My least favorite of that eras Gerald Genta designs. The original Royal Oak is comparatively far more attractive. Both are outdone by the 222 (different designer though), but it's all subjective.
This only lasts until dark patterns can be inserted that disrupt the ease of use that agents are currently providing. If I can't force the end user to watch unskippable ads or trick them into spending money on a service they don't need, what are we even doing?
I recall stuff like the Intel icc compiler being expensive and desirable, and things like client access licenses, hardware licenses (to allow using non-trivial amounts of RAM and multi-processing) and support plans for proprietary OSes being rather expensive. Consulting a SCO Unix price sheet from that era, a license that allowed 150 users and up to 32GB of RAM was $10k.
Prices also varied around OS features used. Vendors loved to nickel-and-dime you (separate *-user client licenses for file services, print services, remote access, etc), generally to drive you towards bigger packages that seemed like a better deal.
Which is why you take the time to put usage docs in the repo README, make sure the script is packaged and deployed via the same methods that the rest of the company uses, and ensure that it logs success/failure conditions. That's been pretty standard at every organization I've been at my entire professional career. Anyone who can't manage that is going to create worse problems when designing/building/maintaining a more complex system.
People have been sounding the alarm about excessive water diverted to almond farming for many years though, so that doesn't really help the counter-argument.
> Armed civilians with their puny little guns and little organization are right out as soon as any part of the military joins a fight, that's why I only mentioned the latter to begin with.
We have several recent real-world examples of that not working out for the military. Assuming like minded people wont self-organize is a bad starting point, and jets and tanks have a tough time doing things like enforcing curfews. That's also ignoring that such a scenario would involve portions of said military force joining the civilian resistance, including those in leadership positions.
Besides, I've always hated this argument, because why fight the military when they can just target the politicians directly.
Having encountered this spread across our orgs greenfield codebases which made heavy use of AI in the last 90 days: Restating the same information in slightly different formats, with slightly different levels of detail in several places, in a way that is unnecessary. Like a "get up and running quickly" guide in the documentation which has far more detail than the section it's supposed to be summarizing. Jarringly inconsistent ways of providing information within a given section (a list of endpoints and their purposes, followed by a table of other endpoints, followed by another list of endpoints). Unnecessary bulleted lists all over the places which could read more clearly as single sentences or a short paragraph. Disembodied documentation files nested in the repos that restate the contents of the README, but in a slightly different format/voice. Thousands of single line code comments that just restate what is already clear to the reader if they just read the line it's commenting on. That's before getting into any code quality issues themselves.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...
Almond farming uses massive amounts of water, which has caused environmental impact concerns in the past.