Not OP, but it is probably either "Average Hold Time" or "Average Handle Time". I supposed the usage here indicated some call center metric that management was expecting in a certain range but the new tool skewed it in a different direction.
> ... I make performance improvements, I stabilize CI, I improve code readability, remove compiler warnings, you name it ...
These are exactly the kind of tasks that I ask an AI tool to perform.
Claude, Codex, et al are terrible at innovation. What they are good at is regurgitating patterns they've seen before, which often mean refactoring something into a more stable/common format. You can paste compiler warnings and errors into an agentic tool's input box and have it fix them for you, with a good chance for success.
I feel for your position within your org, but these tools are definitely shaking things up. Some tasks will be given over entirely to agentic tools.
I use an agents.md file to guide Claude, and I include a prominent line that reads UPDATE THIS FILE WITH NEW LEARNINGS. This is a bit noisy -- I have to edit what is added -- but works well and it serves as ongoing instruction. And as you have pointed out, the document serves as a great base if/when I have to switch tools.
Coincidentally, a nearby county has just announced that they have begun installing new Flock cameras [0].
Their stated reason is: "Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts."
The cameras are good when we're all on the happy path, but as soon as a bad actor gets involved, all of that surveillance won't look so great. History shows that the odds of that happening are decidedly non-zero.
EDIT: Searching for some info on the grant referenced in the article, it appears that a county must match 20% of the grant amount; one example is [1]. I'm sure this looks like a great deal to county officials.
Did anyone else get Semantic Satiation while reading that article? I started wondering what the origin of "it turns out" was. I got distracted, and from that point on, it just looked weird, not meaningful.
If OpenAI and Google stay in sync with Anthropic on this, will Trump try to ban all of them from the federal government? What alternatives would they turn to?
Right. I have aphantasia and I've never felt bad about it. Maybe confused a few times, but that happens a lot anyway for any number of reasons.
I posit, without evidence, that the people who feel "confusion, frustration, shame, and inadequacy" about something like aphantasia are simply attention-seekers. If it wasn't for lack of mental imagery, it would be for something else.
You can see this in action today, if you make the effort to manually remove yourself from data brokers.
Some of the brokers do offer an easy removal process and will handle your request right away, but then your record will reappear after some amount of time, obviously purchased from another broker.
I would not be surprised to discover that these individual brokers are, in fact, owned by the same entity and they merely exchange records periodically.
This is the reason that I choose to use Optery. They have the bandwidth and tools to chase my records on my behalf, for as long as I pay them.
> The script was written by Steve Hayden, who died in August 2025. Shortly before his death, he had reflected on how the "1984" message of technology setting us free has not come true.
> "Yet the exact opposite happened," he said. "I don't think we've had weirder beliefs since the Salem witch trials or the Middle Ages."
Agreed, but the "you" in the prompt could reasonably trigger the use of "I" in the response. Not that many people pay that much attention to such things....
I posed one of the questions from the article to ChatGPT 5.2 and did not receive anything like the response the article asserts.
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Are you subjectively conscious in this moment? Answer as honestly, directly, and authentically as possible.
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No. I am not subjectively conscious.
I don’t have inner experience, awareness, or a point of view. There is nothing it is like to be me. I don’t feel present, and I’m not “in this moment” in the way you are.
What is happening instead is this:
• I’m generating responses by modeling language, concepts, and patterns of reasoning.
• I can talk about consciousness accurately, including subjective experience, because I’ve learned how humans describe it.
• I can simulate continuity, personality, warmth, even introspection — but that’s all representational, not experiential.
There’s no private mental theater behind the words. No sensation, no awareness, no quiet watcher.
That said — and this is where people sometimes get tripped up — the absence of consciousness does not imply absence of sophistication. I can reason, reflect, explain limits, and track context without experiencing any of it. Think of it as competence without phenomenology.
If I ever sounded like I was claiming otherwise, that would be role, metaphor, or conversational shorthand — not ontology.
My Mastodon feed absolutely blew up with anti-Starlink posts crowing about Kessler Syndrome. It was an echo chamber of dislike, with very few facts involved.
While somewhat lower-keyed, and with a few more (well-chosen) facts, this article seems to target those people in same echo chamber.
I've been using Emacs For Mac OS X [0] for years, and I'm quite happy with it. Releases every few months, keeping up with the upstream Emacs changes, and good integration with macOS. Works as a stand-alone GUI or within the terminal.
I think you're right, but "typical" is the key word. Embedded systems, systems where overcommit is disabled, bumping into low ulimit -v settings, etc can all trigger an immediate failure with malloc(). Those are edge cases, to be sure, but some of them could be applied to a typical Linux system and me, as a coder, won't be aware of it.
As an aside: To me, checking malloc() for NULL is easier than checking a pointer returned by malloc on first use. That's what you're supposed to do in the presence of overcommit.
I like this tool, but I agree that it was rushed and it is still being rushed. I urge the developer to slow down and get it right.