Big layoffs reported at ForeFlight.

[Jackk]

And let’s also not forget they were part of Boeing before, so good chance they got overstaffed, Boeing ain’t known for running a lean ship 

[Schllc]

18 hours ago, dkkim73 said:

All the neophiles can pile on and tell me this is the New Normal and I should just get back to digging my own shallow grave. 

 

This is a symptom of our evolutionary station. Richard Feynman said it differently, but said the same basic thing, people today conflate access to information with comprehension.  This is incredibly dangerous. 
Just because something can be done, doesn’t always mean it should….

[Fly Boomer]

8 hours ago, midlifeflyer said:

Well said. I customized my Word interface years ago, so it’s not a problem, but I swear they move Excel features around to hide them.

And half the keyboard shortcuts I used to use don't work any longer (yes, I'm one of those).
 

[midlifeflyer]

1 hour ago, Fly Boomer said:

And half the keyboard shortcuts I used to use don't work any longer (yes, I'm one of those).
 

I’m old enough that at some point mice were new, so it was all keyboard shortcuts. 

[M20F]

29 minutes ago, midlifeflyer said:

I’m old enough that at some point mice were new, so it was all keyboard shortcuts. 

Wordstar 4life 

[MikeOH]

18 minutes ago, M20F said:

Wordstar 4life 

Yuup, along with VisiCalc running CP/M on a Trash 80 (TRS-80)

[Schllc]

29 minutes ago, MikeOH said:

Yuup, along with VisiCalc running CP/M on a Trash 80 (TRS-80)

Commodore PET!

[N201MKTurbo]

33 minutes ago, MikeOH said:

Yuup, along with VisiCalc running CP/M on a Trash 80 (TRS-80)

My old roommate Andy started the company Zedcor. The largest seller of TRS-80 software on the planet. BTW, I showed him how to do @math. But two hours later he had the whole package written. I worked on a Z80 project that had over 400000 lines of assembly. It was actually using a Hitachi HD64180.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BASIC_dialects

look under Z.

[Fly Boomer]

3 hours ago, midlifeflyer said:

I’m old enough that at some point mice were new, so it was all keyboard shortcuts. 

I didn't need a mouse because Windows didn't exist.  No CPU at the far end of the wire -- just a "terminal" with keyboard.

[N201MKTurbo]

5 minutes ago, Fly Boomer said:

I didn't need a mouse because Windows didn't exist.  No CPU at the far end of the wire -- just a "terminal" with keyboard.

You had a wire?

[Fly Boomer]

4 minutes ago, N201MKTurbo said:

You had a wire?

Yep.  I once asked our IBM FE how far a terminal could be from the computer room.  He said he wasn't going to look it up -- just pull the wire, hook it up, and you'll have your answer.  Pragmatic fellow.

[1980Mooney]

8 hours ago, midlifeflyer said:

I’m old enough that at some point mice were new, so it was all keyboard shortcuts. 

 

5 hours ago, Fly Boomer said:

I didn't need a mouse because Windows didn't exist.  No CPU at the far end of the wire -- just a "terminal" with keyboard.

 

5 hours ago, N201MKTurbo said:

You had a wire?

Mouse, Windows, wire?...way before that - 1969 - learned to program on a DEC PDP-8/L (for "low cost").  It was one of the hottest "minicomputers" and best bang for the buck.  About $8,000 in 1968 (about $80,000 today).  It was so advanced....it had 4K of memory, a paper tape reader, a tape punch and a teletype.  We used a start program on mylar tape to boot it up.  Programming was very "BASIC"....

Edited January 19 by 1980Mooney

[N201MKTurbo]

1 minute ago, 1980Mooney said:

 

 

Mouse, Windows, wire?...way before that - 1969 - learned to program on a DEC PDP-8/L (for "low cost").  It was one of the hottest "minicomputers" and best bang for the buck.  About $8,000 in 1968 (about $80,000 today).  It was so advanced....it had 4K of memory, a paper tape reader, a tape punch and a teletype.  We used a mylar tape to boot it up.  Programming was very "BASIC"....

I learned on an HP 2000F system two years after that.

[1980Mooney]

57 minutes ago, N201MKTurbo said:

I learned on an HP 2000F system two years after that.

