> I live in a European country, where the phone company hasn't bothered to come remove the old unused copper phone lines in the last 5 years. Thousands of dollars worth of cables running past my house alone, and no one has bothered to go strip it in the night and sell it

Isn't that because they're still flat out on rolling fibre out? There's not that many telecoms engineers and if they spend tons of time removing the old, that slows down the new.

> Isn't that because they're still flat out on rolling fibre out?

Spain's rollout is up in the last few percentage points (>95%) of fibre coverage, in this particular region we reached saturation of the entire rural area 5 years ago.

Plenty of time for those disconnected copper cables to go walkabout if anyone were so inclined. Realistically, in a region where the population skews older and most everyone owns property, it's probably not worth the risk to fence it

We're still quite some way off that in the UK. Copper lines still working though due to shut down by next year I think. Lots of older people with no internet left in the lurch with phone lines with that of course.

I ran into the exact same wall when doing some SIMD + OpenMP optimisations.

Me: "Parallelise this loop without changing the results."

AI: "I can't do that, because of floating point accumulation."

Me: "So spin out a temporary fixed-length array, accumulate into that thread-locally, and then do an ordered summation of that at the end."

AI: "Oh, you're right!"

It's a fantastic tool for automating the implementation grind, but you still have to hand-feed it the strategy. I guess it will get there at some point.

That is true if you're using them as chatbots but for something behind a product it's largely OK as long as it meets the requirements.

I haven’t used open weight models yet, but this would match my intuition given I haven’t experienced a noticeable increase in code quality this calendar year. If open weight models are already on par with January frontier models that’s already enough for me to automate most of the manual parts of my work (I.e. not “architecting”).

And once frontier models can architect (turn business requirements into engineered systems) then I guess no one needs a job because that’s the digital singularity.

I'm finding that executives at work are generating AI slop and sending it at each other and teams that are then meant to digest it, without any critical thought. Often these are sloppy and contain broad mistakes that aren't relevant to our company's setup.

Only about 15 years later than it should have been introduced

Hi, Fabricio from AWS here. I hear you and it's something we've heard for years and am glad is finally being rolled out. If you have more thoughts on the new experience, feel free to share :D

I wouldn’t personally refer anyone I’ve not worked with. What’s the point? Someone being smart isn’t enough, they have to be actually sane and normal to work with. You can be friends with people you wouldn’t want to work with. Someone I’ve not met would be a totally unknown quantity.

I would refer someone I'm friends with if I know them well, understand what they would be like to work with, and understand the job/company well enough.

After all, I've lived with some people that I never worked with. Surely I know them well enough to recommend them for jobs, even though I have not ever worked alongside them.

I wouldn't trust a referral from someone I don't work with either. Your reputation is on the line, if you don't have one to lose why should anyone care.

In the UK I had a panel interview with 4 people, in person. But for international students who often brought their own funding sponsored by their government that didn’t happen.

That's an interesting wrinkle. If anything, externally funded international students seem like exactly the case where you'd still want the interview, since the funding answers "who pays for this?" but not "does this person have the background and understanding to do the work?"

I recently tried to get Claude to use Codegraph in a repo rather than using grep/find all the time but I found it didn't follow instructions a lot of the time. I tried putting in a pre-tool call hook and explciitly blocking find/grep, and instead rather than using Codegraph like it was told, it started using Python to find/search instead.

I have a hard time to divert “rm” to “trash” too

Na, was normal in the UK to have A4 too

I think you misread, the fact that the UK is in the Anglosphere strengthens the GP's point

> Growing up in Australia, every computer I’ve ever owned has defaulted to “US Letter” as the paper size.

I'm not sure how; the UK is an Anglosphere country that uses A4 and desktop machines as far back as I can remember (mid 90s) also correctly defaulted to A4 when printing. I suspect it's more likely to be that there's been English (UK) and English (US) options in OS's for a long time and Aus got defaulted to English (US) rather than English (UK) which carried some settings that weren't correct by default.