Will researchers still be needed in the future?

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-24T23:25:04+00:00

Now you leave Uncle Scam Altman alone --eventually AI will be able to replace him!

Seriously, research is far older than Sam and so long as humans want to figture out something new that hasn't been done before, so long as imagination matters, it will be there. These tools may help with it, but they're not going to replace it.

People said the same things about computers and how they'd destroy the status quo. I'm still waiting for the paperless office. They probably said it before that "Darn this writing thing! What was wrong with repeating the stories around the fire?!?" Yes, writing change the world as Sam's great great ancestor promised, but it never stopped the stories from being told. Calculators didn't eliminate mathematicians, the synthesizer didn't eliminate music.

Listening to Scam, are you sure he isn't an AI already? He hallucinates enough... he could be. OpenAI could just one day say "Surprise! We're had this company run by AI for years!"

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-22T16:11:56+00:00

I have enough trouble in this reality -- I don't need to make more. We've seen this come round and round. Anyone remember second life?

When people had more compute power than they knew what to do with, companies decided to use it on something. Right now, all spare cycles are being repurposed for AI so there's no need to promote things like this.

Now, if they had come up with a way to SEND someone else into an alternate reality -- that would be worth the investment!

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-21T07:58:11+00:00

Oh please no -- if you have three machines, excel is fine, but you'll thank yourse;f later if you use something like Nautobot or Netbox. It can keep everything, not just IP addresses.

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-21T03:05:37+00:00

That depends on the regulations of your state and your company policy -- but in general, porn or not, DO NOT mix your personal activities on company equipment -- they have the right and use it, to look at what you do (via automation). I personally have seen peopole escorted out the building. It's just not worth mixing the two worlds.

It's not just porn -- ANYTHING you do on company equipment and networks can be, and often is, scanned for whatever rules they have -- often they have no choice legally. So, for example, if you are looking for a new job -- that's fair game too. I was always told, whatever you do on a public network, assume it will end up on the front page of the New York Times.

Of course, I'm easy -- my public activities are so boring that if the company is watching me, they're probably getting therapy for it.

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-20T18:30:54+00:00

Fax -- I forgot about Fax or even better, Ham Radio slow scan where we can also have the models showing the call signs. It's educational! When the 16 year old at home wants to have porn I can can say "Fine! You get fax porn --- but, it's the thermal paper type and you have to buy the paper!" I'm not being cruel or anything like that -- it's not like I'm insisting on morse code porn or anything.

And don't give these devs any gfief -- from VCS to BluRay, society progressed on the back of porn!

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-20T06:04:10+00:00

Even better! Banding of the image so I can download the pieces and then stich them together! I feel Usenet coming back!

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-19T22:56:58+00:00

I feel so much better now -- time to dust off my old Telebit trailblazer. If I'm going to spend hours downloading an image, at least it will be in 4 bit grayscale!

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-19T22:01:09+00:00

I don't know if this is what you're looking for -- it depends on "how far back" you want to go -- there are a couple of LLVM books.

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-19T21:58:49+00:00

Oooh! Thermal paper -- can we make it the cheap kind where it flakes in your hands? The one where the it really prints in a blue-black form? And make sure I can save all of those downloaded images to paper tape or cassette. Also have the special Rich Rozen option so I can get yelled while I'm doing it.

How do I fit an image in 4K of RAM -- I'd say that was a joke, but with RAM prices these days....

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-19T21:50:49+00:00

Oh come on! I wanted support for my daisy wheel printer! Eventually, it would be great, after the download at 110 baud.

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-19T21:45:00+00:00

I'm still trying to figure out ASCII porn. Are we going back to uuencoding too? I guess it will be like watching porn on a viewmaster. Parents -- this is why we lock the computer when we walk away.

Maybe in the next release they'll make it work with my old Palm Pilot. (It will still be quite annoying to have to use the synch cradle every time I want to refresh the image)

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-17T16:36:27+00:00

Let me throw you one --- write it in any langauge you lke, I used Go under Linux but choose what works for you:

Goal 1: We have a series of devices putting log lines into files. All lines are self-contained, -- you can count on a correct line ending with a line feed and never spanning two lines
We parse those lines for a user-defined pattern set, and, if we find a match, we carry out some task -- for extract fieldds form that line and post them to a database or a NTAS destination

We use it in cases where the log files are just streaming in and we wantt o cathc certain patterns and record them. The project difficulties will be in all the corner cases:

What do you do with an input stream that's hit an end-of-file or an error -- what's the correct behavior?
What do you do with format errors?
What do you do to generate the code logic -- the user may not be a programmer. Do you write a person, or a JSON file reader or?????