About a year after you, I was taking a Fortran class.  The school could only afford the old IBM 029 keypunch card machines.  We would program and punch our program deck of cards.  Then one student would take them to the nearby university to be run on an IBM System/360 overnight and printed out.  One fateful day, one of the few kids driving a car (it happened to be his mom's cherry 1969 Mercedes 280 SL) took all our program decks bound with rubber bands and put them in a paper bag.  He put them on the roof of the car and proceeded to drive off onto a divided 6 lane highway.  The bag flew off the roof splitting open in the street. Cars were hitting the rubber banded program decks with cards flying into the air like small explosions.

Amazingly many of the cards and decks which were run over, were found and picked up.  Surprisingly, even though the cards were deformed by the dry New Mexico grit, dirt and sand pressed into them after being run over, we were able to clean them up and run most through the "IBM Keypunch Duplicate" feature to create suitable replacement cards for the IBM 360 card reader.

Edited January 19 by 1980Mooney

[hazek]

On 1/17/2026 at 4:47 PM, Schllc said:

Ai appears to be fantastic at helping one narrow down options by suggesting all the absurd and impossible options first.  It’s real gift is making something ridiculous sound plausible. 
it appears to be nothing more than a higher level tool, which in the right hands can help, and in the wrong hands does more harm than good. 
Garbage in, garbage out, it is not a panacea. Not yet anyway. 

Yes but my intuition based on own AI use is that you miss that garbage in garbage out also applies post training during actual use. How skilled are you in prompt engineering? I tend to have great results from AI but it depends very much on which AI I use and how I prompt it. I suspect devs who have great success, and especially those who most recently raved about AI progress in coding raved specifically about Claud Code and specifically when prompted optimally. Can you say for yourself you tried that?

[midlifeflyer]

9 hours ago, Fly Boomer said:

I didn't need a mouse because Windows didn't exist.  No CPU at the far end of the wire -- just a "terminal" with keyboard.

That’s why mice were new. Pre Windows. 

I didn’t do terminal… Well, I guess I did play a little with APL in college, but never really got into them until I bought a PC XT clone.  I was dragged kicking and screaming to Windows. Managed to skipped it until Windows 95 and then I had to.  (BTW, I loved OS2)

[Schllc]

3 hours ago, hazek said:

Yes but my intuition based on own AI use is that you miss that garbage in garbage out also applies post training during actual use. How skilled are you in prompt engineering? I tend to have great results from AI but it depends very much on which AI I use and how I prompt it. I suspect devs who have great success, and especially those who most recently raved about AI progress in coding raved specifically about Claud Code and specifically when prompted optimally. Can you say for yourself you tried that?

I was poking fun a little bit. I have not used AI for anything sophisticated. I have mostly toyed with it. I have found if you provide a finite problem it can be very fast and precise. 
Hypothetical challenges with myriad variables, not so much.  This is not to say it cannot process and help solve them, it is just not particularly intuitive.  
Once you provide ample criteria, and put some lane bumpers it starts to catch on. 
It is an incredible tool, and I can obviously see the potential. 
It  can process extremely well, and use an insane amount of information.  It still cannot think. Perhaps that is a good thing!

[hazek]

27 minutes ago, Schllc said:

I have not used AI for anything sophisticated. I have mostly toyed with it. I have found if you provide a finite problem it can be very fast and precise. 

Let me put this as friendly as I can muster: you are very uninformed about the capabilities of AI, particularly LLMs, at this moment.

I recommend exploring the latest models but more importantly learning to prompt well from those who get great results first.

If you would like a demonstration how AI can do something you think it can’t, I’m happy to take a request and share a link of my chat that will show my prompt for that request and the response. You will be shocked if you take me up on it. This goes for anyone else here similarly uninformed (except for Jackk). The offer is for non coding requests only as I’m not a dev and do not have access to the latest tools or have the knowledge of the latest prompts.

[N201MKTurbo]

6 hours ago, 1980Mooney said:

About a year after you, I was taking a Fortran class.  The school could only afford the old IBM 029 keypunch card machines.  We would program and punch our program deck of cards.  Then one student would take them to the nearby university to be run on an IBM System/360 overnight and printed out.  One fateful day, one of the few kids driving a car (it happened to be his mom's cherry 1969 Mercedes 280 SL) took all our program decks bound with rubber bands and put them in a paper bag.  He put them on the roof of the car and proceeded to drive off onto a divided 6 lane highway.  The bag flew off the roof splitting open in the street. Cars were hitting the rubber banded program decks with cards flying into the air like small explosions.

