The reason for the existence of bloated bureaucracy is political will not the technical inability to automate processes before the advent of the current wave of AI.
Capable is the loadbearing word, the directors were all PhDs in math, science and engineering fields.
I dont subscribe to the strawman argument that engineers would naturally strive on their own, but neither does simply any form of management automatically add value.
I agree also that hero type devs are an indicator of problems
Bell Labs is an outlier in basically every aspect. Mr Kernighan lists stability of the environment with regard to funding, structure, mission as well as technical competence of the management as main drivers of the culture. This is just not the reality in companies that look for financial results on a quarterly basis and where the executives are MBA types.
I did not yet have a positive "oh shit" moment, but when the corporate manager types that could not deliver a "Hello world" if their live would depend on and would have had a sour look on their face when asked to pay license fees for a proper IDE a 10 to 15 years ago started pushing it hard, way before any but the resume-driven engineers: that has flipped a bit in me.
> I'm picturing Germany as Sideshow Bob walking right into another rake.
Speaking as a German with children: Completely apt image. Yet I would name several dozen of policies that are more serious "rakes in your face" than this. This is merely squeezing a little bit more out of the working population. Everyone knows that social security in the current state is a Ponzi scheme and what ever is collected is immediately redistributed.
This is nothing particularly new. People above a certain age without kids are paying a higher percentage from their income into the social security since 2005 when Gerhard Schröder was chancellor, and that's more than twenty years ago.
What this proposal would change is the concrete percentage. Currently 4.2%, 4.7% if it were enacted.
Be that as it may, the jurisdiction I am living in has an explicit right to refuse to testify against a spouse. It is wild to me that one can construct a crime out of that, let alone one that warrants a decade of incarceration.
I do not want to distract from the content of the article, which is highly relevant for folks who built UIs with frameworks that are conceptually based on signals, but the way that the reading experience is designed really great, in particular the guided reading flow through the instructive code path is something that I rarely have seen done at all, and this even works pretty well on mobile. It's a delightful reminder on how a dynamic medium can be more than the simulation of print on screens.
Plenty, but few of them can be solved by writing and deploying an app somewhere. Some of them are actually made worse by the latter. And how to make money is mostly orthogonal to solving the problems of the world.
I find this knee-jerk reaction, that everything that shows certain stylistic choices is put under the suspicion of "might be generated", to have become a tedious cliché.
Unless the author had live-streamed the writing process, how could we know? Humans have been exposed to LLM generated texts on nearly all channels for more than three years, so by now it would be a surprise if there had not been a reciprocal reaction. Writers imitate what they read, the tools we shaped might have started to shape us.
May I recommend Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" to you?