If so, it would manifest as sabotage of satellite launches. There may, indeed, have been some of that down the years.

Technology is not the solution. It is not even the problem. The problem is denial of the civilizational implications and consequences of technology. That has been going on for centuries and cannot change. That still doesn't make technology the solution.

Assumes homebrew. Depending on the industry and the size of the company, the auditors may not permit homebrew.

Every single one of those traders belongs in prison. The failure to put them there leaves the system looking foolish, unable to claim any authority or legitimacy.

pfft, were you still working for a living or something, you leaner?

This might have some plausibility if it did not come from a vendor.

Anyhow, the first time one of these things leaves tire tracks on a child, the whole idea will be scrapped and never heard of again.

Anyone who thought that building an automated researcher was the right thing to do would not think that research was the right thing to do.

Yes and no. Putting Sam Altman, OpenAI and even LLMs in general aside for a moment, one doesn't need to look too hard to uncover the failure modes of human minds when it comes to research. Here are some from my personal experience:

- mathematical complexity. This hits hard anybody wanting to understand quantum mechanics, even the parts of it which are many decades old. But one is not going to be making a great many things without that understanding. Right, one may come back and say "but who needs new toys? Let's all go to Church instead!" which is indeed the only valid counterargument one can make, read below if you don't believe me.

- biological complexity. One needs a needle smaller than the size used to pin Drosophila flies to poke a biologist and get them to raise their hands in the air and say "it's all too complex. Nobody can really understand all of that. We know nothing of those systems. We are but humble observers trying to grasp at straws". If said biologists really wanted to understand everything, the majority of them would follow the tiny minority who are trying to simulate biological systems at a quantum level, but see my point above. And that simulation effort is perhaps even more complicated than the biological systems under study, even if it has the potential to scale orders of magnitude better.

Without any of it, cancer will get one in eight people before the age of 65, and ageing and other diseases will eat the rest of us. Which is okay of one believes in God, ofc. Sam Altman and his chummies probably don't believe in the Almighty. In so far as I'm concerned, if they want to fuck cancer, they have my blessing to boil the oceans.

Windows kernel-mode development documentation has always been as inadequate as it is voluminous. Back in 1992-93, Microsoft initially intended to ramp up a consultancy practice to support a strategy of keeping a monopoly on driver development. That idea was quickly dropped, but its effects lingered on. For many years, there was the published documentation, which, in its thousands of pages, did not quite tell you what you needed to know -- and then there was the good stuff, which was only available under NDA for big money. It may still be so.

Just one point. 7th graf: "...Washington’s other traditional partners in the Persian Gulf...." We do not have partners, we have vendors; and vendors are not partners. Now apply those last four words in every context.

Taste is the shibboleth of last resort. The problem with group affiliation is not any particular ways it is enforced; the problem is group affiliation itself.

Mostly when people talk about COBOL, what they mean is CICS. It would be more pertinent to say that IBM are the asbestos of platform vendors.

I remember helping UniKix rehost CICS apps onto Sun boxes in the late 90s, build web front ends with tn3270 scrapers, wild times