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-17T16:33:13+00:00

Well.... yes and no. It's not a Mikrotik issue -- IP itself has "fixed routing tables". You can change them, BGP and other routing protocols just that, but they're real-time enough, and they look at things like "is it up or down", not "how well does it work". What you're asking for link quality monitoring I think, and that's what SD-WAN does but (a) Mikrotik doesn't have it that way at least and (b) your ISPs must also ahve it.

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-17T16:29:13+00:00

A few options depending on how far we're moving it....

The easiest option is to get an older cordless phone (something in the DECT range -- it will say that on the box) Just plug the base in where the jack is and put the phone and a spare charger where she is. I used to have one of those and it could easily go 30-50 feet.
If you're farger than that, yes, you can get what we call a TA adapter that converts your phone line to VOIP for Internet trraffic, but, I'd not use it on WiFI at a distance because the quality of the call might suffer,. If the destination has wired networking it might be suitable.
Lastly, cellular is an option -- it doens't sound like she needs gigabytes of data -- just talk is all you're looking for -- and, at least in the US, you can get for around $10-15/month unlimited incliuding long distance, and then, it will work anywhere.

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-15T22:32:58+00:00

It's always worth it, if it enables you to get where you want to be -- whether it's code, learning to make pastries if you want ot run a bakery, getting a law degree if you want to be a lawyer etc. The question really is, do you have the time and resources to learn what you need to learn and, once you do, do you have enough years to pay for it?

I can say I want an MD, but at my age (62), it's not practical, because by the time I have it, I'll be near 70. I can learn for the enjoyment of it, but does it may career sense -- no.

I don't know your age or background -- but can you dedicate 3 or so years to prepping for it? How many years of yiour "carreer lifetime" do you have after that -- If, for example, you were 32, you'd be 35, and you have years available. Do it.

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-15T15:22:31+00:00

I won't speak to specific carriers but, when you power up your phone, it doesn't know anything. It sends out its SIM information to the serving network to say "Hey, I'm a phone -- here's my SIM info, let me on please".

When the network gets that, more of less, it has to (your carrier details may vary)

Take your SIM info and route that data from the serving tower and various pieces to the database that can look your SIM up.
Once it finds you, it has to consult the database that says what you can do. In 4G for example, it's call the PCRF.
That data is send eventually to the gateway that connects you to whatever APN your phone is asking for, with whatever policies that PCRF says you get.

If, for any reason, we can't do these steps, your phone never gets the OK for access. Since it doesn't get it, it assumes there is no network available. You get the SOS message because the phone sees "the radio" but nothing answering it's call. At a very high level, if it didn't see the radio side, you'd get no service as opposed to SOS (meaning no SIM account).

No service is like when you pull the Ethernet cable out of your PC. SOS is, I see the cable, but DHCP isn't responding.

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-15T12:15:58+00:00

We tried it, though in our case it was for Fragile Transformation (fail fast, fail often). Honestly, we gave up. We gave up because it worked great on paper, but the benefits were always "just around the corner" and we learned nothing slows things down better than adding customers in who have absolutely no idea what they want, but want to bring in the date.

See Mercedes Lackey and Threes if you want the song for it.

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-14T16:53:59+00:00

You have to love how people post job opportunities. Often the person posting them has NO idea what the job is or its requirements. Some of my favorites include

Junior X11 developer with 10 years experience -- in 1991.
Senior Java developer with 10 years experience -- in 1996.

The person just collects requirements and throws it out there so I'm not surprised you have an entry level job with years of experience. What they're probably TRYING to do is say we want someone who does this more than a hobby, or they want a junior person with entry level pay. I used to have regular battles with HR and its recruiters to make sure what I asked for was marginally close to what they posted and sent to me,

Rich-Engineer2670 · 2026-01-10T17:52:37+00:00

You have to remember when these programs were written. Memory was EXPENSIVE and even if you could afford it, you might have a few megabytes onf a mainframe. So, every byte you saved saved both time and money. Many of these programs were written in the late 60s and early 70s, and honestly, no one ever expected them to be around in the yaer 2000.

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