Amazingly many of the cards and decks which were run over, were found and picked up.  Surprisingly, even though the cards were deformed by the dry New Mexico grit, dirt and sand pressed into them after being run over, we were able to clean them up and run most through the "IBM Keypunch Duplicate" feature to create suitable replacement cards for the IBM 360 card reader.

I was that kid who took the decks to the district office to run them. Except I was doing it before I had a drivers license. I would ride there on my bike. It was 2 1/2 miles each way, so not too bad. I got tired of waiting overnight, so I convinced them to let me bring them to the computer myself and run them, that way if they needed any debugging I could fix them and run them again. The operator of the computer got tired of me asking him to run them, he showed me how and let me actually run the computer. I was there every day after school and after a while I was running the decks for all the schools in the district while the computer operator was smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. When I was a sophomore we got teletype machines in the school and got rid of the key punch machines. After that my computer nerd friends and I spent every spare minute and after school until they kicked us out at those teletype machines. 

[Schllc]

37 minutes ago, hazek said:

Let me put this as friendly as I can muster: you are very uninformed about the capabilities of AI, particularly LLMs, at this moment.

I’m pretty sure we are saying the same thing. 
How it is prompted is key, it’s why I said garbage in, garbage out. 
I worked with it for a few hours last week. Asked it to help plan a circumnavigation of the globe in a twin Comanche. It told me one leg of the trip wasn’t possible bc of the range. So I increased the fuel quantity by 25%. It gave me the exact same range. I increased another 25%, again, exact same range.  I pointed this out and it acknowledged and apologized profusely for its errors.  Recalculated, and gave me the exact same range. 
it took many many prompts and suggestions to “understand” what I was actually asking. It seemed to be assuming some things from my syntax that was not accurate. 
I am in no way dismissing the power of this tool, nor do I pretend to understand all of the possibilities.  
just saying it’s  still a bit of work in progress, and needs its findings to be checked for veracity. 

[hazek]

17 minutes ago, Schllc said:

How it is prompted is key, it’s why I said garbage in, garbage out. 

You say this, but then you say this:

17 minutes ago, Schllc said:

took many many prompts and suggestions to “understand” what I was actually asking. It seemed to be assuming some things from my syntax that was not accurate. 

Those two things are not the same.

I only agree that most likely you prompted it poorly, hence the result. It definitely doesn’t “assume things from syntax”. It’s not how it works.

Share your original prompt and let me have a crack at it.

[Schllc]

I don’t have a login so the chats are not kept. 
I used ChatGPT 

I asked it to “help plan the circumnavigation of the globe in a twin Comanche, a path that included crossing the pacific”

I absolutely prompted it incorrectly, but it was not because I did not understand what I wanted to know, it was assumptions that the AI made. 
nuance, colloquialisms, sentence structure, and the ambiguity of words absolutely plays a factor. It is not appropriate to call these things “wrong”, it just takes more specificity. 
AKA prompts. 
I am not arguing with your postulation, I am quite certain the failings of AI in my example, are 99.9% my fault. 
it has a ways to go to be useful to people who don’t have your grasp of the technology.  
that being said, at the pace it is moving that could be different this afternoon. 

[Greg Ellis]

I just love how these threads de-rail so quickly.  But it is impressive for me (I am not a computer geek at all) to read what you guys were doing years ago.  First foot in the door kind of stuff.

My earliest recognition of anything in programming was a mandatory programming class we had to take in high school.  So this would have been around 1986 and we used TRS-80's (The most I remember was reprogramming a game called TaiPan to make it easier to win).  Other than that I can't tell you anything about anything.  I am still of the school...if the computer doesn't do what you want it to do then shut it off and turn it back on again...hahahaha.

We need a computer nerd section on Mooneyspace.  I actually enjoy reading these computer history lessons.

[hazek]

35 minutes ago, Schllc said:

I am not arguing with your postulation, I am quite certain the failings of AI in my example, are 99.9% my fault. 
it has a ways to go to be useful to people who don’t have your grasp of the technology.

Check my example and you will see you are incorrect: chat (if you want me to continue feel free to provide answers it’s asking for)

Anyone can do what I did there. There are a few tricks to learn and that’s it. If you passed high school you should be able to learn them.

[Schllc]

17 minutes ago, hazek said:

Check my example and you will see you are incorrect: chat (if you want me to continue feel free to provide answers it’s asking for)

Anyone can do what I did there. There are a few tricks to learn and that’s it. If you passed high school you should be able to learn them.

You win, I didn’t finished sixth grade. I’m out.