My workplace which now uses scaled agile used to be waterfall. We have an enormous system to take care of and there’s loads of specialised knowledge, so we were pretty well siloed

So obviously when the sales people sold agile to the organisation they also sold the idea that a programmer is a programmer, designer a designer, tester a tester; no need for specialists, so in 2015 they spun up 50-odd agile teams in about six trains, one for each major system (where the used to be seven silos in one of those systems) grabbed one senior designer and programmer from each major project to put in an “expert” team

And told the rest of us we were working on the whole of our giant system. Where we had trouble understanding how part of it worked, we could talk to one of the experts

Now nine years later those experts have mostly retired, we have lost so much institutional knowledge and if someone runs into a wall you need to hope that someone wrote a knowledge transfer document or a wiki for that bit of the system

30% of jobs are going if self driving is achieved. Low pay jobs are here to stay for a while as they’re too expensive to automate. The current LLM stuff seems to obsolete low productivity people but still need the skilled writers or programmers to come up with new stuff or do the correct detail work the LLM sucks at.

Some management is going to royally screw up by firing junior programmers since the senior programmers can get all the work done with the help of copilot

But they’ll forget that they will in future need new senior programmers to herd the LLMs

Perhaps it’s that I am not an early adopter. I wait until I have good reason to update. It sucks that they make their customers unwitting beta testers, but they seem to have stuff sorted after the phone has been on the market for several months

My pixel 1 was and is fine. Pixel 3 was an excellent phone. The only bad phone I recall from Google was the Nexus 5x which was made by LG

I take it you missed the recent fourth integrated flight test, in which the ship soft landed on the ocean near Australia as planned and the booster soft landed on the ocean near the launch site as planned

Their failure in that flight was expected. They hoped thermal tiles sealing the hinge for the aerodynamic surfaces would seal those against plasma during reentry. They didn’t. Had they, it would have been much cheaper than sealing those more thoroughly. The ship landed regardless of that failure

Disliking Musk is fair, but SpaceX is doing good stuff

Actual real world right now giant rockets include

• One that is being built under waterfall methodology. It has been being built for several years. That’s the Blue Origin New Glen heavy lift reusable rocket

• One that is being developed under an agile methodology, it flew as a subscale lander to test their engine and flight control, it has flown four full test flights, improving on each. That’s SpaceX’s Starship

We are yet to see either launch a payload to orbit

The problem is if only 10% of the population is obsoleted, that ten percent needs to find new, different, jobs.

There are so many advances in game systems since the Palladium system I use, so I have stolen shamelessly to make combat last less than 1 game session rather than the two or three under standard rules

The universe is good, the rules are ancient

I do have a shelf of books though for Rifts, TMNT, after the bomb

Funny, in Australia we have school dances and they don’t get anything like American proms, with the possible exception of girls’ debutante balls which we dress up for

He’s a bull. He knows his shit

Not OP but I’ll accept it anyway

Publishers and film makers too. Keep it in print or lose rights (though I’d rather have much shorter copyright periods). Changed products get their own copyright, but the old version falls out if you stop selling it.