A doctor friend of mine once joked that it would be really cruel to issue a death certificate for someone who is alive. This seems to be a soft version of that.
The only thing that would be crueler is to revoke someone's birth certificate. "Sir, you never existed in the first place."
Like Kansas tried to do for all their transgender residents. They didn’t switch ID. They just invalidated all documentation that didn’t match what the state legislators thought they should say. They were going to be forced to try securing new ID at their own expense, with their existing ID not being considered valid to identify them.
It was some time ago that I read about it, and I'm struggling to find a source now, but there are instances in India of people being declared dead to allow their next of kin to steal their land. In doing so, the 'dead' unsurprisingly lose access to various public resources, health care, etc.
It is reasonably safe to say that people find it funny because of the absurdity of the situation, while realizing that it is not funny for the person who has been declared as dead.
My ex-spouse worked in IT at a hospital and their user account was inadvertently marked dead. It ended up taking weeks of effort to remedy the problem, as the system wasn't built to handle corpses suddenly arising or perhaps less plausibly, data entry errors. It was one of those "funny until it happens to you" moments as I was still in grad school and payroll doesn't cut checks for dead employees who can't submit timecards...
Undeclaring someone dead is one way to fix it, but you could also issue a new birth certificate, SSN etc and have minted an entirely new citizen :-) free of debt and ownership, uneducated and unemployed on paper but somehow quite experienced.
A friend of mine is adopted. At the time, the worker didn't follow the SOP.
Instead of an entry into the adoption registry, they created a new death certificate, and a backdated new birth certificate. A lot of government systems collapse when it turns out you are two people.
I read the first link and was curious what the outcome of the case was, since the article was released in 2021. It seems that Jeanne was declared alive again in 2023, which is the most recent public reporting on the case:
I don't. But many others do. The only thing that let's banks and other companies know that you are dead is a piece of paper called a Death Certificate.
What you are talking about is in a large part authentication. You can do authentication using an external service and still have your user table locally. You can also do authorization locally with a local session table while leaving authentication to a SaaS.
Many engineers with a long career have probably thought about becoming a manager at one point. A large portion of them decided to stay in the IC (individual contributor) track because they did not like some of the aspects of being a manager. Some decided to stick to the IC role because they liked creating code.
With AI, every engineer will need to become a manager to manager one or more AI assistants who do a lot of the work. The good news is that this will not involve dealing with performance reviews, psychological problems, and raises. You will also remain close to the code.
Look at the manager role again, and see which parts of it will be needed to manage AI agents. Learn those parts from standard management books. You will kind of pivot, but still remain close to the code.
On the other hand, if all you enjoyed is typing in code, but hated working with product people to understand the intent, doing code reviews, or building software that is easy to QA, there will be fewer and fewer such jobs.
I'm finding that people skills are more important than managing AI currently. Both people and agents will build 10 versions of the same product if you let them.
Communication is key, and it always has been.
I'm moving more to management after 13 years of IC work and being lead for the last year. We are all in on AI for everything at my company, and that's not just lip service.
This is exactly what is happening where I work. The "future", according to company leadership, involves "programmers" directing AI agents to do basically everything, without ever touching the code directly. Sounds abysmal to me.
There are so many shades of gray in freedom of speech. In free European countries the police are also not at the door of outspoken government critics.
If you are alluding to dictatorial European countries like Russia and Belarus, the US is miles away and moving in their direction. Compared to Western Europe, there is no difference.
Bad UI plagued software development since ages immortal. The reason is not AI. Good UI design is a skill (or art?) and not an afterthought. But most people do not see it that way and that is why things are the way they are.
Companies make UI/UX to prioritise first 30 minutes of the experience, to keep user using it long enough that they stick with it. Not the 8h/day work the UI will get when a tool become pillar of your work.
Most small companies don’t need AI to be more efficient. They need Excel.
I’ve already had two cases where a friend asked me to show them how AI can help them run their company better. In each case it turned out that they needed Excel. Specifically an excel export from one system, some bulk editing, and an excel import into another system.
(I understand the satire in this article but this is a serious post)
They should also learn how to use it. Too many times I see people manually sorting rows by cutting and inserting them, when filters are just two clicks away! Filter it, copy the table, save it. Done. 3 hour job done in less than 10 seconds.
Or using pivot tables (i.e. for filtering reports with thousands of lines to find string which occurred the most and sort them by the occurrence).
Or automatically deduplicating rows (remove duplicates - choose columns, click and done.)
And the most outrageous cases of being Excel illiterate are people using calculator on the table and writing results back into Excel. These folks are already too far gone. Nobody can help them.
A long time ago a vast majority of people on earth were farmers. They used relatively simple tools like scathes.
Over a few centuries better tools and technology made it so that <5% of the population in rich countries are farmers. They use tools like million dollar harvesters.
It's not the 20x efficiency of harvesting technology compared to what agrarian societies that make them make sense. It's the productivity of the other 95% of the population that makes their labor cost so high that such expensive machines make economic sense.
The only thing that would be crueler is to revoke someone's birth certificate. "Sir, you never existed in the first place."
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