You forgot “Forward Deployed AI Engineer”

“We’re moving from that find-and-fix mentality to preventing issues before they occur,” […]

Funny that the introduction of AI in software development generally means a shift into the other direction. As John Ousterhout called it, “debugging a system into existence”.

This is about AI and learning.

I have an interesting observation: I had the last few years the opportunity to work with older legacy code bases. And I came to the conclusion, that understanding them for me requires systematic learning. Pretty much like learning a language.

Say you have 70,000 lines of code with about 8000 to 10000 identifiers. Also a number of implicit concepts. Invariants and so on.

To work with the code, you need some basic understanding. To understand, you need an idea what these identifiers mean. Or their important subset.

Now, remember that the human brain can only keep six or seven things in short-term memory. To store more, the meaning of all these identifiers, concepts, invariants etc… … - needs to go into long-term memory.

Which means repeating and memorizing around 10,000 things.

That is similar to learning a foreign language up to a pretty good level.

So. you need that learning process to work with legacy code.

If AI use inhibits this - this means trouble.

Guix provides security patches. You can also define your own derived packages and patch them. Or fork the distro and build it with a different kernel and base packages, like the nonguix fork does. Or add an own patched OpenSSL library.

But what such approaches come down to in practice is that maintaining a forked distribution is a lot of work. For most people, the sane approach is to build on an existing distro.

It is not an easy problem. For example, the buildroot distro which is popular for embedded devices, AFAIK has only one release every six months.

Held heute = Arschkarte morgen

(sorry I don’t know how to translate that. “Sonderkommando” is more or less “suicide squad”, I think).

A phone with SailfishOS is fine for that. It can get tricky with messengers and banking apps (but I think phones are Not A Good Idea for banking authentication).

The alternative would be a mid-range phone with SailfishOS on it. I have one, a Sony Xperia III which I chosed for the small size. I like it. BTW I had nearly every Linux phone by Nokia and Jolla since the N900.

But if you still want something that is more like a pocket computer and less like a distracting phone, you could look for handheld PCs / ultraportables, and put Linux on one. These can run Threema Web, and Waydroid if you still want apps. (I have a Gemini PDA, and I like it, but be careful - this is NOT a phone - but fine for answering mail).

Which is also an important issue with google mail.

But this also violates the expectation that spoken conservations are private.

Reverse Turing test for the reverse centaur.

Mine is 17 years old and is still over-specced because I use Linux and bought it with 16GB RAM then. And it is the second PC I ever bought, my first one was an Pentium-class PC (actually AMD K6@300MHz) that I bought in 1998.

By the way, secure open trust systems are hard. Around 2000, there was a FOSS web site called kuro5hin.org, a slashdot-sryle discussion board, which experimented with trust networks. As far as I remember, they did not find a good solution.

Wikipedia or stack overflow has the same issues.

I think a kind of real-life-based(!), signature-based web of trust like the GnuPG web of trust (but ideally with more user-friendly software…) could be part of the solution

You still can get cheap dump phones.

Regarding do this device:

1. Manufacturing a phone in small numbers is not cheap
2. If there were a way that you could have 50% more attention for your kids, yourself, and the people around you, how much would that be worth for you? How much is your attention worth?

I think bugs from library \ version incompatibilities are often hard to recognize.

If you are a long-term Windows user, you already know what it looks like - it is called “DLL Hell”.