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Cake day: Jun 10, 2023

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At my first developer job 25 years ago, any time we made a change in the code we had to add a comment at the end of each modified line with our initials and the date, because we had no version control.


In a version that doesn’t even fully make sense. With databases there is a well-defined way to sanitize your inputs so arbitrary commands can’t be run like in the xkcd comic. But with AI it’s not even clear how to avoid all of these kinds of problems, so the chiding at the end doesn’t really make sense. If anything the person should be saying “I hope you learned not to use AI for this”.



The worst version of this I’ve ever seen is a site that enforced a password policy on the “current password” field on the “change password” interface. I had an existing password that violated their policy (either because they changed the policy or a technician created a “temporary” password for me, I forget), and I could not change it to a proper password because my current password would get rejected.


If this were my grandma, then sure, I wouldn’t fault her. But if it’s someone making life-altering decisions based on their understanding of it, someone who has been doing so for a very long time, and who has support staff who ostensibly try to make sure that person understands the topic at hand, and yet after all these years of hearing about tech-related topics and deciding on them, the person — who has every ability to retire if the world is moving too fast for them to keep up, but has opted not to — asks a question as absurd as this… I actually am going to fault that person.