@Liebranca it works against people who see assertions like "2+2=5" and say shit like "let's see if the stakeholders are satisfied".
If people are stupid, and would rather have any quick answer instead of a correct one, then it is a race to the bottom to find the fastest heuristic, precision be damned.

Someday they'll use AI to plan the trajectory of a turistic rocket to Mars, it will land in a desert in Arizona and people will say "cool, a whole other plane!"

Do what @kiki says, but document EVERYTHING. Every dumb shit someone asks of you, send an email confirming it. Create a paper trail to cover your ass.
Then grab some popcorn and watch they burn

I didn't quit my old job for this type of shit, but I should have. I had someone from my team make a chart to measure how much money the company was wasting due to ignoring our ideas and PoCs. It was on the low seven figures when there were layoffs due to "market changes"

Mate, if someone calls himself "CEO" and has time enough on his hands to do this kind of shit, you better know that when they ask you to call them "Chief Executive Officer", they actually mean "His Grace the Duke of Shitshire, inc".
Pathetic. Obviously the shithead wants to be "a business influencer" or some other contemporary management fad.

@antigermanist bloody confusing time, in truth. Their teachers tell them to avoid AI like the plague and the school administration sends letters to the parents highlighting how they're demanding the use of AI in school operations. How we gotta have the bloody "AI talk" with our own wee ones. How we should be the ones to figure out how to teach them to use the fucking thing because "it's the future" without using it "in excess", whatever it means.
Fucking corporate simps

@antigermanist she takes the elevator to go up two floors. Apparently it doesn't count as "AI" if it makes noises. Seriously, I told her sister that Alexa used AI and she said "no it doesn't, it does not writes anything"

@retoor his kids were older (I think?)

@jestdotty people who detect vulnerabilities are below their standards, they (institutions) want mindless corporate drones that can consult for medical corporations and say that a 33% fatality rate on a treatment plan is actually "an absolute majority of a win!"

In that alternate reality, humanity built no enterprise proprietary frameworks and never had the internet as we know it today. It could only have happened if their reality had branched out from ours in the mid-90s.

Obviously, humanity then evolved so fast that they built a cost-effective fusion reactor before 9/11, got world peace by the time we were in the great recession, and finally they became pure energy beings right on time for the 2020 pandemic.
Now they look at us from their omnicient point of view and are fully aware that if they look too hard, they will start to devolve.

@Wisecrack good idea, but it would only work once.

I always think that there must be a feedback loop of bots - those that spam every number, and those annoying "follow request" bots that respond to every message.
Thus the metrics for both get inflated and the scam teams get the scam budget.

They expect the meetings to actually kill you, so that the PM can ask for a bereavement extension to the project.