Lup Yuen Lee 李立源 @lupyuen@qoto.org

@lupyuen that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard 😂😂😂

@lupyuen I can't believe they reported that. The industry standard calls for wipes and shredding. A hard drive would be a logistical challenge to reuse as the quality couldn't be guaranteed.

Different manufacturers and different models of drives pose even more problems. There's a reason why Western Digital has different colored hard drives. A Red or a Purple drive would work well for storage but it wouldn't be acceptable to try to use one in place of a Black series.

The business section too. It could be viable if encryption is used on the whole hard drive but I highly doubt that this is a common occurrence. There's also the chance of someone grabbing the keys or using embedded malware to save the keys on an unwriteable area of the drive.

Scrap the old desktops but save the hard drives for reuse. That sounds like management.

@lupyuen

I think a good analogy here is when spreadsheets first arrived.

During the late 70s and early 80s we were doing a lot of programming that was just custom software that would add things up from a database and present them in columns. Then along came VisiCalc and we didn't have to do that anymore. They called the "killer application".

That type of custom software was a huge chunk of what was being programmed at the time and I think this is a similar phenomenon. GPT-generated software is very much like a general purpose program that users control themselves instead of having to communicate their requirements to a systems analyst who would then work with programmers to develop the software.

It puts more control in the hands of the user. Some programmers don't like that, some do.

@lupyuen To be fair, that's how the future has been represented in media for the last, I dunno, 70 years?

@lupyuen It's missing a snorkel at least!